Kristin Scott

Ok — I’ve spent a little over one year now in Second Life, and I’m not terribly convinced of its educational potential for college students in the humanities. Yes, I’ve been to a variety of educational events, have seen some pretty interesting simulated literary/historical environments, have even brought my own students into this virtual environment on numerous occasions, and have engaged quite a bit with other academics in the field.

While I see Second Life (and other similar virtual environments) as having the greatest potential in fields such as interactive multimedia, media studies, graphic design, architecture, etc., where you can perhaps better practice some of the conceptual applications of one’s field, I think that these virtual environments, for the most part, water-down, rather than enrich, the study of the humanities. Such virtual learning environments have what I think are too many practical problems — many students simply don’t have computers powerful enough to run the program without crashing; graphics can sometimes take too long to load and/or SIMS get sluggish; virtual environments often experience lag, various interruptions or griefing from other avatars often occurs; and the significant amount of additional time an instructor must spend to even set the virtual stage for learning can be exorbitant. The actual learning experiences currently just don’t seem worth all these headaches. But more than that, I question the value of the experiences themselves.

Yes, I can imagine and have seen a variety of simulated environments that brings literature, history, theatre, music, and other sociological interests “to [virtual] life.” I know that one can now visit a virtual old London community (or something like it) to see what the buildings, foods, clothing, etc. of Shakespeare’s time looked like. I know that one can be a part of (rather than just an attendee) of a performance of an in-world play. And I have teleported myself to the virtual Camp Darfur in Second Life and have had the “chance to walk through a ghosttown [sic] of a refugee camp, victimized by years of torture and genocide.” I’ve experience a number of these types of educational environments.

And 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. One of the things that students get most strongly in a foreign language classroom environment is speaking (though most typically with the teacher, who may or may not be a native speaker); less often, however, do students get an opportunity to interactively engage with native speakers in writing - particularly one that is as fluid and spontaneous as that of a virtual environment. 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.

I certainly see the potential for virtual environments as an addendum to learning, but certainly not a major tool of learning. Not yet. Honestly, I think films, photography, literature, and real-life experiences have the potential for a more powerful effect if one wants to immerse oneself in the culture of yesteryear, a literary narrative, culture, or the plight of the victimized and powerless, precisely because they put more responsibility on one to engage with one’s internal self — one’s critical, intellectual, and imaginative processes.

I am concerned that the influx of virtual learning environments have an equal potential to remove us from the reality of social, political, and other humanistic concerns as they do to offer connections. I see virtual media (as it currently exists) as more often providing a barrier between us and that which we are trying to more deeply understand <insert learning lesson or communicative purpose>. Virtual media, in essence, is mediating too much.

Why go into a virtual post-Katrina New Orleans if you can pull together a bus load of students to go down there and see for themselves; better yet, to go assist those who need help and have a hands-on learning experience that they will never in their lives forget? I know — a lot of people can’t travel either to another destination or into the past, so virtual environments give students a different type of access. Virtual environments are “interactive,” allowing students to not just see the 18th century nuances portrayed in vivid colors on a film screen, but allow them to step inside the 18th century, so to speak, and interact with the 3-D environment. The rhetoric is obviously convincing, especially when one looks at the ever-burgeoning list of colleges and universities purchasing virtual property, including my own, to create virtual campuses and interactive educational projects. But I don’t think that the current technology is delivering the promise of such rhetoric. Not yet.

I’m not totally against virtual education, nor have I lost hope for a greater potential. I see its benefits for distance learning (most strongly); being in a virtual environment seems much better than simply visiting and engaging student colleagues on a discussion board or through email. If you cannot have a real classroom, a virtual one can be more engaging than an online class chat, for sure. I also see the advantages to elementary, junior/high school students — it’s cool, it’s interesting, it’s visually engaging, and when you’ve got a room full of sluggish or tired students, it’s a waker-upper. And no matter how good of an educator you may be, these kids today need occasional jolts of visual/interactive stimuli to get those neurons firing. Virtual learning environments can often have the same effect for college students, though they are much more difficult to impress. So I see its ability to become a rather helpful and interesting supplement, but I don’t believe it is, in any substantial way, a replacement for one-on-one class time.

I’m also concerned about what influence such learning tools may have on our own motivation (or lack thereof) to experience things for real; our ability to imagine in our “mind’s eye” the intense fear, pain, and smells of the cholera epidemic in East End London in 1866; or our ability to communicate our thoughts and concerns in well-thought out, well-articulated verbal and written expressions — the kind that come from long moments of solitary reflection, rather than instantaneous interactive text-messaging — short bursts of words that are often way low on the Richter scale of significance in meaning. And while I’m not by any means scientifically inclined, I wonder what, if any, effect virtual education in large doses may have on our intellectual, conceptual, and emotional processes.

This topic is far too large to tackle in one (or even several) blogs. I’m sure, however, that the conversation will continue, and I’ll be interested 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.

I am an educator who came in quite excited about the possibilities, but after a year of engaging with this technology, I am rather disappointed. Perhaps we’re just in that really raw, rough stage of figuring out how we can make it work best for us; perhaps we’re on the dawn of a revolution in education; or perhaps we’re just starting to close our eyes and enter our worst nightmares. Only time will tell, but it’s worth talking about, as we navigate this virtual terrain.