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Gaming & Virtual World Technologies
Just Ask the Avatar in the Front Row
5/1/2007
Virtualizing Ethnography
Nina Caporale, one of Milton’s students, is acutely aware of both the new artistic dynamics and the new sociodynamics of Second Life. A graduate student in fine arts, she’s been combining her experience in digital photography and video with sculpture installations—both real and virtual. She’s also experimenting with “scripting” the objects on the site in order to expand their “behavioral” repertoires, so the objects can move about and even respond to commands. But it’s the nature of the interaction of the avatars that interests Caporale most.
“When you’re playing a fantasy role,” she says, “you reveal a lot more about yourself. Right now, the most interesting thing to me, personally, is revealing to myself the variety of ways I socialize.” For example, because there are fewer reasons to be inhibited in Second Life, people in their avatar roles are less cautious about broaching potentially sensitive subjects. Caporale thinks that some of those attitudes and behaviors have seeped into her “first” life; her real life. She’s become less timid in some of her “real-people” interactions, she admits, since she became involved in Second Life.
SECOND LIFE STUDENTS walk through subject matter the way museum-goers move through exhibits.
Paul Shovlin is another Ohio University educator who holds classes in Second Life, teaching a required class in junior composition called “Rhetoric and Writing.” Shovlin facilitates discussions with students about their choices for avatars. He asks them how they might relate to him as a teacher, were he to appear to them in a Darth Vader costume; then he expands the discussion to what it means to his students to represent themselves in different ways. They discuss the meaning of “visual literacy”: being able to think critically about images and integrate the images into communication. They discuss how the Second Life medium affects discourse and how the “pseudoanonymity” affects discussions. Shovlin maintains that Second Life is “a great site for ethnography,” because students associate with so many different types of organizations and people. Beyond that, he thinks it’s important for his students to be exposed to these types of virtual environments: “As students are expected, sooner or later, to operate in these environments, it’s our jobs as educators to give them the experience and analytical tools necessary to be successful in them.”
There’s More to Life Than Second
Still, not everyone is a fan of Second Life—at least not yet. John Stinson, the retired dean of Ohio University’s business school, has been involved in online teaching for 15 years and now teaches a class, “Managing in the Innovation Age,” during the winter quarter.
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