Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

It can be easy to take for granted the non-verbal communications that are contained in the face and voice. After all, the way language is used reflects a hierarchy of communication:
'Are you listening?'
'We're having a conversation.'
'I'll talk to him about it.'

These statements, on the surface level, seem to be referring to the spoken word, though if reflected upon we can see that they really have to do with attending to a range of sensory cues, including those that are non-verbal. We know this, but since it's often not explicit, it's easy to forget.

When we enter a virtual space of any sort, we change our medium of communication and very quickly realize that the types of nuanced messages we're used to conveying have to do with a lot more than words.

In the past, distance learning has come up against this barrier that seems to be inherent to online communication. Without seeing the learners and interacting with them on a face to face level, how can an educator know whether comprehension is happening? While many current trends in education would tout tests and other quantitative evaluation methods as a means to measure comprehension, any educator that works in a classroom knows the importance of being able to observe youth learning in real time in order to see if additional instruction or a change of approach is necessary.

A teen will rarely tell an educator that they're bored, frustrated or tired, but an effective educator can observe these states in their students. This observation and its resultant changes in approach are largely reliant on emotional cues inherant in body language, facial expression and tone of voice, and any medium for education is greatly bolstered when it allows for such cues to be conveyed.

An argument can be made that a space like Second Life has far greater potential than any other distance learning medium to convey emotional lattitude. Using mediums like live chat, message boards and email lists (the traditional spaces where online learning has taken place) this was about the farthest one could get:

: ) - Happy
: D - Really happy
: O - Surprised
: ( - Sad

Obviously the world of emoticons has far more variations and much depth and history, but ultimately it is a pretty limited bandwith for someone to work with.

In Second Life, having an avatar allows expression of emotion to happen on a different level. Below, my avatar makes some displays of virtual emotion:

However, while the above is definitely a step up from emoticons, it still in no way compares to this:

The emotions conveyed through emoticons and those expressed through an avatar are in fact limited in the same way: they're both completely intentional. The emoticon won't show up in the chat log if a person doesn't type it. The avatar has a default facial expression, and that won't change unless the person controlling it activates a preset gesture or facial expression, a skill set in itself which can be manipulated in various ways to send different messages other than what's actually being experienced by the person behind the keyboard.

In contrast, our everyday expression of emotion is both intentional and unintentional. Microexpressions, or involuntary and extremely short lived facial expressions, underscore any current mental state and can indicate the difference between sincerity or a lack thereof. The field of vocalics looks at how changes in tone, pitch, accent and volume all give off non-verbal cues that would would indicate things that would otherwise go unsaid. I could go on and on, but the point is that emotional states express themselves whether people like it or not, and being able to observe these expressions is to the benefit of any educator.

This is not the case in virtual worlds, and until the technology gets to a place where that's possible, educators working in these spaces need to think creatively about how to compensate for these limitations both through methods of communication and, more importantly, through what type of education they want to engage in in a space like this.

There are a number of strategies that an educator might use when engaging and communicating with learners in Second Life to address this issue. When possible, it is always to an educator's advantage to have an ongoing real life relationship with learners they're interacting with, as this gives them a greater sense of their personalities and might then shape the way they interact with them in the online environment.

This is not always possible, and certainly has not been the case with most of the teens we've dealt with in our online programs in Second Life here at Global Kids. In a situation where an educator never meets the learner 'face to face', it's important to leverage different mediums of communication to establish an amount of depth in the relationship as well as a better understanding of the learner. This might occur through phone or Voip (voice over internet protocol) conversation, in instant messages or email that occur outside the context of learning time and space, or during informal gatherings and play activities that Second Life is so well suited for.

The medium that is Second Life, like any other medium, shapes what and how we communicate. Therefore, it also shapes the ways that we educate, as education is at its core about effective transfer of ideas, values or skills through communication. If the world is going to start looking to this environment as one where real, substantive education can happen, it's important that those who work with it examine what it can and can not do in terms of communication. Continuing on this theme, the next post in this set will examine further the nature of Second Life and discuss which types of education might flourish or falter in a space like this given both its limitations and affordances as a communication tool.