When Worlds Collide

Of the many popular MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) spaces being incorporated into pedagogy today, Second Life in particular poses intriguing questions for educators, questions that reflect larger concerns about the role of higher education in the twenty-first century, the literacies we privilege, and the virtual spaces we inhabit as educators and as students.

First, some educators and administrators may question the appropriateness of computer games in the classroom—they may wonder if these technologies, generally used for entertainment purposes, will truly help students learn. But as both Henry Jenkins (2006) and James Paul Gee (2003) have noted, games push us in ways that many traditional media do not; games ask us to put into practice complex literacies in order to maneuver through them. Thus, games like Second Life can assist educators in meeting the literacy needs of today's learners (deWinter and Vie, forthcoming).

Similarly, parents might question whether computer games in a composition classroom will help students to write more effectively. While we live in a world that is shifting more and more to multimodal means of composition, we also face the effects of national legislation like No Child Left Behind in primary and secondary education, effects that also trickle up to the college level. One of the strongest answers to such concerns is offered by Gee (2008), who argues that good learning experiences are those that offer goals, interpretations, practice, explanations, debriefing, and feedback. Some of the best places to find all of these factors and thus discover exceptional learning experiences is within games. Embodied experience, rather than studying simulations, also results in better retention of the learning experience (p. 22). Earlier, Gee (2003) describes this kind of learning as "active learning," that which asks students to experience their worlds in new ways, form new affiliations, and, as a result, become better prepared for future learning opportunities (p. 23).

Finally, as students increasingly compose profile pages in MySpace and Facebook, spaces where many instructors are establishing their own identities, these two disparate groups are finding more opportunities to communicate outside of class—and, in some cases, to collide. Our reliance on technology in our daily lives and our interests in bringing said technologies into the classroom bring up pressing questions that we often do not have outright answers to; as educators, we are still in the midst of a process of discovery. Much like online social networking sites, gaming spaces like World of Warcraft and Second Life are spaces where the interests of students and instructors can, and often do, conflict.

It is this final point that illuminates Second Life as a remarkably intriguing virtual space with regard to academia. Here, not only do the often separate interests of students and their instructors collide, but these individuals and other everyday players also hurtle into one another—in fact, sometimes literally. Negotiating and overcoming these conflicts, however, is a necessary step in discovering the opportunities for teaching in virtual spaces.