Points of view: reflections on a virtual world in a classroom

Cathy BurnettGuy Merchant

Sheffield Hallam University

Defining the virtual

Hine (1998)‘not strictly the real thing’‘uncertainty of relation to time, location and

presence’

Miller & Slater (2000)‘the capacity of communicative technologies

to constitute rather than mediate realities’

Sakr (2008) ‘a negotiation between materiality and

information’

New media and ‘immediacy’

Bolter & Grusin (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media.

•trace a desire to ‘put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed’ (p.11)

•virtual objects are foregrounded and the medium, as well as the process of mediation, recede from our awareness

The logic of transparent immediacy

• the screen is essentially a surface for displaying the virtual world

• the viewer(s) actively create the virtual in a variety of overlapping spaces

• (new) media extend classroom spaces or overlay them with the virtual

Ongoing construction of on/offline space

Classroom-ness’ of making meaning across on/offline

Reflexive and recursive relationships between material and immaterial

Fluidity and hybridity of spaces produced

'hypercomplexity of space...embracing as it does individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements and flows and waves - some interpenetrating, others in conflict, and so on.' (Lefebvre, 1991: 88)

'scrumpled geographies' & 'the work that goes into mobilising and stabilising certain situations as contexts' (2009: 496, Edwards, Ivanic and Mannion)

places folded into places

different spaces for literacy latent within each space being produced

(Im)materialities (Burnett, Merchant, Pahl & Rowsell, forthcoming)

Chris Bailey, Karen Daniels, Jemma Monkhouse, Emma Griffin, Julie Rayner,

Roberta Taylor

Points of view: virtual worlds in classrooms

On screen...• Running alone• Temporary gangs

Off screen...• Running commentaries• Locating self• Greetings• Providing support

Laptops...• surface• proxy• boundary-maker

Mass radiation, Zombie Apocalypse or simply stuck in

the castle

Joe: World (s) of His Own

So what?

• multiple perspectives• ‘layered presence’ (Martin et al.,

forthcoming)• array of resources for meaning making• complex movement between different

spaces and materialities• blurring of the actual and the virtual

Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices (Law & Moll, 2002)

First the historic baroque insists on a strong phenomenological realness, a 'sensuous materiality'. Second, this materiality is not confined to, or locked within a simple individual but flows out in many directions, blurring the distinction between individual and environment. And third, there is also the baroque inventiveness, the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements, for instance as in baroque music. (Chunglin Kwa, 2002:26)

So what?

Disturbing the taken-for-granted……

-Focus of learning

-Role of teacher

-The lesson

References

Burnett, C., Merchant, G., Pahl, K. & Rowsell, J. (2014). The (im)materiality of literacy: the significance of subjectivity to new literacies research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35, 1.

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.