Role-playing Online

My Character
It is safe to say that I threw myself into my role as Kyle Krowten (network spelled backwards), a 17-year old digerati arguing against the notion that the web (as represented by google) is making us stupid.


I intended to create a persona that others would recognize as both young and a scholastic underachiever, which is why I used John Belushi with the "College" sweatshirt from Animal House as my avatar. I felt most of the audience would recognize him as a lazy, slovenly, trouble-maker without significant academic credentials.


On my profile page, I tied in references to Animal House with current teen behavior. For example, I uploaded Bluto in a toga as my supposed "senior picture" and talked about how I was defying my parents by being online. In my posting, I used teenager slang, mostly dude, bro; monikers for my elders that demonstrated a general lack of respect (i.e. teacher dude); and salty humor (i.e. students are from Mars teachers are from Uranus) to frame my character as immature.

Digital Native
Framing my character as a slacker gave me room to impress others by making some thoughtful points. I used the tension of teacher-student to advance the idea that Kyle Krowten is normal and the educational system is the outcast. I made vague references and included links to Marc Prensky's work on digital natives and digital immigrants. Most, however, I just tried to represent my interpretation of Prensky's thesis that Kyle (digital native) grew up with the Internet and web 2.0, but the teachers (digital immigrants) didn't. I wrote about how the teachers seemed to be from foriegners who did not speak our language.

I think my character's immaturity worked against me. I did not feel that others read or referenced Prensky or that I was able to overcome perceptions of Kyle as Bluto. The way the role-play unfolded also worked against me in that many more contrarians participated in the early role-play than allies. They also (justifiably) attacked my persona more than my specific ideas. This was fun but I may have intellectually stunted my own development in positioning my character as a slacker. I found myself actually revising or entirely erasing potential posts because the seemed to intellectual. That self-limiting behavior may not have been warranted.

Ethos
I think Google's CEO had tremendous ethos in the role play because of his persona's stature. I thought the wittiness of his posts also boosted his profile. Indiana Jones also had credibility because of his persona as a world-famous archeologist and because of how prolifically he posted! The rivalry between those two helped frame many of the threads that emerged. I appreciated early participants like Dr. Love and his IHOP anecdotes. This helped frame the conversation as visceral, practical, and observable and not solely academic. I thought that made the role play more fun. I was the first to post. I don't know how my initial post helped to frame the discussion, but I represented Kyle totally in character and used humor while trying to make the Prensky points noted above.

I think social standing contributed to power in the role play. While Kyle was very influential in the thread because he was recognizable and an easy lightening rod for criticism, I don't feel like a slacker student was powerful.

Learning Through Role Playing
I did not believe my character's position when I began the role play. I absolutely gained true appreciation for the digital native/digital immigrant schism in our education system as a result of my research and participation in the role play. I also came to believe the thesis not that google or the web is making us stupid but that these tools are making read and think less "deeply." Just trying to keep up with the feverish paste of posts and chats--even before the final day in which we were all "live"--made me skim more and do my thinking while writing, not while reading.

I think this latter point is vital to my understanding of the actual issue (is the web making us stupid) and how digital writing can be used in the writing and thinking process. It shows me that writing for the web is part of pre-writing, idea generation, and learning much more than it is about formal, polished, "finished" writing. I do not believe I would have come to this understanding without participation in this particular role play on this particular topic.

My conclusion that this specific role play was particularly formative to my beliefs about digital writing leads me to believe the potential value of role plays is tremendous in influencing students' understanding of a topic. Role-playing made the topic something I could experience and not just ponder or even think deeply about. What I should also mention is that the role play was one of the most exciting, exhilirating, and enjoyable learning experiences I can ever recall. I was not a digerati prior. I think I developed my fast-surfing skills more in that one week than I had since I first tried the Internet with Mosaic in a box in 1995.

It also scared me as I started to become a skimmer and a schemer. I became a little too goofy at the end of the role play, as many of us expressed in the chat that our brains were fried!

Business Writing Applications
A role play would be ideal for technology students studying to be IT professionals. They could role play service requests, including live chat as the non-techie with the broken computer and the computer technician. The former could try to befuddle the latter by being clueless, while the latter must try to keep his/her cool and avoid jargon.

For all programs at my college, I could see role playing for an entire class with the teacher as manager and students as employees. This is a fiction we already try to perpetrate. The online role play allows for more practice in the written language aspect of this fiction. Students at my college practice the role more in f-2-f contexts than in writing. And their writing tends to be in finite bursts (a particular assignment) and not sustained throughout a term (or even a longer project) as could be accomplished with role playing. The teacher and other students could also play a client/customer as in the computer scenario described above. This would also work for our Hospitality program, with hotel/travel customer, and in Graphic Design with customers who can provide digital critiques of the student designers.

One of the college's primary missions is to give students an understanding and appreciation for the world of work. Role playing online could further this goal tremendously. Students have to think about the role in order to portray themselves appropriately.