One of the classic ways that researchers and managers of distance education in the last century framed learning at a distance was to characterize it as a form of “tele-communication” between “teachers” and “students” (Jonassen, Davidson, Collins, Campbell & Haag, 1995). The underlying premise—that distance education could or should be treated primarily an exchange of messages between “senders” and “receivers”—fails to address the experiential challenges and opportunities posed when teachers and learners use avatars to project their “tele-presences” in remote environments and virtual realities.
Background and Purpose
Virtual worlds, with their complex representations of places, things, cultures, and people, invite educators to position questions about communication within a larger matrix of existential issues. For example: How do or should we facilitate a sense of “being there” and “being there with others” in ways that are authentic and broadly supportive of diverse modalities of teaching and learning?
Without some limits, a single book chapter such as this would drown in such issues, which are fundamental to major branches of philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Nevertheless, questions about “being there” form an invisible foundation for this chapter’s purpose, which is to examine the role of avatar teaching acts and learning acts and the ways these acts might influence the degree to which avatars are perceived as “real,” “authentic,” or “empathetic.”
This chapter explores questions about the potential value of social presence projected by teachers and learners through avatars situated in virtual worlds (VW). We begin with a brief orientation to characteristics of avatars, using Second Life® (www.secondlife.com) to illustrate issues and examples. Then we examine varying conceptions of social presence and research on how it is influenced by teaching behaviors. Out of this comparison arises consideration of the way the constraints and enablers of media technology and media culture shape perceptions of the social presence and immediacy of avatar-based teaches and learners.
(Second Life® (SL) is the largest online virtual world by far and the one most populated by avatar-based educators, partly because it is an accessible, goal-free environment designed to support content creation, rather than implementation of game-based rules. However, SL’s parent company, Linden Lab, laid off 30% of its workforce in 2010 and prospects for its business model are uncertain (Clark, 2010).)