Virtual Worlds: Learning and Teaching in a Digital Age

Long time no blog, as they say, but alas, the Second Life project had finished – so far – and then there are the university holidays. However, we are having summer schools in MACS at the moment, for 5th year pupils (okay, schools want them to be called students nowadays, but it gets very confusing to talk about students – school – and our students – university – so let’s leave this aside) about 15/16 year olds. I went and observed a couple of workshops on Friday and this is an anecdotal account of some very intriguing observations.

The pupils had to log into Second Life, customise their avatar and then built a sweetie and a snow man, if they got that far. Good representations of sweeties won a sweetie.

• The cohort was a 60/40 male/female ratio, and we offered each pupil the choice of avatar gender. In the first 3 workshops (there were 2 before that, which I could not attend, but the tutor related some observations to me) none of the females chose a male avatar, while several males chose female avatars, in the last workshop 3 females chose male avatars (the ratio of male/female in the last workshop was 40/60).
• Anecdotally, it is believed that the reason why males were more likely to choose female avatars is because of a tendency to play MUVE games, such as World of Warcraft, where a large percentage of males at some stage plays a female character, often with exaggerated body proportions.
• The females who chose a male avatar all customised them initially to look like “pretty boys”, reminiscing of the Japanese Anime/Manga style. One female changed her avatar to a more traditionally male looking one after that.
• Most importantly, compared to both the undergraduates (4th year) and the postgraduates of this year’s project, none of the pupils in the 2 workshops I observed attempted to make their avatar look like themselves. This was very surprising, judging from my experiences with the older students.
• The range of avatars was very creative: there were Hulks, Punkers, urban and jungle-type warriors, traditional WoW style warriors, Anime boys, blue-skinned and pink-haired females, gnomes, grotesquely large or small or distorted creatures, and many more. Only a few of the avatars remained ‘normal’ looking with human skin, hair, eyes and everyday clothes.
• In my opinion, the reason for the above might be a different way of growing up, immersed in computer games, and even if not playing computer games, those youths have surely been subjected to their principles by peers etc. Games, where being ‘human’ does not mean to be the prettiest with the most fashionable clothes (as so often witnessed in Second Life). In addition, non human characters are not only a standard in games, but with the surge of super hero films in recent years (X-men, the Hulk, Ironman, Batman, to name but a few) the idea of taking on the identity of a non-human and one that is not even attractive in the traditional sense, seems to have been more internalised by the younger users than the older ones.
• Several pupils turned their male avatar into “pregnant” males, by extending their bellies, thus experimenting with a notion that defies biology.
• As for being influenced by multi player games such as WoW, several pupils asked how they could make their avatars fight and how to attack others, being bewildered when told that this was neither possible nor the point of Second Life, and that this was no “game” because it had no rules to follow.

Did the “New Generation” grow up with a separation and distinction of “self” which allows them to experiment with their virtual representation? And, most importantly, do those teenagers see their Second Life avatars as “themselves” (as witnessed by the majority of the project’s students) or as a “sock puppet”?

It will be interesting to explore these thoughts further with the intake of 1st year students in September, who will most likely be of school leaver age, because how will the representation influence collaborative work? We shall see.

Last but not least, as one student put it at the end of the last workshops: “This is COOL!”