Learning the Virtual Life: Public Pedagogy in a Digital World

Digital culture has become an undeniably integral part of how we learn to read and engage with others and the world around us. Digital technologies have transformed cultural perceptions of learning and what it means to be literate, expanding the importance of experience alongside interpretation and reflection. Learning the Virtual Life offers ways to consider the local and global effects of digital media on educational environments, as well as the cultural transformations of how we now define learning and literacy.While some have welcomed the educational challenges of digital culture and emphasized its possibilities for individual emancipation and social transformation in the new information age, others accuse digital culture of absorbing its recipients in an all-pervasive virtual world. Unlike most accounts of the educational and cultural consequences of digital culture, Learning the Virtual Life engages both theory and forms of practice, presenting a neutral, advanced introduction to the key issues involved with the integration of digital culture and education.