Research into Virtual Worlds in Higher Education: The Cloudscape

Cloudworks is a kind of social network for educators, which enables people to create 'cloudscapes' - that is collections of links to resources (clouds) about particular topics. Clouds can be added to cloudscapes by anyone with an account and an included discussion tool encourages conversation around the resources.

I've been collating research on using 3D Virtual Worlds in Higher Education, and used Cloudworks to both make the list available and enable others to add to it. If you are interested in using Virtual Worlds like Second Life for learning and teaching, this list might be useful to you or you might like to develop the resource further.

If you're not sure what we mean by 3D Virtual Worlds, have a look at the session notes for 'The World of Virtual Worlds' beginners guide session. This goes through definitions, examples, uses and contains lots and lots of links to resources.

Matching Learning Tasks with Learning Technologies

There are a wide range of tools and technologies available to support all types of Technology Enhanced Learning, but that range of tools can be overwhelming even to those teachers who are experienced users of technology.

There are some simple methods that Learning Technologists use to help teaching staff understand the potential uses of web based tools. Presenting categories of tools is useful. If you can look at technologies in terms of, for example, those designed for synchronous versus asynchronous uses, you can think more easily about which you will use for a certain purpose. If you can identify Twitter as a tool for public interaction rather than private you can think better about what information might it be appropriate to carry. If you categorise it as a Microblogging tool it allows you to then ask if other Microblogging tools might be more appropriate to use for your purpose.

Sarah Robbins-Bell showed a possible way to structure this way of looking at tools, based on work by Herring (2007 ), which in turn was based on work by Ranganathan (1933). She used Faceted Classification to look at dozens of tools that were identified as Virtual Worlds [presentation slides], and saw 10 facets emerge that would help users understand if each tool would match their learning tasks and objectives. They will only be of interest to those working with 3D Virtual Worlds, but are:

• Dominant content form - Either Text or Image or a Mix
• Dominant user to user communication form - Text / Voice / Mix
• Stigmergy - Stigmergic / Non-stigmergic / Conditional stigmergy
• Object ownership - Private / Public / Sharing
• User identity formation - Static / Conditional / Custom
• Access - Public / Fee / Limited
• User relationship with other users - Competitive / Conditional / Collaborative
• User relationship with environment - Competitive / Conditional / Collaborative
• Access to groups - Private / Public / None
• Number of groups - Many / One / None

If you look at pages 33 and 34 of her ReLIVE08 conference presentation slides, you can see that she uses the 10 facets to compare Second Life and World of Warcraft, making it easy to demonstrate that two very similar looking tools are different in many ways that might not be immediately obvious to someone who had not used them much.

This same process could be done for other categories of tool, like synchronous communication tools, collaborative document creation tools and content dissemination tools. This could be a useful resource in a conversation about which of these tools might fit the needs of a certain learning activity. The following table is a very brief example of one for online learning activities requiring synchronous communication.

Facet	Second Life	Blackboard Chat	Yahoo Messenger
Text or Image
Public or Private
Text or Voice

Of course exploring needs and requirements is a very subtle process, but this kind of thing could play a part in making it easier for everyone involved to understand the decision making process.

Another model for matching tasks with learning technologies was put forward by Bower (2008) in "Affordance Analysis - Matching Learning Tasks with Learning Technologies". In this article categories of affordances of learning technologies are put forward along with a methodology for practical application.

[image by Pink Sherbet Photography]


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Virtual Gaming Worlds and Learning

One of the interesting thing about looking at using games in education is learning from the game designers. They know how to keep a player motivated to play the game, and to keep learning the complex rules and possibilities. This is especially noticable in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft where players talk about playing the game for 2-3000 hours.

I have a couple of questions that I'd like to explore. Firstly is there anything that educators can learn from game designers relating to motivation and learning, to feed into designing learning experiences? And secondly how can games (either out of the box, specifically created or altered for purpose) be used as a valuable part of a course or module?

To begin thinking about the first question, have a look at Jane McGonigal's talk at the Web 2.0 Summit from 2007. She talks about how, compared to games, reality is 'broken' and she asks how we can make reality work more like games. Games come with a clear goal and clear pathways to achieving that goal, and they give you good feedback on your actions. Most importantly though, games are designed to make you happy. Some attempts to capture these ideas for non-traditional gaming uses are Chore Wars (join my party!), Seriosity (to help an organisation deal with too much email), The Nethernet, and Cruel 2 B Kind.

To help start answering the second question we could listen to David Gibson at the recent Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference in which he talked about putting together a synthesis of ideas to help plan, implement and assess serious games. He tries to combine ideas from Prenky (2001) [EHU Library E-book Link - see page 52 for the list that is mentioned in the talk] about how the new 'Games Generation' thinks differently, with appropriate learning theory, an activity theory framework and Mislevy's assessment model.

If you want to explore these things further you might also want to look at:

• "Collaborative Virtual Gaming Worlds in Higher Education" article in September 2008's ALT-J (16.3) by Whitton and Hollins.
  
• 10 day free trial of World of Warcraft as an introduction to the genre.
• James Paul Gee's work, for example "Games, Learning, and 21st Century Survival Skills" in April 2009's Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (2.1).

[Image by mi2starsfan]


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Thoughts on the Future of Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds like Second Life offer certain possibilities for teaching and learning, however issues like hardware requirements currently act as barriers to a wide uptake. Hopefully these issues, won't be a barrier for much longer and the possibilities will both become greater and more widely explored.

This beautiful video by Bruce Branit imagines one way in which virtual worlds could look and change our lives in the future.


World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Daden aimed to ask questions such as "How important will Virtual Worlds become?" in their "far reaching and provocative" 2007 Virtual Worlds roadmap (PDF). This monograph looks forward 100 years, and during the next 10 years they are expecting a massive increase in users and a move away from the model of isolated virtual worlds, running in seperate clients. In that timescale they also expect that virtual worlds may come to contain things like animation close to what we see in high end video games, better links with the real world (augmented reality), and automatic language translation.


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Monkeys, Birds and Spirits: Differences in How We Experience Second Life

Jeremy Kemp suggests that there could be a certain development in the way people use Second Life over time. From this it follows that we need to think about which of these groups our own uses might be in, so that we can design for them better.

His idea is that we start of as monkeys, liking a replication of the real world environment. We walk our avatar around the world, walking through doors and up stairs. He also uses the word verisimilitude, which is very impressive. It means that when you build for these users, you should replicate real life to make them feel comfortable.

We then tend to grow into birds. We fly to where we want to go, using atriums rather than stairs. We move and land with comfort and grace. This group of people require phantom barriers. If you use walls and ceilings they should allow you to pass through them, but really you probably just need some sort of landmark. It doesn't rain in Second Life.

Finally we become spirits, seperate in many ways from our avatar bodies. We teleport to where we want to go, even if it isn't far. Rather than move to see something we use the camera controls to change our view. He suggests that for these experienced users we design for an out-of-body experience. Lots of objects replicating the real world environment are just getting in the way of these users' experiences.

See the slide-show embedded below for his slides. The ones that I've been talking about here are 14, 15 and 16, but he has other interesting things worth thinking about.

SJSU SLIS Campus - Second Life Unifying Concepts

View more presentations from jeremykemp. (tags: second_life campus)

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