Learning from the design

I start the evaluation as soon as I got ethics approval.  I was not confident while evaluating, because my design is something new and there is no previous work for me as a reference. On the other hand, the sources I chose in the design is based on my assumptions. I thought it can be useful for developing intercultural competence. Assumptions cause misunderstanding and stereotypes when involved in an intercultural environment.

After three evaluations, I realized that I should have had trails. Because I am not an English native speaker, so there is a significant issue in my design which is the wording. I need someone to check my spelling and grammar issues, as an education side in Second Life, accuracy is very important. Another reason is that as the designer of this campus, I could not be objective, some small problem will be ignored. Having a trail will help with these problems.

Design issue 5

After I finished the design in First and Second floor, my tutor had the first trail.  She is not an expert of Second Life. As she arrived at the study Home, she kept asking"What do I do now" and "where I can go now". This brings the issue of unclear instructions. I then realize that I need to give steps to guide participants.

So I made some changes, I marked steps on each object, such as: "Step One- pre-departure survey". I also give a notecard to demonstrate what going to happen in each activity and follow steps to complete the whole activity.

Another issue is because of the automatic setting in Second Life, I can not larger the text size which may cause some problems. As well as the auto zoom in of videos and quizzes. I create instruction PPTs and put them on the side of videos and quizzes for announcements. After finish all designing works, I built an overall instruction PPT and put them in many places in this Study Home.

These issues show that how important to have tuition section before sending participants in Second Life.

Design issue 4

As I said in my last blog, it is difficult to decide which concepts are useful for ICC development design. Finally, I choose the value orientation, individualism-collectivism, ethnocentric, stereotypes, uncertainty avoidance and verbal communication style as the key.


I chose them because, from my perspective, values are very important, as Ting-Toomey and Chung (2012) claim that values shape we do and say things, as well as our behaviors. On the other hand, value orientation, individualism-collectivism, ethnocentric and stereotype are all relevant with value.

Even we spend most of the time on non-verbal communication but verbal communications are still daily actions. Different communication style will cause misunderstandings. Such as low-context people say" You dress is ugly" to a high-context people who feel be offended. Knowing our own communicating style with others allows us to communicate more effectively. 

International students are often exposed to uncertain situations, their reactions are important for dealing with these uncertainties. This is the reason why I choose the concept of uncertainty avoidance.

All these choices are based on my perspective and assumptions, this also brings the intercultural issues which throughout the design and cannot be eliminated.

Design issue 3

I've been tried some many different cultural places, and I found it only works for one of the competences which is the cultural knowledge. But intercultural also including skills, attitude and critical cultural awareness. How to involve all these concepts in an autonomy study program design is difficult.

After I read Ting-Toomey and Chung (2012) Understanding Intercultural Communication. I came up with some good concept which I could use in my design, such as value orientation, communication style, and individualism-collectivism. But the problem came along with all these concepts: how do I introduce these concepts through online activity design.

My tutor provides me an idea to always start with teleporting participants to somewhere to elicit the concept, and debriefing on what they had done. It takes me a lot of time to think about: 1) which concepts are essential for intercultural competence development;  2) what places in SL can elicit which concept in a reasonable way; 3) how could I put all activities in a logical order.

Another big issue is that all the activities I designed are based on my perspective and I assumed that is crucial for developing ICC. This brings back a problem in ICC which is stereotypes. Moreover, the videos I found to explain or elicit the concept also from the editors' perspective and could not be generalized. So for solving this problem, in each debriefing section, I need to announce the participants. 

Design issue 2

Through the design work. it always needs to add the script in objects' content. I found it was difficult for me (who didn't know how to script). Some simple scripts are easy, for example, giving notecard to an avatar or make a floating text. But some are difficult, like display a shared Youtube video or making an in-world survey, even I could find other people's work online, it wasn't fit with what I need. This issue takes me a lot of time.

Design issue 1

When I start designing the activities, I found it was difficult to think of the pre and post-departure survey before teleporting to a culture site. Because it isn't like the pre/ post-departure survey of study abroad programs, the majors of users do not matter, the aim of this design is to develop intercultural competence.
How could make surveys approach the aim is more important, which is to notice the similarities and differences. This cannot be reached simply through surveys and exploring culture sites, I decided to give more than one place for exploring, and users can easily notice the differences in one culture. This has the advantage for post-departure survey design.

My thesis journal - a start

What what I'm going to do for my thesis, I've been thinking a lot. Finally, I decided to do something about the culture in the virtual platform-Second Life.

The topic is intercultural competence and Second Life. Before I started, it took me a long time to rewrite my thesis application and because I knew nothing about intercultural competence (ICC), so I've looked into many previous studies under the topic intercultural communication competence, cross-culture communication,  etc. All these reading gained my knowledge of what is ICC and why important for people, especially for international students.

After the first meeting with my supervisor, she suggested me to attend classes that focus on outcomes and applications of ICC. In the class, the teacher provided some surveys to test students level of ICC.

These surveys gave me a sense of how could I do some activities with these surveys to test participants' attitudes of ICC. I found it was very useful for reflecting on myself as well. What I thought was different from the survey result. This motivated me to attend classes and took a deeper look at ICC.