Kristin Scott, George Mason University
One of my pedagogical interests is in using multi-user virtual environments, such as Second Life, in the classroom. In this post, I want to focus on some of the potential pedagogical benefits and offer a few of my own successful moments.
Using Second Life (and other similar virtual environment tools) can be particularly challenging, if for no other reason than the practical issues involved. However, if a teacher has the time to develop the students’ virtual skills, as I recently did in a course I taught recently for New Century College at George Mason University, entitled Cybercultures, then the use of MUVEs can be beneficial. Since my Cybercultures course was a six credit hour hybrid course, which met for three hours a week in a physical (computer) classroom and three hours a week in the virtual environment, my students had more time to develop the necessary navigational skills than most other courses would allow. Additionally, for those students whose personal computers were not adequate to run the software, I made available a computer lab with Second Life downloaded onto the school computers. I also recruited a number of other educators (from GMU and elsewhere) to act as mentors, should students need help in SL when I was not signed in; though I also had frequent avatar-to-avatar meetings in-world to facilitate the process. Nevertheless, even in this ideal environment, my assignments for weeks one, two, and three necessarily focused on basic virtual skills, so it wasn’t until week four that my students were able to move onto the digital ethnographic assignments I had created and thus concentrate more on the content of the course rather than practical skills.
Of course, because my class investigated specific themes such as the social and political movements that take place within cyberspace, political economy, the formation of virtual communities, and cyber-identities and bodies, taking them into Second Life to actually experience what we were studying made sense. Though doing digital ethnography was particularly challenging. Because our adventures were being recorded on a public wiki, I also had to introduce students to a much abbreviated version of the Protection of Human Subjects Procedures and have them each create an HSP handout (in the form of a virtual notecard) to give to avatars that they thought they would include in surveys or ethnographic description/work.
The assignments produced some really interesting results, though; and students seemed engaged in the discussions that integrated their virtual experiences with the readings. In order to explore the political economy of cyberspace (and Second Life more specifically), for instance, I had them each attempt to earn or garner Lindens (the official currency of SL) in-world. And in order to enrich our discussions of cyber-identities, gendered behavior in cyberspace, and virtual bodies, in weeks 5 & 6, I had students change their originally created avatars’ sex/gender and/or race. Since students, without exception, all had first created their avatars to closely resemble their real selves and worked with these avatars for several weeks prior to this assignment, they had become somewhat invested in their alter-virtual selves, so switching sex/gender and/or race for a period of two weeks led to some fascinating insights – but not just for the students.
Typically, in past classes, whenever discussions of sex/gender arose, for example, I would find myself primarily focused on the social, political, and economic constructions of sex and gender, but the conversations usually revolved around what it meant to be female or feminine. Since ~95% of my students in my Cybercultures course were, in real life, female, switching sex and/or gender meant becoming male or acquiring virtual masculine traits. And for the first time since I’ve been teaching, I found our discussions circulating primarily around the difficulties of being male, since most of my female-to-virtual-male participants had reported feeling ignored, hyper-scrutinized, or were always suspected of “hitting on” female avatars whenever initiating conversations. The majority of the women in my class thus came out of the experiment feeling particularly aware and sympathetic of male/masculine stereotypes and roles in society. At the bottom of the assignment page are links to individual responses to this virtual assignment. I also participated, along with the students, in the sex/gender change (see photo above) – so the assignment became much more collaborative, as well.
So for this particular class, I found the virtual environment to be a particularly stimulating and useful addendum to learning; but for most, the benefits are (and I think will continue to be) debatable. How valuable are the learning experiences? And are they worth the intensity of time and energy spent?
I do think one of the strongest potentials, though not utilized nearly enough, is that of foreign language education, especially since voice came to Second Life. Though one of the pitfalls, of course, of a virtual foreign language learning environment would be the same problem often experienced in one’s native language when communicating online, which is the proliferation of text-speak.
Though I have some serious questions about the overall benefits of virtual education, I have not lost hope for greater potential. MUVE’s can certainly become a rather helpful and engaging supplement to learning, but I don’t believe they are able to significantly replace one-on-one class time. I will be interested, however, in seeing how virtual educators will feel after several years of teaching in these environments. I suspect that some will remain as fascinated by its potential as when they first entered the virtual education domain, while others will likely begin to more rigorously question its pedagogical effectiveness. In any case, I hope those reading will share their own experiences, questions, or concerns with the use of MUVEs in education.
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