Yasmin Kafai, Participatory Competencies in Virtual Worlds: From Collaborative to Collective Agency
Filed at 10:00 am on November 27, 2007 in Civic Engagement • Leave a comment
An associate professor at UCLA and panelist at the recent public forum continues our discussion on learning in virtual worlds. She asks what new skills might be needed to learn how to successfully engage with the large collectives evident in virtual spaces.
One of the most unusual, and perhaps least understood, aspects of virtual worlds is having hundreds, thousands, if not millions, of kids come together in one virtual space such as Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel, or Whyville (ok, they are usually not all in one room but distributed across multiple rooms and spaces.) We have few, if any, comparable experiences with such large collectives because life in our immediate surroundings, be it at home, in schools or neighborhoods lets us encounter and interact with dozens, hundreds or occasionally thousands of people at most on a regular basis.
What does it mean when scale of our interactions change, as it does in virtual worlds? Does scale matter at all? What changes in our interactions? What do kids know already and what do they need to learn? The answers to these questions are obviously relevant from a developmental perspective as kids grow up and need to learn how to successfully engage with large collectives of others. I’m calling them collectives because these virtual worlds are not random assemblies but purposeful meetings - kids make intentional decisions to join these virtual worlds. Their reasons on why to join and spend time there may differ and change over time. From an educational perspective we don’t quite know what kids need to know in order to participate in these virtual worlds. In schools we focus mostly on children’s collaborative, and not collective agency. What I mean by collaborative agency is our focus on students learning how to work in small groups, if that happens at all in classroom. We have few examples where we engage students in collective activities. In fact, if a whole classroom is involved it’s mostly under the guidance of a teacher. The form of collective agency observed in virtual worlds is literally unseen in schools.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a five-part discussion in conjunction with our third Public Forum in Digital Media and Learning. See Connie Yowell’s index here.
Next: Jim Gee: The Repertoire of Human Identities and the Digital World > >
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