Yes, it was the first time I heave ever used Twitter in a conversation. And as much as I appreciated the new experience, I disliked the fact that it is so difficult to actually follow the course of discussion.
Unlike chat, unlike the discussion forum even, this most asynchronous of all means of communication (well, I’m exaggerating, perhapsJ) is difficult for a partaker not only because it is so stretched in time, but also because it is linear in the way that each new post appears after a previous one (so unlike in a discussion forum where related posts can be grouped together), because a substantial number of various threads/topics may appear all in one discussion, and finally because each and every entry is subject to a character limit, making utterances abbreviated or cut into parts.
Contrary to what I had thought, Twitter threads proved to be very personal (words often spoken directly to someone specific rather than the whole group) and what fascinated me even more was an article by Jutko et.al. where a number of additional advantages of using Twitter were revealed (including but not limited to: high students’ engagement in the study process, extending classroom conversations, expressing personal feelings, revealing one’s shortcomings, mentioning extra-curricular content to find common interest, etc.).
I admit that to fully engage in a 3-day long discussion, a regular check of a few times a day would be necessary, probably.
Yes, I do believe Twitter has its place in the e-education process and I wish to continue my exploration of it starting from reading the bibliography positions from the two Twitter-related articles.
After doing some research on the World Wide Web, on the SL website, Wikipedia, and a few other blogs and websites, I’m ready to leave the comfort of Holyrood Park, and do some exploration. And being a complete SL newbie, I’m not too concerned with finding a location in a subject/issue/discipline that is necessarily part of my repertoire of interests! I want to find a place that can show me what SL can do, and also what its benefits can be.
The Virtual Medical Doctor (VMD) is a SL space released by MadPea Productions. It takes you to a time in the future when “Surgery is so minimally invasive that all you have to do is take a pill”. The aim is to learn about the human body, its vital organs, and how various diseases can be cured.
(Warburton, 2009) talks about how a SL experience can facilitate innovation in pedagogy, through: Extended and rich interactions, Visualization and contextualization, Exposure to authentic content and culture, identity play, simulation, Immersion, community presence, and content production. Of these activities, I would say that the VMD fits nicely into the Visualization and Contextualization, and Simulation categories.
The first thing I noticed when teleporting here was that there is no stumbling about aimlessly as is the case in many SL locations. For someone who isn’t very familiar with SL, this was a welcome because I am still very much in SL learning mode, and therefore happy to find structure and direction in the learning activities where possible.
When you teleport to the VMD, you will be greeted by Poseidon! The environment has a futuristic and very “Let's get to work” kind of feel to it.
Poseidon assumes nothing about your level of SL expertise. After Touching Poseidon, he will provide you with 4 different options:
If you’re completely new to Second Life, then the Basic Tutorial is the place to start, and after you’re confident in your ability to do a few simple things like walk around, sit on chairs, and interact with objects and characters by “Touching” them, you should be ready to begin with the VMD Tutorial.
Medical education happens on the training level where you learn about the vital human organs (Heart, Lungs, Stomach, etc.), and about medical problems that can occur in these organs.
Next comes the hard part; learning about drugs. I did try my best to understand as much as possible, but I'm not a medical person and found this section somewhat difficult!
Despite the fact that I gave up the drug section fairly quickly, I can see how interesting this kind of environment can be for medical/pharmaceutical students, looking for creative ways to help with their learning.
So after studying and learning at your own pace, and when you're somewhat confident that you've digested enough information about drugs and the body, you can move into a section filled with patients, and where you will find a number of quizzes to test your knowledge.
The real fun starts next. It's time to teleport to the hospital on Tupol Island. At the hospital you’ll board one of the 3 different Cheirons.
Each Cheiron is designed to deal with a different set of medical problems. These are futuristic vehicles, which you enter, and in which you are miniaturized before you begin your journey of exploration inside the human body!
There are scenarios and challenges, which you’re presented with while inside the body, and where you have to treat different ailments.
In the following scenario I’m faced with an ulcer inside the stomach, which I have to treat before I can progress.
And after completing my first mission I realized that in the same way I was happy to get a sticker for doing my homework when I was at primary school, I’m still very happy to get a reward after doing my homework and completing a mission in Second Life.
Overall, I found this experience a fun example of how virtual environments such as Second Life, can be used to enhance the learning experience in a very practical field such as medicine. The quizzes, the Cherions and the miniaturization process give students the ability to look at the body and its medical problems, through a different set of tools. And although there is no substitute for real practical experience with real patients, I certainly enjoyed the VMD, and I think that games such as these can make learning some very tough subjects allot more enjoyable.
I explored this SL location on my own, but there is room in the Cheiron for a second passenger! which I can imagine would make this experience even more fun. The VMD was only released on the 15/January/2011 so it will be interesting to find out a year from now how popular this programme is going to be. Here's the official trailer for this SL location:
REFERENCES
Warbuton, S. (2009). Second Life in higher education" Assessing the potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning and teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(3), 414-426.
As mentioned in my comment to the previous post, online learners’ emotions are of paramount importance to their tutors, letting them have a better insight into what might engage or inhibit the student in achieving their learning goals. I have decided to take the previous and very informal attempt of visualising my emotions a bit further and analyse them in more detail, hoping I would be able to draw some conclusions and help myself overcome the interaction problems I am now experiencing. I am also trying to assess how such data would be useful to the teacher.
Description of the method
The inspiration was brought by the research paper written by Gilmore and Warren (2007) in which they were trying to research the emotions from the perspective of online tutors using the medium of an online chat for holding seminars and the potential influence these emotions exerted on the relationship with the learners. The framework they used was a combination of ethnography and grounded theory. The former means the tutors were participating in the seminar themselves, so becoming part of the researched community. The latter assumes collection and processing the data (marking, coding, grouping into similar concepts and then categories) prior to stating the research hypothesis.
This is how they justify their choice of their methodology and describe their data collection:
An ethnographic approach requires a sense of the ‘poetry of experience’ in that researchers often need to pay attention to data which are metaphorically indirect and atmospheric rather than literal and rational (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 589)
During the analysis of our own and each other’s logs there was a strong sense of ‘reexperiencing’ our emotions and as such the logs were not ‘sterile’ records of past interaction to be picked apart and recombined as codes, but more akin to ‘material memories’ that evoked recollections and emotional remembrances of our feelings (Gilmore & Warren, 2002: 590)
I found this approach quite appealing and decided to replicate it in my context. While participating in the first skype chat I was trying to monitor my feelings and jot down any stronger occurrences of emotionality (a visual taster presented in my previous posting). Later I analysed the chatlog, trying to log my thoughts and feelings at the time alongside the actual chat contributions. After that, I analysed my comments and picked out any mention of emotions, either encircling them (if they were named explicitly) or extracting them from ‘in-between the lines’. I tried to restrict the set of emotions if possible so that it would be easier to count the occurrences of particular feelings. At the end, I counted all the mentions of any emotion, mentions of negative emotions, positive emotions and ambiguous emotions and mentions of particular emotions trying to establish which ones were the most frequent. See the attached PDF for more detail (this document is not public at the moment - email me for details).
Results
Any kind of emotion was noted on 34 occasions. Majority of them could be described as negative. The ones that occurred most frequently were: alienation/ annoyance, self-consciousness and embarrassment (PDF).
According to Wosnitza & Volet (2005),emotions can be analysed in regard to their direction, i.e. recipient and they have identified multiple sources emotions can be orientated towards: task, technology, performance, oneself, social environment and learning context. It’s curious that all of the emotions coded in my experiment appear to be socially oriented, mostly self-directed and occasionally other-directed (and here it seems ‘other’ stands for ‘fellow students’ rather than the tutor), so it seems the social aspect of the learning experience took over. Another odd thing is that the emotions I felt towards myself, the feelings of alienation, self-consciousness and embarrassment are closely related to the social environment. One could actually argue that for instance the prerequisite for feeling alienated is the presence of a group of which one does not feel part of. Feelings of self-consciousness and embarrassment might also have a tendency to arise in a social setting as they are linked to the issue of perception – how the person perceived themselves in relation to others, how they are perceived by others and how she/he feels about others perceiving her in a given/imagined way.
My rough conclusion in regard to my emotionality is that there seems to be a high degree of pre-occupation with that last issue, considerably higher than in face-to-face contexts.
Limitations
Of course, my ‘research’ is still very informal and its conclusions are far from being meaningful due to the following reasons:
I have minimal experience in research
Self-report tends to be subjective and therefore not very reliable
The annotations were made with a few days’ delay, which might further decrease the reliability of the report
The matter was treated in a cursory manner, without a deep analysis of how to decipher, code and group the emotions arising due to the interaction (I was just playing a researcher)
Due to the above reasons, some important data might have got lost.
Nevertheless, the whole experiment was worthwhile and did bring some insight into my emotionality. It would be interesting to repeat this with greater care about detail and reliability as well as compare with what other chat participants felt at the time.
Now the question remains a teacher can do with such data (I am now distancing myself from it and trying to put myself in the tutor’s shoes). Could the course design be tweaked to include more social get-togethers in real time, more pairwork and groupwork to facilitate establishing closer working relationships between the students so that the comfort zone for a socially inept student is slowly extended?
Gilmore and Warren (2007) while summarisingthe issues related to the virtual classroom point out that online interaction is often conceptualised in dichotomy terms of being either liberating or impoverishing, either enabling highly intimate relationships or ones that are impersonal and hostile. It puzzles me to see that I am experiencing both: the Skype experience and the blog experience. So after all, even if the student runs into difficulties in one online environment, it does not have to be blown out of proportion as long as they find their niche in another environment on the course where they can flourish and fulfil their potential.
Adult learning has been traditionally perceived as conceptual, rational and cognitive. Yet, adults undertaking studies do experience a range of emotions, both positive (enjoyment, pride, satisfaction) and negative (fear, anxiety, dread, shame). And these emotions are not necessarily a sign of insanity, as Kant would have diagnosed it (in his opinion, emotion being ‘an illness of the mind’) but essential ingredients of the learning process. Affective factors seem to play a crucial role when it comes to motivation or lack of it to pursue the subject matter of the course. Of course the view of learning and teaching now is much more holistic, trying to integrate cognition and emotion into the instructional design. However, isn’t that uncanny that expression of certain emotions might still be looked down on as a potential sign of weakness, hysteria, lack of balance?
This might be even further complicated in an online learning environment which on the surface appears to be emotionally impoverished – disembodied, devoid of non-verbal cues, blurring social and spatial boundaries, in other words ‘the ultimate disorienting dilemma (Campbell-Gibson, 2000 in O’Regan, 2003), too overwhelming and alienating to make subtle emotions explicit. And indeed students experience confusion and isolation when trying to navigate through the course site and establish contact with peers and tutors.
However, some of the rules regarding feelings must be renegotiated very soon and some users decide to disclose personal or even intimate details at some point of the course, often in the initial phase. For instance, I had one e-colleague divulging to me she'd lost a teenage son at the beginning of the second week of a 20-week course and I must say I was at a loss as to how I should react to that. The reasons for such sudden sincerity were obscure at the moment as well as the way she felt about the confession. I was in a bit of a shock and started wondering why such things happen.
Some researchers claim that what is regarded as an impoverishing aspect is actually very enriching. Lack of body language and visual cues introduces a greater degree of intimacy into online zones, often loosening users’ self-protection mechanisms and pushing them to disclose private details, including the greatest intimacies. Could that be likened to the anecdotal ‘stranger on the plane’ phenomenon? It is often considered that the body in fact exists in cyberspace – already in the late 90s Argyle and Shields (in Gilmore and Warren, 2007:593) stated that the technology mediates the body, making its expressive qualities apparent in different ways. After all, the term ‘virtuality’ comes from the Latin virtus, which stands for excellence, potency and efficacy (Online Etymology Dictionary). Although the computer-related usage dates back to the 1950s, perhaps the traces of the root meaning still resonate in this modern lexical expansion.
Another facilitating factor at play, especially in regard to tightly-knit communities, might be an increased sense of community (which might build quickly on closed courses geared to a small group of like-minded professionals like in the above described case), common cause and purpose and trust that builds up over the course of time. I would be curious to know which mechanisms are in place when people decide whether and when they can start trusting other online participants on the course and go further in disclosing personal information, beyond the point of stating the obvious 'I like reading 19-cent historical novels and listen to trip hop in my free time'.
Another interesting aspect is how online users go about their decision regarding who they are going to open up to. Based on anecdotal evidence and mostly on my own experience, I can state that even on asynchronous courses, where there is no real-time communication built in, you can create a sense of your personality through the way you express yourself. How do we pick up on the vibes from other people online, how do we come up with this expectation: ‘Hmm, I think I can easily relate to this person but not the other. She/He has got something about them. I think we’re on the same wavelength.’ Does that require an extra plug-in in our emotional intelligence to be able to read people online or is it by pure fluke that I managed to pick out friendly souls, including my current partner, in the chaos of the online? As I said this is a sheer speculation based on anecdotal evidence from my own and my friends' lives. I am aware of the other darker side of the net where people meddle with their identity to harm others.
This refers more to education in general, both face-to-face and online contexts and I must admit I got sidetracked while researching this topic but being a teacher myself and currently working in a sort of assessment-obsessed environment I couldn’t resist the temptation of writing more on assessment. So here you go:
ON WORKING TOGETHER (ONLINE)
There is no doubt that group work might be beneficial to learning - it is more student-centred, promotes more self-directed learning and social construction of knowledge. In more practical terms it helps students develop a range of important skills, including problem-solving, communication, leadership, collaboration and decision-making, all of them being important personal and professional assets sought by prospective employers. However, some groups prove to be dysfunctional, mostly due to the so-called ‘lone wolves’ or the phenomenon of social loafing.
Lone wolves are primarily interested in achieving their own goals while social loafing can be defined as little or lack of activity on the part of a group member who ‘shirks their obligations in the hope of benefitting from the work of others’ (Dommeyer, 2007:175). If the loafer or the free rider manages to slip unnoticed through the system they receive the same mark as the rest of their more industrious group members, which seems to be the most common reason for students’ concern, dissatisfaction and complaints (Aggarval & O’Brien, 2008; Kennedy, 2006).
Both these dysfunctionalities are likely to occur in face-to-face and online settings alike but perhaps they are more common in the latter due to lack of bodily presence and issues around community building? Besides Hron and Friedrich (2003) claim that due to its characteristics, online discussions (and I dare to speculate that by extension probably any form of online communication) might pose a number of problems, among others difficulty maintaining topic coherence and understanding the context of a message, which could instigate a number of difficulties in group activities.
For instance, based on my own experience of setting up group discussions within a virtual learning environment (Moodle), students often contribute a single post and rest on their laurels, satisfied that they have completed the task. There is usually very little or no interactive value in the post, e.g. a question or a challenging comment. When I run the activity report I often find out there is one post per student – is that a discussion or rather a series of minipresentations – I ask myself.
Such eventualities should be borne in mind while creating the tasks and perhaps more guidance in ‘global learning methods for organising group work, behaviour rules for structuring dialogues, so-called co-operation scripts’ (Hron & Friedrich, 2003: 73) should be offered. Introducing peer evaluations during the process of group work or final peer assessment could also reduce the incidence of loafing (Aggarval & O’Brien, 2008; Pond et al, 2007).
ON PEER ASSESSMENT (ONLINE)
This idea of peer assessment, as you remarked in your comment, Clara, is however both compelling and problematic.
To start with, there are obvious benefits to introducing peer assessment, such as increased motivation, engagement and accountability (Falchikov, 2005). To illustrate this, in a piece of research carried out by Bouchoucha & Woznak (2010) the engagement and interaction in an online group discussion increased upon introducing peer assessment from 1.4 to 3.6 posts per person in a single discussion. Other potential advantages include facilitation of deeper understanding of the subject matter and the student’s own achievement (Bloxham & Boyd, 2007).
Besides, in a situation where the group project entails other communication media, beyond the tutor’s control, let’s say emails, conversations on the phone or skype, chat or texts, the tutor is not really in the position to gain a good insight into the group dynamics and fabric and thus cannot make a fair judgement. The only people who are capable of assessing their own and others’ relative contributions are the students themselves (Race, 2001) but the question arises whether they are able to do so fairly and reliably.
ON PROBLEMS RELATED TO PEER ASSESSMENT
According to the reading I did on the subject, it seems there is some discrepancy in the views in that respect from quite favourable findings that students grade accurately and consistently (Marcoulides & Simkin, 1995), through stating that they mark with a slight bias to over-mark (Boud & Holmes, 1995) or under-mark (Hamer et al, 2009), to discovering that the correlation between the students’ and tutors’ marks tends to be restricted to a holistic judgement, based on well-understood criteria (Falchikov & Goldfinch, 2000). I guess these might be even more conflicting if a more thorough comparison is carried out across departments and faculties with their different grading scales, approaches and the nature of their typical assignments. If you think further of interdisciplinary degrees or post-grad degrees with students from different backgrounds, humanities and sciences, and you add online on top of that, the issue might get even more muddled (illustrated by your comment).
ON POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
Ways of addressing the problem include involving students in the process of creating the peer assessment instrument. For example, they could select from a pre-prepared bank of questions or criteria using various scoring scales (Nicol & Milligan, 2006); alternatively they could even formulate the criteria themselves. Theoretically, in such a situation, they should be able to understand them inside out and allocate a fair mark. However, even this might be problematic as students might have varying notions as to what particular terms stand for or how achieving a given criterion translates into a particular grade. This might result in the students either over or under-marking. Clarity of the rubrics might be tested by means of a calibration process prior to launching the group project. In order to further reduce this stringency or leniency effect, each student could be assessed by all the other group members (multiple peer assessment) and the assessors could be encouraged to write more detailed comments to justify their scoring.
Hmm, it all sounds ideal but I guess in terms of preparation (creating criteria, running assessment trials) as well as implementation (students filling in the assessment forms and tutors reading them) might prove time-consuming and thus adding to the workload of everybody in question. It is also unclear to what extent the peers’ mark should influence the final grade and how the calculation should be performed.
I’d be quite interested in doing more about this as the issues of peer/self-review and assessment have been on my mind for some time now. Basically, I’d like to encourage more reflection on part of my students, deeper thinking on their performance, goals, abilities and skills. The issue of formative peer assessment springs to mind too (as suggested in the article by Aggorval and O’Brien (2009) it is multiple peer evaluations that best prevent social loafing). Something perhaps to ponder on the assessment module in the future?
One of the stories from week one described a situation in which a wheelchair user participated in an online course – an example of inclusion on a logistical level where online creates a convenient and easily accessible environment for learners with disabilities. However, as I mentioned in the previous posting, online might offer inclusion in other respects too. In that particular case the disabled student chose to keep their health condition secret. That could have been dictated by many motives, for instance their unwillingness to manifest their otherness and so not to get ‘preferential’ treatment (being it true or fake sympathy or even harassment – hence inverted commas – or a degree of favouritism in assessment – ‘She is scraping through but since she is disabled and so making an extra effort to continue her education, let’s reward her with a higher mark) or the fact that they thought it was irrelevant in the given circumstances. Whatever the reason, the person did not experience any exclusion which could have otherwise occurred, became an integral part of the group and only at the in an off-hand remark revealed the actual state of things.
Clara, you pointed out in your comment that this might be just illusion of receiving equal treatment and so the need to hide a part of oneself might be considered exclusionary. I agree you can’t be certain whether the environment is inclusive or exclusive unless you test the waters by simply revealing who you really are and the others’ gut reaction might provide the proof of the pudding (I’m not sure though what counts as a gut reaction online and how you measure it!) However, I think it all comes down to how the ‘other’ person perceives themselves. If the self-perception is linked with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, then the main reason for withholding the truth might be fear and thus could count as exclusionary. If there is acceptance of the condition in the person and they simply opt out because they think it’s their private matter and it’s not pertinent to the course (but if asked, they would admit it), then it’s more inclusive. I think what I wanted to stress in my previous post is that the online might offer more control over private information to learners with disabilities or belonging to minorities (sexual, racial, cultural, religious) who could be subjected to discriminatory behaviour and simply denied access to the group on the grounds that they are transsexual, a Gypsy, an orthodox Muslim or Palestinian. They identify themselves to others, thus shaping the way the others can interpret them (‘if the [visual] cues are not discussed, pragmatically they do not “exist;” textualisation constitutes “reality”’ [Lai & Ball, 2004: 24]). Thanks to that they can promote themselves as individuals without being unjustly associated withcollective stereotypes that every Palestinian is a terrorist.
I think the idea of inclusion and exclusion might have some connection with how the participant sees themselves, especially in relation to other people. According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs the needs of love/belonging (feeling of acceptanceby the community)and esteem (being valued and respected by others) constitute two of the 4 basic deficiency needs, coming right after physiological and safety belonging needs. If these needs are not satisfied, a person might experience feelings of social anxiety and develop notions of low self-esteem and inferiority, which in extreme cases might lead to depression.
Levy (1998:34) pointed out that the boundaries between the private and the public blur online. Once I log into the course VLE, the classroom and my own cosy room penetrate each other. For this reason, it is often claimed that shy, less confident students often feel empowered by the online medium and contribute more when seated within their comfort zone than in an actual face-to-face classroom ([Faculty Focus, 2010] but I need to find more references). By more active participation they might start blossoming, gelling with the rest of the group, building relationships and gaining respect of the others, thus satisfying their needs of belonging, a certain sign of online being inclusive.
However, and this is me thinking aloud, it might also happen that some hypersensitive and more vulnerable individuals might experience enhanced insecurity and anxiety, and in their fear of losing face, they might post nothing or very little to the forum. As it becomes increasingly more difficult to contribute, they might fade into oblivion (especially on big courses, self-study courses, or courses where participation is not part of assessment). In such a situation in order defend themselves and to pre-empt any imagined rejection they might project feelings of dislike, or even hostility onto their actually neutral coursemates. By doing so they exclude themselves from the group, in extreme cases spiraling downwards to depression.
Online experiences can shape the way we perceive ourselves, can’t they? An example (although this is personal it’s just an observation, I was just analyzing my thoughts and feelings): I posted my introduction to the forum, nothing fancy but that’s me (or how I see myself), no frills, straightforward. No response from anybody and a thought creeps into my mind: quite pejorative self-assessment fed by feelings of hurt, exaggerated by other circumstances having nothing to do with the course. A moment of reflection and I slowly regain the grasp of the reality (accompanied, however, by a shrug of shoulders). Then somebody replied, so far it seems the only fellow student I established some communication with. I don’t feel part of the group … Self-exclusion but I’m ok with it. How many students do a similar thing, how many students do it and are ok? How many do it and suffer in silence? And what should a tutor do? Fish them out and save (but the course is not a psychotherapy session), reason with them (it’s good for their learning to participate and it strengthens the fabric of the course and network) or maybe leave them in peace (they are adults after all and so should know themselves what’s best, they are responsible for their actions).
I have tried to put some sense into understanding where the discussion of ‘digital natives’ vs. ‘digital immigrants’ stems from. And I don’t mean the basic definition that the former – in the most simplistic terms – are those growing up surrounded by technology and the internet.
What I mean is more concerned with why the notion was coined in the first place. I seem to have found part of the answer in Dworschak’s article.
“The example of the dot shows how normal the Internet has become, and debunks the idea that it is a special world in which special things happen. Media are used by the masses if they have some relevance to everyday life, (…) and they are used for aims that people already had anyway.”
This could suggest that before advanced information and communication technology permanently present in our lives became the omnipresent reality, such notion was revered and dreamt of by the biggest brains on the planet. It was the time when possible uses of the internet and likely improvements to every man’s life where almost limitless. It would seem that all too often, however, people tend to treat the internet simply as a different (more convenient, perhaps) way of performing the tasks they would do otherwise offline.
All in all, the term ‘digital natives’ seems valid and worthy of in-depth research during the current transition period. The transition being from no or little technology present in our lives to the stage where technology permeates our lives to the extent when it is hard to imagine living without it, or when lives start to depend on it.
(I wonder what term in the future the then-ubiquitous digital natives will give to the technologically impaired oldies’ minorities…)
The digital natives of the future such as the 20-month old Clementine:
“the thing about the online discussion is freedom of speech and everyone has the right to have their own opinion(…)”
Meeh, freedom of speech in this case has nothing to do with what’s happened here. Especially mentioning the fact of an ‘online discussion’ doesn’t change the simple fact of absolutely uncalled for verbal aggression on the Flamer’s part.
Surely, we get used to the idea of hiding behind a safe veil of the internet and our physical remoteness from the first time we use the web to chat, IM, give opinions, criticize. We are seduced to think we are invincible every time we vent our anger at someone we only acknowledge as a virtual, not physical being. Just like in a game.
It is sometimes easy to forget that the person sitting on the other side of the screen is exactly like me, with feelings and aspirations, etc.
I am thinking of an allusion to a game, more than that, I am thinking specifically of the latest GTA games or any of the Sims game. You meet other virtual beings and play by imitating real life to a certain extent. But you come to a point when you want to try something you’d never try in your life: set new boundaries, break the game’s laws, drive on the wrong side of the road, abuse a pedestrian, not feed your dog, etc. And when you are tired you switch off the game or restart it.
Adding to certain valid points on the discussion board, I am also thinking that Louise’s (the tutor’s) reaction was really over-the-top. Honestly, since she is well able to deal with exactly the same situation face-to-face, why now shouldn’t she just say calmly sth like “I’m sorry but this really is your task to find out. I can’t help you anymore.” Job done. bob's your uncle. No hard feelings.
Leaving the tutor's reaction aside, the likely truth is that once such ‘advice’ is given to a student, such ‘invitations’ for help will never cease...
