Coming to Land

Having visited the orienation spaces a few weeks after my first experience in SL is kind of an interesting experience. I will have to consider how it was to come to land 5 weeks ago and which kind of help would have been useful.

My first impression on orientation island was positive as the information arrived just in time and in little chunks that made it easy to follow and to integrate the knowledge step by step. The amount of information was not overwhelming and let enough space for the learner to get slowly used to the virtual world.

I think in these first hours in-world that's what probably most new citizens would request, an easy introduction, that teaches you the basic steps. After that first experience I immediately got acquainted to the Muvenation environement and went only after a few weeks to some other orienation island.

One I particulary liked was NMC orientation island due to it's very explorative learning approach. The orientation environment is very well defined and represented through a series of little houses, which creates an inviting learning scenario.

The learner could go according to his own pace and curiosity to the different rooms and explore the content.

The amount of information is very well presented and organized and small modules.

Depending on the content the learner gets additional material either in form of notecards or links to external websites.

The whole environment is very creative and even the support is rather innovative. Here is an example of a video they show to explain how to use the camera control. How to use the camera control by NMC

Another orientation island that got my attention was "Virtual Ability".

Beside that fact that I went for the first time on a virtual swing I enjoyed this environment that is rather explorative.

Another positive point in this environment was the organization in different sections, one for beginners and one for "already advanced" users.

In general I think orientation island should be as explorative as possible and as guiding as necessary. By that I mean the learner should be able to learn following his own pace but also receive some guidance in terms of complexity of the learning modules in order ot avoid some cognitive overload and thus discouragement.