Who Owns the Floor?: Examining Participation in a Collaborative Learning Scenario Between Student Teachers and Active Professionals in Second Life

Language Learning, Networking and Social Software

The affordance of online communication in bringing intercultural learners together to create communities of practice and critical inquiry is particularly valuable in collaborative online language learning (Warschauer, 1997). For this purpose, educators are increasingly integrating social software such as blogs, Skype, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and SL in CALL. The open architectures of such social media support collective online activities, one of the main advantages being that the social networks of the students and the teachers can be integrated into the learning context thus adding to the authenticity of the scenario and increasing engagement (Bowers, Ragas, & Neely, 2009; Otto & Pusack, 2009). In the context of this study, our ambition was to integrate the students in existing professional networks, a practice which will be discussed further below.