Online Role-Play Reflection

One week of role-playing online... How quickly time flies! I must admit at first I was leery: What will I say? Where will I find research? Who do I respond to? I was unsure how to start. But, like Debi said, once your toes are in the water, it doesn’t feel so bad and it becomes easier.

On the positive side, I enjoyed speaking from the point of view of a different persona, which allowed me to try on a different voice. This must be how writers who use “un nom de plume” feel. Cool! The only bummer is that none of the discussions got heated enough for me to use my “demanding parent” voice (art imitating reality)… I also enjoyed learning from what others had researched. Some of us found the same (timely published) articles, which gave us something to blog about. There were a few resources that I actually bookmarked so I can use them later.

On the negative side—aside from the initial “what the heck am I doing here?”—the one drawback was feeling overwhelmed at times. There were too many discussions going on at once. Which one do I read first? Am I supposed to respond to each one? Yikes! Maybe it would help to brainstorm a few discussion topics and keep the conversations within those. Also, since we’re all so good at finding and posting resources, I felt overwhelmed by the amount of outside sources to read in order to understand a post. Frankly there are some sources I didn’t bother to read if the topic summary in the post didn’t grab me: I simply went on to another discussion. Now that we’re at the end of this role-play, I wish I’d have more time to go back and re-read more carefully what was posted.

Because I was slow on the uptake, I now wish we could keep going for another week so I could respond to more people. By the way, since we started this Ning project, everywhere I look I see articles and blog posts about digital writing, digital literacy, online game simulations, etc. I’m having some serious Twilight Zone moments…

As far as using online role-play with students, this would work with middle school students and maybe fifth graders. To do this well, students need to know how to type, how to adapt their voice for their audience, how to research a point of view and how to organize their thoughts. A few years ago when I lead the French Language Arts curriculum review in middle school, we listed an online simulation as one strategy for 7th graders. 7th graders were studying fairy tales. Primary students also read fairy tales (since they know the story in English it helps to develop and anchor French vocabulary). The idea was to have the primary students do a shared writing of questions they would like to ask the fairy tale characters. Think of something along the lines of “Why did you eat the second little pig Mr. Wolf? Weren’t you full?” The middle schoolers would then respond to their questions from the character’s point of view. Such an activity gives both younger and older students an authentic audience for their writing, which is so difficult to achieve in an immersion setting.