Blogging here from iDMAa in Philadelphia, sitting in a session entitled Art in a Virtual World: A River of Second Life. Yes, the speaker has leveraged the power of SL by having a panel, of potentially interesting people to comment on this topic. This is my first time hearing the new voice application, and it’s mostly contributed to giving me a phenomenal headache. It is 2:20, we are 20 minutes in, and I have learned nothing except that bandwidth is a HUGE issue with SL.

For anyone who has cared to listen to me babble about my dissertation, one of the biggest findings was that duh! technical problems redirect goals constantly. Where breakdowns occur, the task focus shifts from the original issue to the technology and troubleshooting a problem. Though it is obvious, unless I want my students to focus on this phenomenon, that seems to be what I learn about the most when dealing with Second Life. I know cool things go on in this virtual world, I just find the evangelism for the potential often outweighs any evident pedagogical gains.

At least we ditched the crapalicious sound reverb from the first speaker. Maybe my headache can subside.

“Technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.” -From A Cyborg Manifesto

What are people learning when they engage in activity, interaction, and communication in Second Life? Beyond the question of whether there is a demand for learning English in SL, there is a larger question of how the tool, in this case a complex virtual world, and an understanding of a way of being within the context of the use of that tool, is an important question when we embark down this path.

What are our “historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies” when we start to engage with each other in virtual, increasingly multi-dimensional worlds? In the physical world, we have histories, individual and communal, that underlie our interactions. We have the ability to formulate abstract communications with each other, disembodied interactions, through written language. With the development of communications technologies we have been able to modify to more “bodied” exchanges, where the nuance of tone, pitch, and articulation in a voiced interaction convey more embodiment than words on a page, but less than an interaction with the whole person.

The development of information communication technology, the ability to digitize both written text and spoken information has fractured our sense of “distance” and “presence.” Whereas these were previously, at least colloquially, measures of space and time, we can be both distant and present with others across physical space and chronological time. But how is this new “enforced meaning” changing our communication? How does a shift from a visual online world (how I will loosely label our text/image-based internet) to a tactile online world (borrowing from McLuhan’s definition whereby “tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object“)?
One question in regards to teaching and learning in Second Life specifically is, how does the culture of that virtual world impacts the communicative process? Another question I would ask is how participation in a virtual world such as SL changes the participant, and is the way the participant is changed– the way they are forced to confront their identity and engage in communicative action– something that should be imposed on someone in the same manner we are all required to be participants in the physical world? What kind of disclaimer should be provided for learners who are required through coursework to join these burgeoning and wholly immersive tactile worlds?

I bring up this issue for several reasons:

1) Because much of the research and exploration of using virtual worlds such as SL for teaching and learning appears predicated on a wholly technologically deterministic approach whereby it has been created for us, so we must use it. Or from a technological utopianistic view that online we can explore these new identities in a wonderful way that doesn’t need to be critiqued. I haven’t seen a whole lot of critique of what ways of being are being introduced to students who engage in SL.

2) In the one class where the issue of SL has been brought up this semester, a student mentioned it as this “place online, where like, people live their lives and spend real money” with a tone as if to skeptically indicate that s/he had heard of this, but does such a thing really exist?

3) Capitalistic values (that whole spending real money aspect) are inherently and obviously perpetuated in the SL environment, and that may or may not be appropriate for language learning and/or other educational endeavors. Maybe, as English is the current lingua franca of business, that makes it the perfect learning environment for English.

And on that note, with #3 tying nicely back into more questions of how SL perpetuates or breaks previous historical patterns, I will break in search of lunch…

While in the Boston area for MIT5 last weekend, I stopped by the ECA (Eastern Communications Association) conference to check things out. While there, I attended a roundtable that advertised itself as follows:

“This roundtable discussion examines the work of James Paul Gee’s and Henry
Jenkin’s contentions that online gaming is the next pedagogical trend in
education. Thus, the participants will engage in a discussion of the online game,
World of Warcraft. This discussion will focus primarily on the communication
concepts students learn and apply while “gaming” and how applied
communication educators can incorporate students’ interest in gaming to
enhance their educational ones”.

I would say that the roundtable did address these issues, but the only speaker that caught my attention in terms of innovative uses of new technology was a professor from Penn State McKeesport, who is using a closed blogging community to teach newswriting.

The rest of the roundtable centered around a high school student who very articulately explained his interest in World of Warcraft and the types of communication skills he feels he is developing through collaboration and team work with others in the game. As the roundtable progressed, I became suddenly aware that the high school student was in fact, the son of the moderator of the panel. For some reason, that didn’t sit well with me. The panel was adamantly opposed to my use of the word “coached” to describe his ability to metacognitively reflect on his interaction with the game. I simply meant that other
In the hall way, after the session, this spokesperson for World of Warcraft was with a small group of us having a more informal discussion. Here, in this more informal setting, he said that to get to the level where one would collaborate with others and engage in team building, one has to be put in approximately 40 hours of playing time. FORTY HOURS! He said, and I quote as accurately as possible, “That’s why it wouldn’t work in an educational setting. I was trying to tell them that last night.”

What would you make of that? Would you think that he was asked not to mention that during the roundtable because it would ruin the panel’s argument? I am not opposed to in-depth discussions about the use of new technologies to teach and learn. This needs to happen more often and more concretely. The WOW high school student’s comment came at a time when I was suggesting that what we need is to have educational games and simulations that use similar techniques to MMOPRGs, but that are designed to teach specific educational concepts. But please, let’s not pretend that out-of-the-box MMOPRGs are well-suited for educational purposes without research and when your case study himself says it won’t work.

An appropriate medium for its intended audience of Digital Arts students, a university program developed in Second Life will be debutting at Simon Fraser University. I hope that the virtual university isn’t just a digital replica of the bricks and mortar one and that for $20,000 a year (in Canada, where education is usually a little less costly), students receive some complimentary linden dollars.