Fun with the Teacher

In contrast to Melissa's resistance, another episode of play involved the time-honored game of "trick the teacher," with a virtual twist. Jeff Chandler and Pat Ballard had logged in from southeastern Indiana on the same machine; Pat had joked that "Ron"--a member of our class who had never joined a conference--was there, too. So Jeff was speaking as "Pat," but before I caught on, Jeff logged in on his own machine as "Jeff." Everyone else were more or less themselves, except Xiao, who usually logged in from California, but tonight had returned to Muncie but logged in first as "Woddy." I didn't catch on until late in the conversation that the "Pat" character was really two people, and that "Ron" was never present at all. The foreground conversation, meanwhile, was about Angie's hitting a deer with her car. So, with minimal manipulation, several students and one teaching assistant (Jeff White) had turned the situation into a role-playing game that the teacher was playing badly. I didn't mind because it served as an attractive way of bringing the group together; it did, however, raise the specter of purposeful false identity that could possibly undermine or at least disrupt fully-on-line distance education (another need for future investigation). This session, by the way, contained an almost archetypal passage of complaint, encapsulating almost everything that can and does interfere with non-traditional students' furthering their studies on-line. (The speaker is really Jeff Chandler--as I found out later.)