blogging about .edu stuff
Archive for Gender
July 22, 2007 at 11:07 am · Filed under Gender, gaming and narrative, second life
My starting point is the term Self only because right now it’s the word that comes to mind when I think about my avatars, Me-the person that’s writing this blog, and my experience of Me being in SL embodying my avatars. Using the concept of a Self helps me operationalize my thinking. It helps me analyze my experiences by constructing an artificial separation between mind and body. In practice, I don’t however experience or believe there’s a separation.
In “Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds” (The Social Life of Avatars, edited by Ralph Schroeder), the authors point out the importance of seeing embodiment as relevant to both virtual (digital) and physical (biological) experiences, in that we interact with both worlds through our bodies.
No matter what, I and others experience some embodied representation of Me and my Self. But what does that mean? What does it look like and how does it feel? How do my thinking and actions change as a result?
Layered onto of the idea of embodiment, are ideas about identity, role, gender, race, and physical appearance.
The verbs to practice and perform are useful for talking about embodiment. For example, gender is an abstraction until we practice or perform it. This is true in both worlds, however in SL it takes on much more complexity because we can change our avatar’s gender instantly. Both of my avatars have androgynous names so that gender is not inscribed on them via their names. I can then experiment with performing gender. It’s very interesting how gender has been designed into SL standard avatars. You see it when you play with your avatar’s appearance. In SL yesterday I met a female resident who commented that her breasts were way too big; she quickly qualified that by adding that her [avatar] shape must have been designed by a man. I met another resident whose human-looking avatar looked entirely different from other residents. Her hair was short, her body proportions and clothing were subtle yet distinct. She had a kind of aesthetic sophistication you rarely see in SL. It reminded me of a Parisian. I complimented her on her look and she told me that she had designed the entire avatar. She called them “Me’s.” “Me’s” she said are all unique. She was very proud of her designs and being able to craft individuals. She’s a graphic designer in first life.
How do these experiences map onto to first life and vice versa? How are first life gendered practices performed in SL? What can we say about embodiment in first life given the bodies of celebrities and those of our friends, family and neighbors? When I look at bodies in first life, I see poverty written onto the bodies laborers. I see the bodies of single working mothers as distinct from childless women. Wealthy retired executive bodies are distinct from those of retired middle managers. At the SDSU gym, I see masculinity performed in the weights room; on campus I see femininity practiced with long hair. There’s no escaping the fact lived experiences in the digital and biological worlds are always embodied experiences.
July 22, 2007 at 9:43 am · Filed under Gender, higher education, informal learning, second life
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
January 21, 2007 at 7:49 pm · Filed under Gender, TheWeb, education, educational technology, equity issues, trends
I was glad to participate in this conversation with others who question the whole digital natives/immigrants, net geners “movement.” Of course many are off to the ELI annual meeting where this movement seems to generate its ideas.
Being relatively new to academic discourse from the inside, I’m wondering if this is the way it goes. There’s popular culture that may or may not be grounded in rigorous investigation, but nobody seems to mind. We all jump on the bandwagon, cause it’s there, the D.J.’s good and the celebrities show up.
As was pointed out in this conversation, where’s the discussion of class, SES, ethnicity and I’ll add gender? It’s painfully obvious, (to me anyway) that this talk is coming from predominantly white male voices. The circling conversations as well. I think I might have posted this white paper before,
Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, which gets at the issue from a different angle, defining and categorizing via activities and use.
October 28, 2006 at 10:49 pm · Filed under Gender, Politics, trends, women
A sticky topic. Doubtless, I’m suspicious of the ideology behind the decision.
Read more
August 21, 2006 at 6:27 pm · Filed under Gender, gaming and narrative
BBC’s story quotes David Gardner of EA, the producer of Sims and many other games, which he says are played by 90% of boys and 40% of girls.
Something’s felt a little off with those generalized statistics about what young people are doing. What it signals to my mind is a real disconnect and cleft, not just in the gaming industry but in software and hardware industries too. There’s ample evidence suggesting that girls are “not welcome” in engineering and computer science cultures from the beginning–in school. Technology is gendered, historically and systemically.
