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Jun 14, 2010

Comments

1.

Thank you for the glass of cool lemonade. I started wearing out from the heat of the hype in 2007 and since have been looking at virtuality from under the shade of an old willow, a different vantage point than most of my colleagues in my field, education. My efforts are documented with this initiative, followed by this research which informed this initiative..

My work is situated in a professional discipline where thinking about applications and outcomes is revered more than theorizing. That’s what I think is missing from vw academic discourses, which I believe, here in the States, are by and large situated in the same kinds of praxis-based disciplines. The narrow focus on technologies (SL/WoW) represents a larger issue--a lack of historical perspective. There’s plenty of relevant research of virtuality (e.g. publicly open MOOs and MUDs and closed experimental systems and environments) that goes largely unreviewed.

So I believe there’s an emergent phenomenon in play, namely praxis infused with contemporary, praxis-oriented theories producing atheoretical and dubious praxis, which in turn informs the next turn on thinking. The field of education is riddled with psuedo-theories already, so there’s nothing new there. But because teaching and learning are human endeavors, and we’ve been studying humans in virtuality since they’ve existed, it seems to me, we should look back and broadly at virtuality as much as we look to its future.

And yes, yes...I’ve been backlashing “gaming is it” all along. I'm curious what Bloomfield’s thinking.

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