I’ve been talking about the pedagogical affordances of Second Life to fellow educators for two years now, and I’ve had the time and opportunity to refine what I say and how I say it. There are certain concerns that educators generally tend to have about virtual environments and virtual worlds, and in my experience I’ve found it prudent to address these upfront and at the beginning of each talk. One of the things I always include in this section of such talks would be that operating in Second Life takes a lot of self-discipline, and a close eye has to be kept (either by the learner, and / or on behalf of the learner) on the amount of time spent in-world.
[update: i would like to extend a very warm welcome to all visitors who have been directed here by Hamlet Au's very kind mention on 15 May, in New World Notes :-) ]
I have put the way that Second Life can potentially be a time-sink, to the fact that it is not easy to multi-task while in-world. That is to say, people at their computers – but not in virtual worlds – can multi-task fairly easily – we’ve all seen adolescents juggle multiple IM conversations while simultaneously browsing the web and updating their MySpace page. But once you enter a virtual world such as Second Life or World of Warcraft, it has been my argument that such multi-tasking activity, and ability, is somewhat reduced, and it’s not just because the virtual world looks nicest when run in full-screen mode.
No, it’s because the virtual world is persistent – that is, it continues to change and evolve even when the resident / the learner / the player, isn’t paying direct attention to it, or to the activities of his or her avatar. This persistence makes it very difficult to want to multi-task, even though the ability to – strictly speaking – has been only slightly diminished.
So far, this argument has been easy to understand and has contented my audiences, and has contented me. But today I had a further insight, and I would like to share it with you.
Important though persistence is, in considerations of designing learning environments around new media, it does not help much to explain why well-designed interventions within virtual worlds can result in deep and meaningful learning.
I would argue that virtual worlds are such potentially powerful learning environments because they help shape and form identities.
Before I proceed, I would like to flag two things to note. First, I make the distinction between virtual worlds, and virtual environments. I see the latter as being different from virtual worlds in that they do not have significant histories (backstories), cultures nor economies. Thus, for example, World of Warcraft, Second Life, and EVE Online can all be contrasted against, say, Sun’s Wonderland Project. Wonderland may be very good for certain things, but it is being designed less to be a virtual world and much more to be a collaborative space. Second, when I said earlier that virtual worlds shape identities, I take ‘identities’ to refer to the entire spectrum of possible projective identities, ranging from those closely akin to the learner’s own identity in Real Life, to more fantastical identities that he or she may choose to adopt.
Identity formation through virtual worlds is critical to anyone with an interest in education, because identity works through embodiment to result in deep learning, as Gee and others have noted.
Note that I specifically said “identity formation through virtual worlds”. I would argue that embodiment alone may not necessarily result in deep learning; this is why some 3D games with an educational focus may not necessarily result in the enaction of lasting change. The learners (in this case, the players) need deeper emotional investments in the characters, and it is my argument that such investments are made as identities develop over time.
Generally, the virtual worlds industry realizes this, and that is why there are ongoing efforts to investigate the possibility of identity-portability across various virtual worlds. However, true to historical precedent, I fear that the education industry is slower on the uptake.
What is it about virtual worlds, then, that builds identity? I would argue that there are two necessary contributors, namely co-presence and dimensionality. By co-presence I refer to the ability to know that others are online within the same ‘space’ (loosely defined) as one presently is, and by dimensionality I refer to ‘spaces’ which have an explicit (depiction of the) third-dimension (as opposed to webpages or IM windows).
Co-presence alone does not help a great deal in identity-shaping. To a large extent, the roots of online co-presence date back to the roots of the internet, and its lineage can be traced through IRC and IM. Despite this long history, there has not been much reporting of how such technologies have been effectively used in education and learning with respect to the formation of identities. This could be due to the afore-mentioned characteristic that an operator’s involvement in such technological clients can be potentially fleeting, not least because of the ease of multi-tasking which these clients afford.
More recently, the Weblin service has enabled people browsing the web to actually see who else might be concurrently browsing the same site. This is definitely co-presence transposed to the web, but this is still more a social tool and does not purport to be one which shapes identities.
Likewise, dimensionality alone does not help a great deal in identity-shaping. Contrived though this scenario might be, the person behind a lone avatar operating intermittently in an isolated region in Second Life would struggle to understand what others in general – and educators in particular – find so compelling about Second Life as a learning environment (as an aside – the scenario isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem, as it does describe the activity of some people (educators included) who just come in-world to dip their toes in the water).
So, neither co-presence alone, nor dimensionality alone, would result in the shaping of identity. It is when – as so many educators have already discovered for themselves (and never vicariously) – the two come together, in a virtual world such as Second Life or World of Warcraft – that the ‘magic’ happens. The magic happens because the learner is not only aware that he or she is not alone in the neighbourhood (co-presence), but is also able to see – and therefore react to – what others are doing around him or her (dimensionality).
It is through these actions, reactions and responses to others in a concurrent, timely manner that identities are rapidly shaped, with consequent implications to the meaningfulness of the learning activity.
[update #1: 13 May: have a look at Hamlet Au's take on the new Blerp web-service
update #2: 24 October: Jeff Lowe has a helpful post on his blog The Immersive Life]
