Literacy Different for Children in Virtual Environments
Looking at technology and information systems from a humanities perspective
"Angie" (a pseudonym), the seven-year-old collaborator on Ph.D. candidate Eric Meyers' research project, is like most seven year olds. She likes to read books, watch movies, and play with her dog, Isaac. She has frequent play dates with her friend, Victoria. But because her friend lives in Florida, the play dates are virtual—the two girls meet in Club Penguin, a shared virtual environment online. Club Penguin is similar to immersive online spaces like Second Life or massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, but designed expressly for children as young as five years old.
Meyers is working with his collaborator to explore the ways informal virtual environments like Club Penguin influence the ways children ages 5 - 11 seek, use and even create information resources. This investigation, Meyers hopes, will help him get at what literacy, in the broadest sense of that word, means for children in shared virtual environments, and how this might help us understand what literacy means in the 21st century. This work led to Meyers being named one of the first cohort of Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) Scholars, a group of close to 50 students in institutions of higher education across the country, including six students from the University of Washington.
“The Simpson Center [for the Humanities, at the University of Washington] contacted me in June and said they were nominating me,” says Meyers. HASTAC combines the resources of universities around the nation to examine the ways humanities scholars function in a digital world. “It’s looking at technology and information systems from a humanities perspective, drawing on humanities methodologies, including ethnography, critical perspectives, historical approaches or even natural science based methodologies like experimental design.”
“What brought my work to the attention of the Simpson Center was looking at virtual spaces [like Club Penguin, Woogi World, WebKinz and HandiLand] in terms of literacy. These are more than just games—they are a way of interacting with people socially. Interacting in these spaces seems to be a new form of literacy. A broad understanding of literacy looks at the ability to solve information problems that might arise in any context, not just the decoding of printed text .
“Once I started playing in these worlds I realized what kind of problem space it is. There are so many things to explore here, in terms of children’s development, how they become literate, and how they see themselves as literate in an information age.”
“More and more of these spaces are coming under development, often as a marketing tool, but nonprofits and other groups are developing these shared virtual worlds as learning spaces, with a focus on how to create productive citizens through interaction in these virtual spaces.” Some older children are also using virtual spaces as a production space, using their avatars to act out stories, create music videos, and develop machinima, a category of video that uses the production tools available in video games, including camera angles, backgrounds and game characters.
“I am intrigued by the for-profit and nonprofit aspects,” said Meyers.
“These spaces have not been researched yet. Institutions like schools and adult service providers like librarians and parents are worried about their children’s access to these spaces.”
HASTAC supports Meyers as he conducts his research. "HASTAC has brought together people from many different departments," he says. "At the UW, that includes students in the English, Technical Communication, Geography and History departments. As a result of interacting with these students, I have gained ideas about how to push the work forward. I have been able to interact with them on what it means to be a digital native, and how we use mobile technologies to enable identity.” This type of interaction is supported in various ways by HASTAC, including a Web site with support for blogging and vlogging tools, and discussion forums that allow HASTAC scholars to explore specific issues in depth.
“This is just the beginning. It’s valuable to be engaged with a community of scholars all looking at issues like literacy, identity, and others using different lenses and perspectives to examine them.”
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