Bump indicates two problems with online worlds in the institution.
- First, because of issues of security and privacy, institutions often remove (or request that instructors remove) the online content created in the teachers’ classrooms (113-4). After all, he asserts, “There is still no true digital equivalent of a library: electronic media can and often do vanish almost as soon as they appear, leaving no record, no archive of their existence…People vanish also. New faculty members who plunge wholeheartedly into the digital humanities, learning the old print ways behind, such as books and articles, may soon disappear themselves” (114).
- Second, there is an “increasing anti-verbal bias in designers and users of video games… The goal at times seems to be the death of words altogether, language replaced entirely by technological imagery” (114). There are few to no written instructions: “After all, the basic method of learning in the computer world seems to be trial and error, on your own. If you get effective help, it is usually someone showing you, by example. How to do a task, not putting the process into words” (115). Also, “this new ‘literacy’ increases impatience with the kind of time-consuming, careful, critical, ‘close’ reading and writing genres that are traditionally the capstones of the college experience and crucial to the advance of civilization” (116).
Bump explains that he uses SL because MMOGs like this “invite…members not just to write their own narratives, but to invite new hybrid genres by creating their own objects as well as their own avatars, thereby participating in the construction of a new virtual world”(117-8). The goal of the SL course is to help students to “read…the world as text” (118). As an added benefit, “teaching modes of communication that students have never ‘written in’ before requires them to rethink their basic literacies” (133). After laying out the goals of the course, Bump moves on to provide examples of student work within SL.
After the course, students indicated that “English and technology [can] clash…uncomfortably. The main themes were: technological hitches, lack of technological support,…tensions between the need for coverage of curriculum content against time taken up by technology, as well as the time taken by pupils in their exploratory and often time-consuming uses of technology” (131). Additionally, “students still did not accept the premise that ‘writing,’ meaning writing like that assigned in high school, includes visual as well as verbal rhetoric” (132). Given this, Bump writes, “perhaps we should begin with the assumption that many students will not already see that verbal rhetoric is, to some extent, also visual rhetoric. We will have to make more time in our schedules to practice both thinking in general and transcending this dichotomy in particular” (134).
He concludes with the following:
[M]ore research on hybrid genres that appear when students write in the games themselves would be valuable, especially
to explore the possibility of a new multimodal rhetoric in which abstractions and examples are more fully integrated. For
this new research on writing and building in a virtual world, my specific recommendations are: (1) choose a virtual world
more user-friendly and easier to use than the original SL; (2) understand the differences between gamers and the general
population; (3) know the difference between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of visual and verbal literacies; (4) know
the limits of discovery learning, especially concerning directions; [and] (5) ‘provide training, support, and clear directions’
for virtual world activities. (133)