Students Must Come Fully Clothed and in Human Form
It wasn't long ago when we began encouraging instructors to include netiquette requirements in their syllabi. The statements usually said something like "no IM speak. No vulgar language. etc". With classrooms beginning to meet online in virtual worlds like Second Life, we may be seeing netiquette statements like the following: students must come fully clothed and in human form.
As we prepare our students for a future in which meetings, and some educational experiences, will take place in virtual worlds (as they are now for some of the larger corporations), we may be teaching students how to dress their avatars for an interview, as well as which facial features, hair styles, etc are most appropriate. In a virtual world an individual can be either sex and any race by choice, not by birth, so discrimination on that basis will eventually have to disappear. Individuals do not even need to be human.
The virtual environment offers us far more than the talking heads of webinars and video conferencing. All participants can be in the same virtual room and interact with one another much like in the real world.
Recently, I attended my first meeting in Second Life. Outside the window of the meeting room, large palm trees were bending in the gentle breeze. The room was a large wood paneled room and the presenter was at the front. Participants sat on little sofas. I could look around the room, much as I would do in person, or I could look out the window. It was very much like a classroom, and the interaction was much more realistic than any I've had virtually before. I actually preferred it to the webinars that I've attended.
At first, however, my thoughts were that this was fantasy masquerading as life. Here humans can be virtually anything. One of the attendees, an officer in this group of Academic CIOs, was dressed as a purple cat. One of them, a female, wore transparent clothing. Yes, the boundaries do come down! I asked myself, which was the "real" person. The one that came dressed in proper clothing to their "real" office, or the one here. I thought about those school children in their uniforms. Does the uniform reflect the person? I decided that the virtual world may actually be the "real" world after all. There has to be something in a person, already there, that would allow them to come to a meeting in transparent clothing, or as a purple cat. Something that they kept hidden otherwise. In the real world these outfits would've been much more distracting than they were here. It was more of a curiosity than anything else.
As the technology evolves, and more instructors use the virtual classroom for synchronous meetings of students at a distance; as companies require employees to send their avatars to company meetings instead of flying the actual person, the technology will become more sophisticated--by demand, by investment. Maybe the Matrix wasn't so much science fiction after all.
As we prepare our students for a future in which meetings, and some educational experiences, will take place in virtual worlds (as they are now for some of the larger corporations), we may be teaching students how to dress their avatars for an interview, as well as which facial features, hair styles, etc are most appropriate. In a virtual world an individual can be either sex and any race by choice, not by birth, so discrimination on that basis will eventually have to disappear. Individuals do not even need to be human.
The virtual environment offers us far more than the talking heads of webinars and video conferencing. All participants can be in the same virtual room and interact with one another much like in the real world.
Recently, I attended my first meeting in Second Life. Outside the window of the meeting room, large palm trees were bending in the gentle breeze. The room was a large wood paneled room and the presenter was at the front. Participants sat on little sofas. I could look around the room, much as I would do in person, or I could look out the window. It was very much like a classroom, and the interaction was much more realistic than any I've had virtually before. I actually preferred it to the webinars that I've attended.
At first, however, my thoughts were that this was fantasy masquerading as life. Here humans can be virtually anything. One of the attendees, an officer in this group of Academic CIOs, was dressed as a purple cat. One of them, a female, wore transparent clothing. Yes, the boundaries do come down! I asked myself, which was the "real" person. The one that came dressed in proper clothing to their "real" office, or the one here. I thought about those school children in their uniforms. Does the uniform reflect the person? I decided that the virtual world may actually be the "real" world after all. There has to be something in a person, already there, that would allow them to come to a meeting in transparent clothing, or as a purple cat. Something that they kept hidden otherwise. In the real world these outfits would've been much more distracting than they were here. It was more of a curiosity than anything else.
As the technology evolves, and more instructors use the virtual classroom for synchronous meetings of students at a distance; as companies require employees to send their avatars to company meetings instead of flying the actual person, the technology will become more sophisticated--by demand, by investment. Maybe the Matrix wasn't so much science fiction after all.
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