day 3 reading

Identity, Power, and Representation in Virtual Environments, Frank Vander Valk

This guy has got issues.  First of all he tries to hard to sound intelligent and academic in his paper.  He comes across as pretentious, paranoid, and he is on a social/political agenda. He bemoans the idea that virtual worlds reflect the real world.  He does not like the idea that people are adjusting their appearance and self in a virtual worlds where this virtual self meets a virtual other.  He does not like that there seems to be no power, promised by proponents, to liberate and enlighten young minds.  He seems to have a very left agenda that he would have imposed on students.  Here are some realities; people alter their appearances and personas in the real world, social norms are inherently negative, educators are dispensers and facilitators of knowledge and learning they are not dispensers social and political idealism, and virtual worlds are nothing new that's why people read books watch TV tell stories and just generally daydream.  What is enlightenment anyway, who is to say what an enlightened mind looks like?  If we liberate students then what do they become?   Do we want our students to be gender neutral vanilla weaklings that don't believe in anything.  You know that last time I read about a school like this guy wants being realized was in Nazi Germany, and under the Iron Curtain, both failed and no longer exist.