I am developing an introductory Women’s Studies class to be held in the metaverse of Second Life. The primary focus of the class will be gender identity and gender expression. I chose SL as the platform for several reasons.

• First is the immersion component; students can experiment with gender expressions in a safe and secure environment.
• Second is what I call the mask or actor affect: if a student can pretend to be someone he or she is not, he or she might be more willing to express an unpopular opinion or position.
• Last, there is a very pragmatic reason for choosing an online environment: our university, like many others, has a lack of classroom space and a lack of funds to create more. Meeting in a virtual classroom helps alleviate the space crunch while providing a more personal interaction between student and teacher then many other online platforms, i.e. WebCT.

What are the positives and negatives of teaching in SL? I would like to discuss several issues which relate to teaching in SL:

• Are the benefits of immersing oneself in an alternative world offset by the isolation some critics fear increases in SL.?
• When teaching in SL, how do you get over the learning curve of using the platform?
• Is it ethical for students to perform a gender with which they do not normally identify or, in other words, pretend to be something they are not?
• Also, any other issues which pertain to teaching in Second Life.

Teaching at a small liberal arts college means that most of my digital humanities work focuses on the classroom. During the fall 2009 semester, both my Colonial Latin American History course and my Global History course built digital history exhibits using Omeka: Colonial Latin American Material Culture and Global History before 1000ce.  Both of these projects involved students curating a range of primary and secondary sources to build a larger historical argument.  During THATCamp, I’d like to share ideas about student learning through digital history projects.

I spent a few years as a graduate fellow in a Writing Across the Curriculum program, and in my current full-time position as an instructional technologist I continue to collaborate frequently with WAC. In the time I’ve spent in close contact with the WAC program, I’ve come to find great value in some of the principles that lie at its core:

1. The ability to write is of central importance to nearly all fields of study
2. The various kinds of writing that are valuable in different disciplines can only be taught by practitioners of those diciplines
3. There is a close connection between the way one writes and the way one thinks, such that explicit focus on writing techniques can result in increased academic clarity in general
4. These considerations demonstrate that the position of writing is too integral to academic study for the teaching of writing to be the responsibility of composition programs and English departments alone

WAC programs are then organized in such a way as to provide tangible support for the teaching of writing, in the form of lesson plans, faculty development, pedagogical resources, and so on. And WAC’s mission is explicitly pan-departmental: one of the central tenets of the WAC philosophy is that students will only really learn to write if writing is meaningfully integrated throughout the entire curriculum.

I want to take seriously the idea that the WAC point of view can and should be applied, more or less wholesale, to the teaching of digital literacy.

There are a lot of problems to be worked out. First, I’d like to explore the extent to which the argument behind WAC can be adapted for digital literacy. Different disciplines require different kinds of engagement with the written word; likewise, we should be prepared to enumerate the different ways that the disciplines will require digital fluency (ranging from software know-how to programming skills to content filtering to multimedia composition to comfort with networks). I’d also like to flesh out the kinds of concrete support systems that would be required to make a digital analog to WAC function, be it faculty development or technology-intensive sections or whatever. And there will be the problem of politics: how do you argue to reluctant faculty and administrators that digital literacy education is as important as writing education? Here too I hope that we can look to WAC for strategies.