Online Worlds

Today I put a nice lady into an uncomfortable situation. I was doing a presentation on Internet Technology, focusing on social networking sites and virtual worlds. I asked for a volunteer to take over on the computer so she could chat in a virtual space for the rest of us to watch. She gingerly sat down at the computer, and hesitantly touched the keyboard as if it had just been sprayed with a squirt bottle full of germ water. She typed "hello," and after that was off and running (literally, well, literally in the virtual sense). I know how she felt, though. Trying a new technology in an atmosphere where there are a lot of people who know how to use it is hard (the rest of us weren't experts, just the 400,000 or so other people who use the virtual world - in this case, There.com). I wonder some day if traditional online courses will be supplemented with "in world" classrooms where we all login as our avatar and take our seats in a virtual desk (this video is LONG...I only listened to about a minute of it before I wanted to make the narrator stop talking).

Also, my presentation's main focus was how Social Justice relates to online experiences. I had some of my students login to virtual worlds as people of different genders and races, and it offered them the opportunity to experience - in some real sense - a few moments under a different identity than their own. From the responses that they wrote, it seems like it really affected some of them.