ABSTRACT
Education in virtual worlds has the potential, it seems, for engaging students in innovative ways and for enabling new discourses on a host of issues. Although virtual spaces are often lauded as ‘fun’ and ‘creative’ for students, experiences here are not universal because of the different challenges they present for students. Virtual locations like Second Life, Kaneva, or World of Warcraft, among other multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), also come with unique challenges for educators as we consider the affordances and risks involved in introducing new technologies into the classroom. Virtual worlds themselves require additional pedagogical and technological scaffolding if they are to function as fun and creative spaces for students. Further, the nuanced interactions of ‘real’ classroom spaces are sometimes lost in representational virtual spaces. In exploring subject formation and Second Life, deWinter and Vie (2008) recognize that ‘instructors need to foreground any participation in Second Life with strategies for avoiding or extracting oneself from difficult situations and discussions’ (319). We take their suggestion about preparing students for online environments to heart in this viewpoint, and here we focus specifically on the need for pedagogical and technological scaffolding. Our experiences both as students learning in Second Life and instructors teaching in virtual environments led us to invent the dialogue below, which reflects the complexities we have encountered. These two characters (Bored and Lost) were inspired from our own experiences as graduate students who were, indeed, bored and lost in virtuality, but in what follows we imagine them as undergraduate students in the composition courses we teach. After each dialogue, we offer a response to how thinking about these students’ positions might lead to a more critical pedagogical stance where virtual worlds are concerned.
