Virtual Worlds and Social Media: Conversation Changes Education

[Intellagirl]

The RezEd folks have invited me to start a conversation this week and they've left the topic up to me. How dangerous is that?!

Lately I've been talking to folks less about Second Life specifically and more about how Second Life is an example of a larger movement in media with huge ramifications for education. Virtual Worlds, like Second Life and World of Warcraft, are examples of many types of social media (media that relies on and encourages conversation among users rather than the old broadcast model) such as blogs, wikis, forums, microblogs etc. The educators who have begun to embrace and experiment with these media forms, some new and others not so new, have certainly sensed changes.

For me, as an academic and an educator, these changes have been dramatic. In that last two years not only has my teaching become reinvigorated, but the community of scholars with which I share ideas, collaborate with, and learn from has grown exponentially. I used to only collaborate with colleagues on my campus or in my field but in the last few years I've done work with astrophysicists, K-12 teachers, political scientists...scholars who I might never have met before.

So let's chat about how social media (and virtual worlds in particular) have changed the way teach, learn, and relate as a scholarly community. How has your adoption of these tools change the way you think, work, teach? What are the larger repercussions of conversation in education?

[Rafi Santo]

One of the biggest things that I've come to notice in my few years working professionally as an educator (and a bunch more that I have under my belt before I went "pro") is the impact of the attitudes and culture endemic in a given field upon the practice of that field.

In my working life I've been involved to varying degrees in a number of fields before getting involved with social media and education; human rights education in non-traditional settings like museums, social work in the form of therapeutic group work, traditional public school education and international development in the form of community building and conflict resolution. Each of these fields certainly had their own distinct culture, but for me they always had a commonality in that they all related in form or another to social justice. And all of them, perhaps because of that, had outlooks and attitudes that I feel are unique to a number of socially minded fields: seeing problems, being reactive, a sense of uphill battles with insurmountable obstacles, being somewhat bogged down by systems and bureaucracies that prevented progress or reform from occurring. (*Caveat: This is a broad generalization, and I'm sure it's not always the case.)

In coming to work in the educational technology field, and specifically dealing with social media, what I'm most struck by is the incredible optimism, solution-seeing and seeking, innovative and exploratory outlook, general sense of excitement and energy as well as strong tendencies to collaborate and share information and practices freely.

Jim Gee, a scholar who writes about games and learning, talks about semiotic domains, or areas of specialized knowledge that have their own language, cultures and practices, as being especially important when thinking about the potential learning that happens when people engage in MMO's, specifically. However, the idea has relevance here in that social media, as a semiotic domain in itself, has a number of characteristics (as I mentioned above) that make the way that I work both as an educator and citizen more dynamic than they've ever been before.

[BlueWings Hayek]

As a librarian working in virtual worlds, I think it's really helped me to see how much the library is part of the community-the global community. We talk about it all the time, but to extend onself beyond just having a presence online-but really interacting with those that find us as resources helpful, I think is a great way to connect with the world and make a difference.