Identities in 'Non-places' : The Geosemiotics of Computer-mediated Learning Environments in Second Life

The diffusion of virtual computer-mediated settings and the development of Web 2.0 environments have enormously increased the importance of non-material places, that is to say virtual ‘non-spaces’ where social identities are constantly re-semiotized thanks to the multisemiotic potentialities afforded by the electronic settings. The case of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) is rather emblematic: it was created in June 2003 and “[a]t the beginning of September, 2008, just over 15 million accounts were registered, although there are no reliable figures for actual long term consistent usage” (Wikipedia, 2008; Rymaszewki et al., 2008). Among a variety of different ‘real-to-life’ environments, Second Life (from now on SL) offers a widespread choice of ‘education places’: from real institutions with a virtual ‘campus’ (see a list in SimTeach, 2008) to entirely virtual schools (see SimTeach, 2008 and Pepper, 2008). This study discusses some of the potentialities offered by virtual communities and their socio-cultural dynamics in SL learning environments. The analysis will try to complement theoretical frameworks derived from the fields of multimodal analysis and education: in particular, critical socio-semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Baldry and Thibault, 2006; Lassen et al. 2006; Caldas-Coulthard and Iedema, 2008) and socio-constructivist theories of learning related to computer-mediated communication (CMC) for educational purposes (Lamy and Hampel, 2007; Pritchard, 2007). One of the aims of the study is to identify a working procedure to investigate SL learning environments and explore its virtual and potential geosemiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003) in relation to e-user identities (institutional, learning and teaching) and corresponding virtual communities of practice (Wenger, 1998, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 1991). More specifically, the paper reports a case-study from our work-in-progress and presents a framework to analyse whether the geosemiotics of a virtual setting and its affordances promote the construal of places (or ‘non-places’ ) conducive to learning