I’m quite glad that the voice chat was introduced after I had already experienced the forums, the blog and the text chat on Discord. I was already becoming more accustomed to interacting with fellow students and tutors in a virtual environment. Going into today’s chat, I felt a mixture of curiosity and nerves but mostly I was enthusiastic to discuss the work that we have all been doing.
The voice chat is, so far, my favourite means of interacting online. It felt so much more of a authentic human interaction. It was good to hear voices, share a joke without having to insert an emoji and to actually hear an “lol”. I am also more of a talker than a writer, so it felt less challenging in that respect.
In our chat group there were two tutors, Clara and Rory and five students. Clara introduced the space to us and prepared us for the inevitable awkward pauses and the subsequent flurry of two or more people talking at once. By pre-empting some potentially uncomfortable situations, I felt more at ease. The composition of the group worked well. The group was just big enough to support a variety of perspectives but not big enough for the less confident folk to “lurk” in the background.
One interesting dimension of the voice chat was my reaction to hearing all the international accents. I became quite curious about the individuals within the group. How their life experiences were different or similar to mine and how those experiences might inform their world view. This social curiosity did not surface in the forums or in the text chat. It was a really eye-opening experience from that perspective.
The notion of the disembodied student came up in week one as an unintended yet beneficial aspect of virtual environments. Students have more control over what they disclose about their identity in a virtual interaction. Differences in appearance or physical abilities which might dominate our perception of a person in a face to face situation would simply not be a factor in a virtual environment. Even though I could plainly see that benefit of interacting in a virtual environment, I was still struggling with the notion that virtual environments could enable, what I would define as, an authentic human interaction.¹
It is interesting to note that I enjoyed the voice chat and found it be a more authentic human interaction but it was also the first IDEL interaction I’d had where I was able to pick up contextual clues about my group. This observation led me to think about a possible relationship between experiencing the voice chat as a more authentic human experience and the availability of social clues and context through which I could place my group members in a framework of my pre-existing knowledge and experiences.
In trying to understand this experience, I came across this interesting article about the evolutionary origins of stereotyping:
Stereotyping is the process of predicting an individual’s traits on the basis of their belonging to a category. The term stereotyping is applied regardless of the accuracy of the belief, whether the belief is fixed or malleable, and whether it is widely held or a minority belief.
Humans use stereotyping as a means to navigate different cultural groups, the fact that humans form stereotypes about social groups so readily makes sense if we consider our evolution as a cultural species. Our willingness to interact across cultural group boundaries may be part of the reason that humans develop as many social group stereotypes as they do.
Whilst my Discord voice chat experience was still in the realm of virtual, it had much more social context that the text based interactions. This small amount of social context set my subconscious to work trying to make my social interactions more predictable; an exercise in social soothing. Perhaps the beliefs that I formed simply enabled me to feel more comfortable in the social interaction, and it was because of this that I found it more enjoyable and perhaps, paradoxically, more authentic. It seems somewhat pretentious to describe an experience as authentic when it is founded on a set of assumptions that could be inaccurate.
This led me to challenge my assumption that face to face human interactions are more authentic than those in virtual environments. Virtual interactions may actually save us from our stereotypes and offer a way for us to form more accurate beliefs about our fellow humans and thus more authentic connections.
¹ My interpretation of authentic human interaction would be an interaction between people that results in a connection between those people. There is mutual respect for both our shared humanity and our distinct individuality. I realise I have bitten off my than I can chew with this definition, so this is my gut talking.
I think most students prefer the voice chat – finding it more immediate and a greater sense of student and teacher presence. You rightly highlight the issue of identity play that occurs more easily in online environments given the degree of control the participant can exert over what about their identities is made visible or invisible. Of course, you’re assuming that everyone’s accents were genuine and/ or that it was the actual students who were participating in the voice chat (this can really mess with your minds).
The point about stereotyping is similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0141014598) on the evolutionary basis on instinctual decision-making. But if snap decision-making or stereotyping are ‘naturally’ human then does technology mediation to remove or suppress them then make for in-authentic experiences?
As we’re at about the half way stage of the course, we’re reviewing everyone’s blogs against the assessment criteria in the course handbook. Your posts are demonstrating an effective and critical engagement with the ideas and concepts of the course. Your writing style conveys a strong sense of ownership of the blog. In terms of further development of your blog, I’d mainly suggest keep developing the blog as your are and continue to develop your critical writing along with further refections on the implications of ideas explored in the blog fo your own professional practices. Also, you should consider how to make use of multi-modal resources such as images, audio and video in your posts to illustrate and emphasise the points you are seeking to make. The frequency of posts is about right given their reflective nature. You might want to consider addition short posts to capture particular ideas or questions during each week along wit the more substantive posts.
I’m finding a lot of value in your posts and am enjoying reading them and so I’m looking forward to seeing how your blog develops over the remainder of the course. Please just let me know if you have any questions on this review.
“But if snap decision-making or stereotyping are ‘naturally’ human then does technology mediation to remove or suppress them then make for in-authentic experiences?” Very interesting point. Gosh at the risk of sounding transhumanist, perhaps by suppressing our human instinct to stereotype, technology can help us “transcend” this evolutionary, and often problematic instinct. Making for interactions that are based more in “reality” than our “perception of reality”.
Thank you so much for the encouraging feedback. Like I said in the comment on my previous post, I realise I have a long way to go with my critical thinking but that fact that I can actually identify that, is bolstering my confidence in my progress.
I have not really written about the connections between what I am learning and my professional practice. I am a primary school teacher and I think the Minecraft module will be the perfect opportunity to start. I will make a effort to do more of that. I will also attempt to utilise other forms of media.
Good point on a transhumanist perspective!
Yep, Minecraft is certainly being used a lot in primary & secondary schools. I’m also aware that Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/educators) is used as a means of introducing younger pupils to computational thinking and coding (this is a priority for both UK and Scottish governments). I’ll look forward to reading more of your impressions of Minecraft.