Concepción Sánchez Blanco

Book Review: Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments, Languages and Education in Africa: A Comparative and Transdisciplinary Analysis, Shades of Globalization in Three Early Childhood Settings: Views from India, South Africa, and Canada

What do identity, persona and avatar mean in the context of learning environments? What does it mean to teach and learn within social virtual environments? These are the questions that frame Sharon Tettegah & Cynthia Calongne’s book Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments. In an increasingly digital and mediatised world, these questions continue to be central, and the authors of the essays and research pieces in this short volume address these questions in a variety of ways. There are other questions, though, that are overtly and tacitly woven through this book, and these questions and the answers posed or left hanging were perhaps as interesting and indicative of the state of our knowledge in this area as the more explicitly framed content of the book. Consequently, this review is itself framed around these and other central questions that connect the material of the book to issues and ideas which others might seek to explore, especially as these issues address the way that power, as manifested through identity, context and interaction, plays a role in the virtual lives of teachers and learners. It is perhaps because we have so many unanswered questions when it comes to the learning that takes place in virtual environments, that many of the chapters of this book offer contextual definitions and descriptions of what is meant when we talk about the ‘virtual’ in general, or in specific spaces such as Second Life. Kein (chapter 2) defines virtual environments; Perez and Calongne (chapters 5 and 9, respectively) define and describe multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs); while Whang, Taylor & Cash (chapter 4), Teoh (chapter 7) and Bell (chapter 10) each provide contextual descriptions of Second Life. Given multiple descriptions of Second Life, what emerges throughout Tettegah & Calongne’s book is an anthropological snapshot of the ways in which the authors of this book (teachers, scholars, librarians and researchers) are themselves coming to understand the significant aspects of virtual worlds. This understanding is heavily oriented towards the ways that participation in virtual environments shapes identity. In framing the concept of identity, emphasis is placed on the ‘fragmented’ and ‘reconstructed’ nature of identity in a world increasingly defined by virtual interactions (p. 33). Whang, Taylor & Cash, discuss, for example, how crossing ‘the racial line’ can be accomplished ‘with just a few mouse clicks’, while Kein poses a series of questions that complicate assumptions about straightforward links between new avatars and new identities: