Well, there's actually one thing that I am happy about regarding week 4 and 5 and that was to see librarians actively involved in the learning environment. Something I argued for already 9 years ago (Roes, Hans (2001), Digital libraries and education: trends and opportunities, D-Lib Magazine, July / August, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july01/roes/07roes.html).

On to the reasons why I am not happy.

1. I already commented on the Boellstorff chapter. Many stories in there about how people experience SL, but in how far is it relevant to the subject of the course? I asked for perspective, but did not get a real answer. In week 5 we get a very similar text from Taylor, this one from 2002 about a virtual world even crappier than SL. Again, stories about how people experience this world, again etnography.

My point is that you can learn something from these texts, but what you learn is how people experience these 'worlds' as a gaming annex social environment, in both texts there is absolutely nothing about how these 'worlds' would be experienced as learning environment. In both texts the word 'learning' is almost absent.

Also, both texts are ethnographies about people that immerse themselves deeply in such worlds. My question would be how deeply people - students, and teachers - would need to immerse themselves in such 'worlds' before they become adequate environments for teaching and learning? I am not sure, but see the next point.

2. In week 4 and 5 I attended 4 meetings in SL. Yes, I can see some progression in how the tool is being used in discussions. The discussion I attended last night was much more focussed than the one last week. On the other hand, we had only 5 participants last night, including the tutor (Pancha / Marshall, hey hey, a librarian!). Also unlike the discussion last week, Pancha was now present all the time and was actively steering the discussion. So I wonder what caused the progression, the fact that the students were more experienced, or the facts that the group was smaller and actively being led. I guess the latter factors are more important. And an important takeaway for me: I suspect 5 to 6 participants is about the max a group chat can have. (From my teaching days I remember research into the optimal / maximal sice of working groups, I'd suspect that there is research as well in this area.)

And of course, like I said last week, the meeting is still basically a group chat. Yesterday night I discovered that for the most time I just concentrated on the chat, and when I looked at the screen, I was mostly looking at the avs' names rather than at the avs themselves.

Okay, maybe it is just my lack of imagination. In this regard I'd also like to respond to a remark by Clara last week about whether or not I was experiencing 'flow'. A concept I always liked (although I wished that the guy who came up with it had an easier to spell name ;-), and also a concept I have tried to apply in my management positions: challenge people beyond their abilities, but not too much beyond. Incidentally, the Gee text also describes flow, second paragraph on p. 70, without any reference, but than there are no references in the Gee text at all. Back to 'flow' for me in SL. The simple fact is that I don't feel challenged by SL, let alone intimidated, as I have the impression some of my fellow students are. Again, it maybe my lack of imagination, but it's something I can't help.

Now, of course it is important for me to know how people might experience a 'world' like SL, and in a sense I can really follow all these stories in the Boellstorff and Taylor texts. But again, I am dearly missing the link to the relevance of all these stories for learning.

And, more importantly, I think Clara remarked a few weeks ago that technologies in a sense can also hinder learning. Now, I don't think SL is an obstacle there, but chat is a tool that at least for me is not really suited for a good discussion. It forces one to use short sentences, and slows my thinking down to the speed at which I can type. Maybe it's my background as an economist, but I can't help finding it a most inefficient way of communicating. The Yee text for me confirms this: games are all about slowing you down.

3. Learning then. Here we have three texts that at least have the words learning in their titles. Warburton, Dickey, and Gee. The first disappointment here is that Gee and Dickey are from 2002 and 2003 respectively. It made me want to shout at the librarians involved here: surely you could come up with more up to date texts here?

I will not repeat what I said about the Warburton and Dickey texts last week. I had another look at the Dickey text and although her analysis in terms of affordances and constraints is worthwhile, the example she uses - Intro to RWX Modeling - is in the end not a professional example. At the time she researched her article one would probably not find such a professional example, but that only reinforces my point that a more up to date text would have been very helpful.

4. Which brings me finally to the Gee text. Gee (that's a pun, yes), I thought, so now we have a linguistics professor that seems to be developing his own learning theory based on his individual experiences with a particular computer game. And gee, not a single reference in that text except for a short bibliographic note at the end that mentions some research into learning. Already on the second page (52) he puts me completely off with the remark 'your character - that is you'. No, you are playing your character, there's a fundamental difference there. And there is this strange second paragraph on p. 57: "One sort of limitation video games certainly bring up to real-world baby-boomers like me is that they do not reward - in fact they punish - some of my most cherished ways of learning and thinking (e.g. being too quick to want to get to a goal without engaging in sufficient prior nonlinear exploration)." Now, I recognize what Yee said about games slowing you down, and, being a baby boomer myself, I can see his point of too quickly wanting to reach a goal, but too quickly wanting to get to a goal is _not_ a way of learning, but hey, I am not a linguist, and English is not my first language, so who knows.

On p. 58 and 59 we find paragraphs beginning with "It is not uncommon ...", and "It has been argued ...". Citation needed, I thought, Wikipedia style.

On p. 61/62 we get to what seems to be the core of Gee's learning theory: entice to try, put in lots of effort, achieve meaningful success. Seems plausible to me, but my theoretical background in pedagogy is just not good enough to judge the validity of this. I really would like to have seen some discussion here (I might start one today, I am not that active on the discussion boards). Also, an interesting question would have been, assuming there is some validity to his learning theory, how Gee's principles might apply to the design of e-learning.

So there you have it, the reasons for my unhappiness. And yes, maybe I do want to get too quickly to my goals ;-).