#H800 Virtual worlds and Identity

Second Life is one of the topics in week 25 of H800, with in particular a focus on how people engage with an 'online identity', given shape by their physical manifestation online, their avatar.

A key element in the discussion on virtual worlds is the concept of identity or, better, multiple identities.

The issue of multiple identities reminds me of the identification concept of Wenger (1998).  Wenger considers identity as a social construct, formed by our participation (and non-participation) in a wide range of communities and our influence in those communities (our ability to negotiate meaning, as he calls it).  In this regard, participation in Second Life adds another identity component.  We have one identity (the ‘self’) according to Wenger, but it is composed of a range of ‘identifications’ in communities.  This resonates with the following excerpts:

What is changing is not the self, but the ability we have to explore different manifestations of this self. ‘In conventional terms of reasoning, post-modern identity can be considered schizophrenic; however, it should not be looked upon as pathology but as a virtue’ (Adrian, 2008, p369 in Peachey, 2009, p.4).

The role of groups in shaping ‘real life’ identities is implicit, as is the multiplicity of ‘real life’ identity. What is interesting and new about virtual worlds is that they make this group-shaping explicit and multiplicity of identity actionable. (Adrian, 2008, p368 in Peachey, 2009, p.14).

Peachey (2009) describes how people construct their avatar very carefully, like spending a lot of time in choosing a name and physical appearance.  First impressions matter, also or even more so, in virtual realities.  For some identification with their avatar can become very strong and spill over to their real life identity, blurring boundaries between the two.  For example, people create Facebook profiles with their avatar name or adapt their hairstyle to match with their avatar’s looks (Peachey, 2009).  Experiences with an avatar may result in increased confidence in real life, or, conversely, may also result in real emotional pain.  A strong identification with one’s online identity makes me wondering about the person’s satisfaction with his/ her real world’s identity.

The notion of extending avatar identity into the real world inevitably raises the possibility of overidentification and withdrawal from essential realities (usually where contributing factors in the real world might predispose such withdrawal). (Peachey, 2009, p.13)

For some students balancing 'real life' and 'virtual' identities may create tensions, fearing that their online identity '[takes over' their real identity.

What comes through most strongly from the accounts … is that there is a tension in students’ narratives between the ideal of an embodied, authentic, anchoring self, the self that goes along to tutorial classes on Tuesday afternoon, and the possibility of other, deviant, less authentic selves which emerge online and which threaten the anchoring subject with the possibility of their autonomy (Bayne, 2005).

I found the discussion on people with disabilities interesting.  For this group of people a virtual world such as Second Life may provide them with an appearance that doesn’t generate the instinctive reaction of ‘patronising convention’.   However, some still choose an avatar with physical disabilities.  .

But what is the potential for education?  The author sees a lot of potential for collaborative learning.  I can see that you can re-create some of the visual clues that are absent in regular online interaction.  I can also imagine that community bonding could be stronger in a Second Life environment than in a regular forum or e-mail discussion.  On the other hand, it is another social network to engage in, another place to login and check updates.  I’m not sure whether the added value of Second Life weights up against this reluctance to engage in another network. 

Within H800 it could be an interesting experience to move some of the tutorials from Elluminate to Second Life.  A disadvantage in Elluminate is the lack of visual clues, which makes it difficult to engage in a muti-person informal discussion.  Second Life may provide a richer and more intuitive environment for discussions.  However, the considerable time investment to get started in Second Life would require using it at least a few weeks to make the effort worthwhile. 

#H800 Reification and Participation in Wenger’s Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice are a powerful and highly influential concept, developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and later refined by Wenger (1998) and Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002).  It is an abstract and challenging concept, but, once understood, it results in a better conceptual understanding of learning and design for learning.

Identity is a social construct, according to Wenger.  It is formed by participation (and non-participation) in a range of communities.  There can be communities at work, school, family or nation-wide.  Secondly, identity is determined by the way how we ‘negotiate meaning’ in those communities.  In other words, how we influence the activities in those communities.

Negotiability refers to the ability, facility and legitimacy to contribute to, take responsibility for and shape the meanings that matter within a social configuration.

Wenger identifies two ways of influencing within a community: participation and reification.  Participation is the direct interaction between members of a community.  Reification is the use of artefacts such as lesson plans, guidelines or a curriculum to impose or affect others’ behaviour.  In learning design an optimal combination of both ways is necessary to achieve the learning outcomes.

For example, in a workshop for teacher trainers a focus solely on participation may have the result that participants find it difficult to ‘transcend’ their practice, cross boundaries and develop new conceptual understanding.  Too much focus on the reification, for example by imposing a lesson plan - aspect may lead to alienation with participants, who feel that they don’t have any impact on the design process.  It lowers the status of the participants in the community and they will likely formally comply without creating any ownership.

#H800 Communities of Practice, Networked Individualism, Network dynamics and Mycorrizhal networks

Communities of Practice

The concept of Communities of Practice (COP) was introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991) to highlight and conceptualize forms of learning that focus on participation and are not limited to the individual level (don’t stop ‘at the skin of the individual’).  Legitimate peripheral practice is the conceptualization of the apprentice learning a craft with a master, thereby gradually developing mastery in the subject.  In this way he showed that learning was an inevitable aspect of all productive practices and not limited to a formal setting within schools or institutions.  The communities in the COP can be characterised as:

-       Clearly bounded structure, with rules for membership.

-          Single centre of supreme skill and mastery

-          A hierarchical structure where new members (apprentices) start at the ‘periphery’ and gradually move toward the centre of the community as they obtain mastery.  Also called a ‘centripetal’ structure.


Networks

However, recent work by Engeström (2007) challenges Wenger’s analysis by pointing out oppression by dominant figures in communities, and rebellion by apprentices. Therefore, learning is not smoothly and necessarily centripetal. Instead, the movement of learning is shaped by learning’s participants. Those at the hub of the learning experience would appear to exert the greatest influence.

Jones focuses on the successful application of network dynamics in other domains, such as transport and politics.  This enables applying mathematical network ‘laws’ on learning networks, such as power laws, clustering and the strength of weak ties.  Networks can be identified from the level of societies and institutions down to individuals and ideas.  Individuals can be nodes in a network, engaging in linking to other persons, agents and resources.  Or, nodes can be formed by ideas with associations between them forming the links of the network.  His ideas remind me of Connectivism - also discussed in an earlier blog post-, which claims to be a learning theory for the internet age, that also considers learning as building networks, not only of physical persons, agents of learning resources, but of associated ideas.


  

Engeström considers COP as a-historical structures, which means that they are not connected with the varying dominant organisational structures in a society.  According to Engeström, COP fit within a society dominated by craft and industrial production.  Craft is characterised by a master-apprentice relationship and industrial production is characterised by teams, small groups with well-defined membership, with members who have complementary competences and work together on certain task.  Gradually a ‘co-configuration’ model evolved in which companies became more susceptible for input from customers and other outside sources (co-creation of value as described by Prahalad and Rawasmamy, 2004).  Adler and Hecksher (2006, cited in Engeström, 2007) call the organisational structure for the post-industrial society a ‘collaborative community’

A collaborative community is different from a team in 4 aspects:

-          Boundaries become more fluid;

-          Very high level of division of labour and diversity of knowledge;

-          Authority based on knowledge and expertise instead of status;

-          Values are orienting and motivating elements for members of the community. The increased importance of motivation follows from looser membership rules.

Engeström points out that such a collaborative community is no longer a team, but a network.


Social production and the mycorrizhae analogy

For Engeström the organisational structure of the information society is social production. The flagship example of social production is the open source movement.  Thousands of developers and bug fixers work together in a loosely-structured network without a clear centre – although one could argue that one of the success factors of the Linux and Moodle open source networks is the role of their respective leaders -, but with a compelling common goal, called ‘runaway objects’.  Examples are global warming or a free operating system.

Engeström develops an analogy with a mycorrizhae system.  This is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and the roots or rhizoids of a plant.  The fungus delivers nutrients and water to the plant, which returns the favour by providing the fungus with energy-rich sugars.

The analogy plays as follows:

-          A underground network of roots with interspersed nodes resembles a loosely connected and expanding network of individuals, exchanging information and with multiple loyalties.

-          Visible fungi resemble the visible, erect, bounded and institutionalised structures that emerge from this network.  Engeström uses the term ‘wildfires’ to describe sudden bursts of activity – in the same of a different place - with long dormant periods in between.

-          There is no hierarchical structure in mycorrizhae as is the case in the root system of plants.

-          The mycorrizhae work in symbiosis with plants, as informal learning networks can work in symbiosis with formal structures.

-          The mycorrizhae is hard to kill, but also vulnerable due to the lack of clear leadership.

Networked individualism

The model is very suitable for a mobile generation of learners, who form temporary networks, dominated by weak bounds, very easily.  Castells (2008) calls this a ‘networked individualism’, claiming that not mobile, but individual is the defining property of the mobile generation, since people experience a much higher freedom.


Final remarks

These post-industrial organisation modes and the mycorrizhae analogy that describes it, seem fit to explain learning activity in a Web 2.0 environment.  Students are developing personal learning networks (PLE) as a complement to the institution’s system (VLE), in which they communicate not only with their peers, but with a wider network of friends, and possibly alumni, bloggers, staff and domain experts.  Twitter seems to me the ultimate tool to facilitate this kind of weak-tie dominated networks, much more than Facebook, which seems to have a more personal and bounded network structure  - An interesting analysis how Google + mixes weak-tie and strong-tie networks was made here by George Siemens.  Traditional classroom practice can be described as a community of practice, with a clear master (the teacher), a bounded membership structure (the classroom) and a clear, externally defined objective (the curriculum and assessment).  The current trends in (higher) education towards a more student-centred learning approach, with a higher responsibility for the student to create a learning network, more flexibility in courses and more fluid boundaries between formal and informal learning seem fit with a network approach and a mycorrizhae analogy.

Main references

Engeström, Y. (2007) ‘From communities of practice to mycorrhizae’ in Hughes, J., Jewson, N. and Unwin, L. (eds)Communities of Practice: Critical Perspectives, London, Routledge.

Jones, C. (2004a) ‘Networks and learning: communities, practices and the metaphor of networks’, Association for Learning Technology Journal, vol.12, no.1, pp.81–93

Castells, M. et al (2004) 'The Mobile Communication Society: A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology, A research report prepared for the International Workshop on Wireless Communication Policies and Prospects: A Global Perspective, held at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2004