Second Life: Landmark Learning
I traverse the digital world of Second Life with hesitancy. As I’ve written before, I maybe be a digital native, but I am a video game immigrant. Nope, not immigrant. Unlike digital immigrants, I don’t believe I’ve entered the culture of video games, nor am I attempting to learn those skills. I have no desire to participate in role-playing games and only the occasional interest in using a Wii or Xbox Kinect to dance with friends. Yet I teleported around Second Life to visit some favorite landmarks of Metaphor Voom. Perhaps that makes me a Second Life tourist.
Second Life as a world that embraces change and a format for learning through play and imagination. My roommate, an early childhood educator, often says that play is a child’s work. She is not the first to say this, as it has been explored by child development psychologists including Jean Piaget. According to Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown, play should not be abandoned as one ages. “In a world of near-constant flux, play becomes a strategy for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it.” (A New Culture of Learning, Chapter 3). Sandbox environments are one way Second Life facilitates playing to learn.
As a Second Life tourist, I stumbled upon a sandbox while wandering around the Brown University Media Studies landmark. Ignorant of the sandbox concept, I thought this was merely a digital version of a child’s playground. I tried to slide down a slide. I tried to dig in the sand. No success. I eventually abandoned the space and went to the next site on the list. Global Kids, Global Kids HQ, Periwinkle Infohub, ANGEL Learning Isle. As I worked my way through the list, teleporting to places that sounded interesting, I noticed the Berkman sandbox area. It was at this site that I made the connection---sandbox is a metaphor for building, exploring, creating. Like a child who sits in a sandbox, exploring the laws of nature, a digital sandbox is a place for Second Life residents to learn the laws of building in a virtual world. They are spaces where creativity and chaos go hand in hand.
It was at the Beckman Sandbox that I first found other residents. Through all my traveling, I had yet to interact with other nodes of information. Seeing other people was alarming at first. Despite the participatory nature of this collective, I was still very much in the private v. public dichotomy. (Chapter 5). I didn’t stay long because I was scared that someone might want to interact with me. Like the person who goes to Karaoke but refuses to sing, I was not ready to contribute to the collective. At the same time, I missed out on the chance to be mentored in the digital world. Instead, I teleported to Warmouth Infohub to continue exploring on my own…
Assignment: Describe the experience of visiting locations in Second Life. Make connections between one or more of the locations visited and chapters 3, 4, and 5 from A New Culture of Learning.
Reference:
Brown, J. S. and D. Thomas. (2011). A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. CreateSpace.
