Building Bridges, Burning Bridges: Some Potentials and Pitfalls of Second Life

This webtext provides instructors a glimpse of the potentials and pitfalls of Second Life for educational purposes. There is a wealth of information available for instructors who are interested in using Second Life in their classroom, and I have provided a list of recommended readings for those who wish to learn more about the hardware and software requirements necessary to run the environment successfully as well as learn more about Second Life in general. It is not my intention in this webtext to teach readers how to use Second Life; instead, I offer questions, concerns, and suggestions that I hope will guide both instructors already interested in teaching in Second Life and those who may choose to experiment with the space as a result of this webtext.

Throughout, I examine one aspect of Second Life that should be of concern to educators who wish to integrate this site into their teaching; that is, virtual harassment and the instructor’s accountability for his or her students’ safety (broadly defined) in Second Life and other similar virtual worlds. While Second Life can offer exciting educational opportunities to students and their instructors, its positioning on the peripheries of academia likens the space to a borderlands of sorts, one where the rules are not yet clear and the etiquette fuzzy. As a result, we must approach Second Life and similar online spaces with a critical eye (Selfe and Selfe, 1994; Selfe, 1999).

Throughout this webtext, then, I pose the following question:

There are no easy answers, particularly because our nation as a whole is grappling with legal issues brought to light by our increasing reliance on digital environments; in many cases, we just don’t have hard-and-fast answers to some of the questions that emerge in online spaces. However, my hope is that this piece will encourage academics to not only consider how Second Life might provide a space for the intersections of pedagogy and play, but also to more broadly think about our responsibilities to our students as we all move further into virtual worlds.

Returning to the question, "Why choose a Second Life?", rhetoric and composition instructors have long attempted to find ways to engage their students by structuring classrooms as spaces for active, collaborative learning. But writing instructors today face a new challenge: bringing multimodal texts into composition classes in meaningful ways that allow us to teach students about issues of rhetoric, power, language, writing, and culture. Gaming is one area of multimodal media that students and even many instructors already engage with outside of the classroom. Complex online games like Second Life can be used to address composition students’ educational needs—including the development of complex, dynamic literacies coupled with critical and adaptive subjectivities.