Educators and Multiple Avatars

It seems the new year has started us all thinking about who we are, both in first life and in Second Life. In the past few days there’s been a flurry of great posts on SLED about educators and their avatars.

• How many avatars do you have?
• Does your avatar look like you? Act like you?
• What role does an avatar play in imagination? learning? teaching persona?

What does an educator look like? Images courtesy of here, here, here, here, and here.
SLEDers have been asking and answering questions about how they choose to represent themselves in Second Life, not just as an educator, but as a person. I proposed that perhaps we’re looking at two camps of people (with lots of gray in between):

1. Extenders: those who use Second Life as a tool with which to extend their first life personality into another space and tool set. These folks will readily identify their avatar with their first life identity
2. Escapists: those who use Second Life as a space in which to reinvent themselves as something other than that which is commonly known of them. These folks will typically tell you that they keep FL and SL separate.

Nola objected a bit to the connotation of “escapist” and preferred “explorer” to describe SL users who use the space for entertainment, role playing etc, to explore other facets of themselves, the space, and the people in it. Rolig added ideas about a user’s level of immersion and suspension of belief and how those factor into one’s use of the space.

Other posters added information about why they use more than one avatar (one is official, one personal in most cases) and how a second avatar can be used to test permissions, access, or as a camera. Certainly the mechanics of SL often cause us to need a second avatar for building, money transactions, demonstration purposes etc but I’m going to step away from that and focus back on the idea of the educational avatar.

Anyone who teaches is no doubt aware that they have a “teaching persona”, a version of themselves that is most effective with students. Perhaps a K-12 teacher finds he/she has to be more parental or more regimented in the classroom. A young teacher might have to distance him/herself from students who might be in a similar generation. You get the idea.

The recent discussion about avatars on SLED reminds me of these personae. Are the avatars that much different than the personae in the classroom? Is an avatar a souped up persona with more possibilities? What can we learn about ourselves as educators when, as in SL, we’re given the opportunity to create a persona without limits?