Emotinal Literacy through Virtual Environments

For my new literacies project I chose to also do emotional literacy but I chose to explain it through virtual environments. To start emotional literacy has many key components including (from the definition I found) the understanding of our own emotions, empathy towards others and feeling remorseful for our mistakes towards others. These three things I have realized through the completing of this project that these three things are completely difficult for young students to understand. While I did not focus this, reading Jessica's new literacy project helped me to realize that.
While I have been on numerous virtual worlds such as Sims, Zwinky and some online video games I never thought about the components of emotional literacy while I was on these sites. Usually in online video games I get competitive and I am not normally as forceful with my competitiveness when I am next to an actually person not talking to them half way across the world. It was not until Jessica asked me how i was going to explain emotional literacy through virtual environments that I realized I had never thought about that before. I also thought that literacy was reading. While looking through Tompkins I realized that there is a lot more to literacy than just reading. Once I realized this the thought of explaining emotional literacy through virtual environments started becoming clear because I could focus on the emotions that people were portraying while they were talking. This project is what helped me realize that there are many different types of literacies and that they are in the natural and virtual worlds all around us.
While the site (Zwinky.com) i chose to use is not suitable for younger students or any students there are other sites that are available, which are safer. The reason I used Zwinky is because it is really easy to see the emotional literacy through the way people talk to one another. On educational sites it may not be as blatant. Using virtual environments in classrooms i think is a great idea. Students today are a lot more technologically advanced then we are because they grew up in a world were technology is all around them. This also caters to many different learning styles because it is hands on, you have to click where you want to walk and type what you want to saw, it is visual because you have to view the pictures of the places you want to visit and read the sentences that other people are writing. While all students may not like the reading aspect they can be allowed to play games if they read and write conversations. Even younger students, with an appropriate website can get the emotional literacy value out of virtual environments because they can learn many different ways and be rewarded by playing games or exploring on their own.
I would try to incorporate this in a classroom by setting up a private online world where only our class or school could get access to it and there could be games and educational conversations going on. In my opinion all students no matter the age can get literacy knowledge from virtual worlds.
That is what the new literacies project helped me to realize.