First Post!

Alright, to begin with, this is the first post in accordance with the class assignment. That assignment is to give a little bit about me. I'm afraid this is going to be a touch schizophrenic, but I'm a tad complex.

To begin with I am going to switch the order of the three questions. You see, the first two questions, about teaching, are colored by the third question, me.

This thing is that, while the monkey behind the keyboard is male, the avatar is female. Yes, that's right, I am a "male-to-female crossplayer." So if you find yourself looking at a diminutive oriental female avatar with a baritone voice with a southern accent, this explains the confusion.

Why is this important to know? Well, this gets into the questions asked. I am not currently an educator. However, it is my goal to complete a Ph.D. in communication and become a university professor. My subject of choice? How we communicate our identities, particularly in terms of sex and gender. (Beware, I'm a post-modern feminist! Know fear.) "Aoi" came about as the result of an off-handed comment by a female friend and colleague. After a small experiment I conducted a couple of years ago testing gendered communication (by having people crossplay to see if they were detected by my pet lab chimps) she suggested that it was my turn to try it.

Aoi is that attempt. I've found over the past year and a half that it has been a greatly educational experiment. I have, over that time, learned a bit about some of the pressures that females face in a male dominated world. Even though I do not actively hide the gender difference between the monkey and the digital, so few seem to investigate very closely that it has left me subject to some interesting situations that have given me a greater appreciation for the struggles women face. (Having strangers make suggestive comments, the online equivalent of a wolf whistle, has been quite discomforting.)

So what interests me in education? Exploring how we, in virtual worlds, can adopt new identities and learn from doing it. Whether it is race, sex, age, or one of hundreds of other identifying marks we can learn to walk in another's shoes here. We can learn how we communicate these roles. To me, virtual worlds can be a "game" that can teach us a more equal way to "play" at life.

So there we are. Me in a deceptive nutshell.