Teaching in the Digital Age

How does digital media, particularly games and virtual worlds like SL, impact the way(s) that we teach?

I'm investigating this question in this class, which I hope will become part of my dissertation in general. I'm interested in how teachers must respond to the learning that is going on outside the classroom, inside it. That is, do teachers need to understand that a different kind of learning goes on in (non) places like SL, so that they can effectively tap into them inside the classroom?

Danah Boyd, author of many (online) articles on Social Network Sites (SNSs), has argued that they do not belong in the classroom, since they are strictly social, though she also argues that they accomplish very important sociocultural work. But while I understand that most of the "work" that goes on is social, there's no reason that the social can't, or shouldn't, enter the classroom.

I'm not suggesting that Boyd is wrong here; I am just trying to use her ideas to explore how teaching with, and from, sites like Facebook, might change our students' attitudes about the ways they use the internet.

My question also stems from my reading of Ondrejka's claims about the educational potential of SL. While I agree with a lot of my classmates' posts about the problems of authorship, the apparent elision of issues like race, gender, access, and class, at the same time it does pose interesting ideas about how learning and teaching might change in response to the learning going on.

I am wondering if what Ondrejka says about the new forms of collaborative, "for fun" learning are really true. What kind of learning is it? Is it "real" learning (learning that is engaged, active, and has an impact on our lives), or is it learning confined to SL? Do people learn about others' race, class, gender, etc issues from interacting with them on SL? Or, is the learning task-based? There is nothing wrong with task-based learning, both inside or outside of the classroom, but I question whether Ondrejka's claims about long -term, collaborative learning really can/do apply. Does SL provide space for the interaction between critical, social learning (the type we try to engender in Comp courses, for example) and the learning to get a job done?

Obviously, these are reductive claims on my part, and they warrant some reconsideration later. But for now, I'm still puzzling out whether teaching should, or could, respond in kind to these claims. If we took these ideas into consideration, and incorporated them into our classrooms, how would it change the ways we think about the places where "learning" has taken place? Evaluation? Etc?