My stance with respect to Second Life reality is that of extending and freely recreating myself. I opt to shape my virtual self, overcoming the limitations of my real self imposed on me by the circumstances I am in (me being in a particular place in the world, constrained by the laws of nature, subject to weather and health matters). I like to think of Peter Nitely as an improved me. Yet, at first I inadvertently chose my avatar to be as similar to me as possible, thus selecting the gender options for ‘male’, in late 20’s, blonde, white, skinny, dressing quite casually. I even tried to match his name as closely as possible to mine.

My interactions with other SL users won’t differ much from my real life interactions, where I wouldn’t try to bother strangers with conversations, or wouldn’t act foolishly, even though I am fully aware of still being completely anonymous in SL. In fact I have yet to explore the SL’s social use.

I am very glad with our group Second Life session and the first striking feature I noticed was the observance of the “social proxemics”, characterised by us walking in an organised manner to an agreed area, apologising each other when stumbling on or pushing somebody, sitting down and facing each other while talking, etc. All these came very naturally to each one of us; we submerged into our virtual identities as students quite easily. But what if the task was more difficult than just taking part in a discussion? What if new skills and new knowledge were to be gained?

Answers to this question are provided quite extensively by Gee. According to him if children cannot make associations between their real-world identities (who they are, what values they represent) and their virtual identities (who they can become), the learning process will fail. In fact, according to Gee, helping to form such associations is what teacher’s role should be about. With the right assistance from the teacher, students will make the right associations between the available identities, thus moving from the real identity (as represented by “That’s what I think), to virtual identity (as represented by “That’s what I would think if I was a…”). The final step being the student’s realisation of their projective identity could be represented by “That’s what I’ll think right here and now, being this type of person”.

Possibly a good and simple explanation of Gee’s ideas is mentioning passive versus active -or critical- learning. Learning things without being able to refer them to one’s own goals or to own context, has much smaller chances of being remembered and mastered by a student than learning critically, knowing what the particular knowledge and skill will help one with. Gee’s video game example, accompanied by succinctly explained learning principles is a must read for any ambitious educator.