'With great power comes great responsibility'

I have made it my mission this week to decide on a thesis topic for my M.A., and although no progress can be noticed, I am thankful that it is still relatively the beginning of the week. Well, as I was pondering the effects of virtual worlds on language teaching and learning, I am reminded of a blog post by one of my fellow classmates who addressed the use of Facebook in the language classroom. Perhaps to more clearly illustrate where this introduction is supposed to take us, the following quote by Henry Brooks Adams will be more fitting:

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops".

I am convinced that Adams intended this quote to be inspiring and motivating for educators and amen to that, but as any story has at least two sides, I do too believe that this quote carries a word of caution as well. Perhaps eternity here does not affect the human race in totality, but an individual's future. Just bear with me a bit longer, my point will become clear in a few moments.

Part of the language classroom (even with a sole focus on reading and writing) entails that a facilitation of pragmatic competence should be present. Students need to know when to respond and in which manner, they have to be taught how to be sensitive for contextual cues and to keep to Grice's maxims for communicating. In other words, students need to know when to say what and how. This pragmatic competence is more effectively developed when students are engaged in real-life communication. This highlights one purpose of Skype, virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and social forums such as Facebook in the language classrooms.

My question then and the purpose of this post is, when is a student mature or old enough to take responsibility for their own interactions in for example a virtual world such as Second Life? For both Facebook and Second Life, the teacher has only limited control over with whom the students interact. And we should not be oblivious, we all know that bad elements (i.e. people) are out there (even if it is in a virtual world). I understand the importance of equipping students with all the skills that we can, to enable them to be innovative and critical thinkers, to be the best that they could be, but allow me for a moment to voice my concern.

What if I warn the students of all the possible dangers and pitfalls when communicating with people that you do not know, and a student visits these virtual worlds outside of the classroom, on his or her own time and gets mixed up with bad people. Is the teacher responsible for this? After all, it was the teacher that equipped the student with the know-how of navigating in the virtual world? I further realize that we cannot protect our students from the dangers and bad elements of the real world, but when are the students old enough to be exposed to for example virtual worlds?

I found an article on Edutopia about Second Life (SL) and its use in schools, and although in SL there is something called Teen Second Life (TSL), which according to the article, is a "smaller version of SL that's restricted to youths ages 13-17 (and to select adults, after a background check conducted by Linden Lab)". Second Life thus recognize that a virtual world can be a rich and positive learning environment, but at the same time realizes that bad elements (i.e. drug use, exploitation of youths, etc.) are also present in this environment.

I am not trying to be cynical about the uses of said environments in the language classroom, in actual fact, I cannot wait to implement them. My concern relates more to the emotional and intellectual maturity required to effectively use and at the same time protect the students. Any thoughts? At what age would you introduce your students to virtual worlds and social forums?