Educating avatars: on virtual worlds and pedagogical intent

Virtual world technology is now being incorporated into various higher education programs, often with enthusiastic claims about the improvement of students' abilities to experience learning problems and tasks in computer-mediated virtual reality through the use of computer-generated personal agents or avatars. The interactivity of the avatars with each other is the central learning experience, but serious questions arise about the possible instability of the identity of the avatars and their dubious relations to the learners controlling them. Another problem is the questionable transference of experiential learning from the virtual world to the actual world. A final problem is the meaning of the possibility of avatars engaging in immoral activities. This paper reflects on these matters and attempts to relate the use of avatars to the five principal experiential learning paradigms: constructivism, psychoanalytic intervention, situative learning, critical emancipation, and complex co-emergence.