Surprisingly, my first recognition moment in SL came before SL confirmed that I had learned how to make my avatar move around physically. When your avatar is created SL takes you through a series of exercises to 'take yourself for a test run.' These include learning how to use the keyboard and mouse to do a variety of items. There are four of these to 'master' before you get a "key" that allows you to move to the next phase. I wasn't sure how this would work. But, once I mastered the first of the four items, I exhaled in relief because I knew that I'd get the other three without any problems. That was my recognition moment for mastery - I can do this! Then my surprise. When I'd completed all four tasks, my avatar jumped into the air and pumped her arm! How did that happen? Are there other gestures? How do I make them work?
I don't know if the avatar response is programed in at that point to get you interested in learning more, but it brought about a few responses from me. One was - do I really have control of my avatar? Another was, as noted, how did that happen and how can it happen again? Learning had taken place and the 'bait' to move onwards had been put before me. All teaching encompasses this - set out tasks that, once successfully completed, lead to other tasks. Unlike my SL experience, I do not recall a teacher 'previewing' their lessons for the next day until I received a syllabus for classes in college. I don't want to assume that a book is a preview of what will come next since it normally is not. Like SL, FL can be seen this way if we see everything we do in terms of one step leading to another. Yet with so many choices, what to do next can become paralyzing in either place. I suppose that this is where mentors come into play.
Speaking of mentors, in SL anyone with the last name of Linden (for Linden Labs) is considered someone who can mentor anyone (answer questions, I would assume, is their main function). After being away from Help Island for a few weeks (I hate to admit that), I was "moved off the island" by a Linden Labs person when I went back after being gone for awhile. When I logged on again, there was an update, so I updated. When I did, the graphics had changed and I was slightly confused as to what I had/had not done. When I tried to make sure I'd seen everything, a very official looking female (in a blue skirted suit, shoulder-length blond hair, and high heels no less!) came up to me and basically told me that Help Island was for newbees and I was no longer a newbee. I was taken aback at that and forgot to ask some of the questions I'd been wanting to know. She basically told me that I needed to be moving into SL and leave Help Island. Wow. There's a built in monitoring system that didn't seem to work as well as I'd hoped - she didn't have any idea that time had passed and updates had been made or that I might need to get my bearings again. Each time I log in the system tells me when I was last logged into SL - I would assume that any Linden employee had this info. But, being told it was time to leave was a recognition moment that many times we ask people to move along on our timeline, not theirs. From an educational standpoint this must be what students feel like who do not feel like they have mastered the content yet but are still moved along into a new arena to learn more - the questions are still there, but now it is more difficult (in their minds) to find the answers, sort through the information and process how to use it all in a manner that makes sense to themselves.
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