I'm not a teacher, but every once in a while I like to browse through Innovate, a journal about online education. Sometimes the pieces are dry, dry, dry. But this month, several articles have juice. Most interesting to me, given my Barbie musings, is an article about an educational experiment that took place two summers ago in There and Second Life -- two virtual worlds that give people the chance to be whoever they want to be. As part of a summer camp, a few lucky (and computer savvy) high school students were asked to assume different online identities and interact in multiple online games. For example, in one game, boys became girls and girls became boys. Post-game discussions, the authors wrote, were rich with talk of diversity, stereotypes and cultural expectations. As one of the students put it: "These games provide a risk-free environment for exploration and discovery."
The article, Leveraging Identity to Make Learning Fun, was written by Joey J. Lee, a PhD student at Penn State, and Christopher M. Hoadley, who runs Dolcelab, a learning/design/computer lab there. I want to visit.
Lee and Hoadley point out that similar themes come up in a 2001 article by Marina Umaschi Bers in the Journal of the Learning Sciences. I am glad for the pointer to Bers. And it's not just because she has worked under some big names in education -- like Seymour Papert, Mitch Resnick and Sherry Turkle. She also hails from Argentina and has worked on education projects in Thailand and Costa Rica. She is now an assistant professor at Tufts University, working on some projects related to early child development. I want to visit her too.
3:34:43 PM 
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