As a newcomer to higher education, to teaching and learning in this environment, I’m still working out my “What’s it all about Alfie” stuff, the questions that make you stop and think. There’s always a why question buried in my thinking.
So … what are we supposed to be teaching college students? I ask myself that in my own doctoral studies: What am I supposed to learn here, that I can’t learn somewhere else or in some other context?
It’s an important question and immediately relevant because we are asked to provide evidence and be accountable for what we are doing.
If we say we’re teaching students how to think, is that too broad or is it in fact what we want? We want biology majors to be able to think like and do like biologists.
But what about SL? In the Fall, we’ll be teaching students about Virtualities: Mapping Virtual Worlds onto the Real World. There is no one thinking framework to do that.

The one I’m going to use is the Avatar/embodied experience one.
I spent almost the entire day in SL yesterday, in one or the other of my 2 Avatars. The bulk was spent in my non-professional self. I haven’t quite thought this through, but for now, my thinking about it is in terms of having ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves. In the private one, my first life identity is deliberately ambiguous and opaque.
With my public self comes transparency. My profile links to this blog and pICT’s website. I interact with in world residents who I also know as out-of-world professionals. My SL name (Aurili Oh) is part of my email signature