Learning and Research in Virtual Worlds

Jeremy Hunsinger, Aleks Krotoski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415693479
• eBook ISBN: 9781135753115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Virtual worlds are places where humans interact, and as such they can be environments for research and learning. However, they are complex and mutable in ways that more controlled and traditional environments are not. Although computer-mediated, virtual worlds are multifaceted social systems like the offline world, and choosing to study virtual world phenomena demands as much consideration for the participants, the environment and the researcher as offline.

By exploring virtual worlds as places of research and learning, the international practitioners in this book demonstrate the power of these worlds to replicate and extend our arenas of research and learning. They focus on process and outcomes and consider questions that arise from engaging in teaching and research in these spaces, including new approaches to research ethics, internationalization, localization, and collaboration in virtual worlds.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Learning, Media & Technology.

Learning and researching in virtual worlds

Jeremy Hunsinger and Aleks Krotoski

The development process behind this book began as a special issue for the journal Learning, Media, & Technology half a decade ago. Aleks Krotoski and Jeremy Hunsinger were both PhD students at the time, in two different countries, both using Linden Labs' Second Life as a field of study. However, the pair quickly realised that they approached it in very different ways and with very different objectives: Aleks was tracking the flows of social influence through its online friendship networks, while Jeremy was investigating the politics of knowledge of the internet. Despite the differences in their lines of enquiry, through occasional encounters in person and online, they discovered several unanticipated crossovers between their work that stretched beyond the environment in which they set their academic activity. They realised that this digital community – and similar others – offered different things to different scholars, but there were commonalities they observed across both the learning and research fields that would be useful for people also exploring these spaces for fieldwork. Combining their common interests, they decided to bring together the growing body of practitioners who were flocking to this and other online environments in virtual and meatspace forums.

To explore the possibilities devised by this contemporary research community, Jeremy and Aleks created the Learning and Research in Second Life workshop series, supported by Linden Lab and held at Internet Research 8.0: Let's Play in Vancouver, Canada. John Lester, the Linden Lab Education liaison known within Second Life as Pathfinder Linden, supported the workshop in person by giving the keynote for the workshops. The series continues today, adapting to new technological functionalities and interests built upon the current literature, and Jeremy and Aleks have been honoured to offer the organisation responsibilities to the next generation of scholars who bring new perspectives. They would like to thank the participants, organisers or producers who have contributed to the discourse over the years, and whose work has been published in this volume.

Introduction

Virtual worlds are persistent, shared, online computer-mediated spaces where people collaborate to perform a wide variety of tasks. The environments can be 2- or 3-dimensional and can adhere to a limitless number of fantasies depending on the (personal or commercial) interests of the designers. The worlds that they comprise can be enclosed within the computerised environment, or they can become embedded in our everyday lives.

Over the last half century, various forms of virtual reality have progressed from fiction to fact. Digital spaces have evolved from early complex systems, like the CAVE automatic virtual environment and flight simulators running on mainframes that filled a room, to today's online virtual worlds and MMORPGs that can be accessed from a wide range of fixed and handheld machines. These virtual spaces have migrated slowly from deeply computerised and technologised environments of the 1960s and 1970s and their cybernetic imaginations into the commonplaces of our ubiquitous communication societies. Now, we use virtual worlds through personal computer systems and mobile devices, they are embedded within and upon our non-virtual space and in augmented realities and cognitive extensions. As we have become more familiar with these digital milieu, it has become apparent that they are a reflection of everyday life: the passions of their users, their interests, their practices, their thoughts, and their hobbies. As we increasingly embrace virtual worlds as places of work and play, they become more interesting as sites of learning and research, and demand closer inspection.

The most similar work to virtual worlds analyses has come from the group of academics that studies online communities. This area has a rich history that stretches back to McKenna & Green's theoretical analysis of virtual group dynamics (McKenna & Green, 2002) and has a precedent in the post-modern theories of non-physical community dynamics developed by sociologists in the late 20th century (e.g., Goffman, 1959). Our understanding of this area and the overlaps with virtual worlds work continues to evolve as new technologies are developed that feature richer communication facilities, from text to audio to video. The compendium of research and learning papers included in this volume are therefore a snapshot of the opportunities offered by the current crop of high-tech networked solutions for online communities to interact in virtual worlds.

What have evolved are opportunities for practitioners and researchers to explore these spaces as fields of expression of our everyday lives. They have advanced our capacities to interact in mediated spaces and offer new pathways to elaborate on existing practices. In addition, the mainstream adoption of new communication media over the last century has boosted the variety of methods that practitioners can integrate into their classrooms and research designs – both new and established. The rapid dissemination of technologies, practices and methods affords possibilities for distance teaching and learning, new study techniques, and unimagined research questions. Similarly, the limitations of these technologies require that practitioners adapt their practices to their benefits as well as their shortcomings.

Histories of virtual worlds

Although the technologies that we use today are attuned to the spaces and systems of their users, these environments have been part of the online collaborative storytelling landscape for decades.

The histories of virtual worlds derive from digital games and technological systems, and represent national cultural history and contemporary imaginations and realities. Their content and design has been inspired by and designed from many disciplines, including literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy and folklore. Regardless of the technologies that have run them throughout the decades, the stories in environments – and those used to legitimate them – are stories of the economy, of our society and our humanity.

This collection takes as its starting point that the history of virtual worlds is one of the messy intermingling between humans and machines¹. It aims to emphasise that this history offers a scaffolding upon which we may build an understanding of how to learn from them, to learn in them, and to come to know the human condition more fully through them.

Over 300 English-speaking virtual worlds were recorded in 2009, and their prevalence in countries like China, South Korea and Japan indicates that the global number of virtual worlds is much higher. Their unique affordances offer opportunities that extend physical environments because they allow an immersive place in which to test impossibilities: within the virtual world, what can be real or treated as real is more than what is real in our physical worlds.

Additionally, teachers and researchers can trace the co-construction of realities amongst populations, allowing us to examine the development of shared histories that suffuse the learning and research agendas as they are imported into and emerge from the online space.

Researching virtual worlds

Although computer-mediated, virtual worlds are multifaceted social systems like the offline world, and choosing to study virtual world phenomena demands as much consideration for the participants, the environment and the researcher as any other research endeavor. Situating research in an online community demands reflexivity; as an immersive field of study, it demands more patience, self-awareness, and thoughtfulness toward research design than a lab-based experiment.

The mutability of the environment and the experiences within them – as close to or as far from reality as is possible within the constraints of the technology and the design – must to be taken into account when researching in virtual worlds. What appears at first to be a virtual world replica of an offline phenomenon may actually be subject to very different pressures and restrictions. Similarly, something that seems to be potentially very different from reality may be an extension of a commonly observed phenomenon in a different guise.

This raises the question of social and cultural understandings of research and the role of the contexts within our practice, and the relationship between researcher and researched. By placing our fieldwork in co-constructed, mediated environments, we must consider the modes of participation and engagement that are appropriate for this kind of space. It raises issues of the assumptions and research traditions at a deeper more reflexive level; the context may emerge as relevant or irrelevant in interesting and important ways.

As the chapters in this volume indicate, there is a thriving and considerate community of virtual world research keen to share best practice for methodologies through forums, seminars, focus groups and other events. There is less a hidden college and more an open and public collegium with which researchers can engage in order to conduct research in virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds as learning-centred environments

Virtual worlds are places where humans interact, and as such can be learning environments. However, as we have noted, they are complex and mutable in ways that more controlled and traditional environments are not. Thus we need to be more careful in our learning designs to account for these differences or perhaps to use the capacities of virtual worlds opportunistically. Four decades of eLearning practice and learning design research has demonstrated that simply reproducing experiences that exist in physical spaces can lower learning and research outcomes in comparison to designing specifically to take advantage of the affordances of the new environment.

Networked and non-networked computer systems have allowed practitioners to standardise learner-centred teaching practices in formal learning environments. They also create time and cost-saving simulations, and allow for nuanced and personalised opportunities negating any perceived loss of quality: extensive evidence suggests that using technology in courses either in a classroom or delivered at a distance has no significant difference in results than physical classroom environments (see htt­p:/­/no­sig­nif­ica­ntd­iff­ere­nce­.wc­et.­inf­o/i­nde­x.a­sp). In light of this, virtual worlds are having an impact on global educational policy, drawing attention to new possibilities for organising education outside formal environments of our current research and learning institutions.

Their interests likely stem from the pedagogical trends towards personalised learning strategies celebrated by education researchers. In particular, virtual worlds support socially-directed opportunities; and social learning in virtual worlds is almost unavoidable.

The genre of the software that has been most used by teachers and researchers as a field of study is the social virtual world, an environment that claims no overarching goal, as in game-based spaces, but provides a mediated environment simply as an articulated space for interpersonal interaction. The openness of the systems allows for the variety of objectives to be enacted in a way that doesn't conflict with a specific global aim. They provide natural arenas for group projects, shared exploration, shared knowledge building, dissemination, conversation and data collection. They often incorporate tools for building custom materials, which allows participants to engage with specified and controlled practical and experiential activities that fulfill the requirements of the learning and research programmes. Furthermore, there are unique opportunities for co-production of artifacts.

Global opportunities

Many virtual worlds have a global reach, providing access to not only materials for research and learning, but also active participants from different countries and cultures. The involvement of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural participants can transform research projects. Although challenges that are apparent offline still arise online – linguistic, cultural, pedagogical, theoretical – the simplicity that the integrated virtual world environment offers practitioners and researchers the opportunity to work together in an incredibly rich medium. The challenge of internal institutional barriers related to work-life, disciplinary efforts, and interdisciplinary research and learning has been well documented elsewhere as has the possibility of transdisciplinary solutions to some of the problems (Hunsinger 2005; Hunsinger 2008).

Some of the most fruitful collaborations in virtual worlds are those that work trans-disciplinarily. These collaborations bring many people together from a wide variety of fields to build and share ideas around the global problem they share. Two projects based in the virtual world Second Life that exemplify this are SciLands (see htt­p:/­/ww­w.s­cil­and­s.o­rg/) and Info Island (see htt­p:/­/in­foi­sla­nd.­org/). They represent large colla-borations all seeking to explore issues and problems that unite various disciplines in one virtual world. They move beyond disciplinary interests toward the larger issues involved.

Conclusion

Despite the opportunities that these spaces offer, rich virtual environments demand creativity and labour in order to be robust spaces for learning and research. It is a challenge to be reflexive about the frames through which both learners and researchers engage with the digital world and one another, with the contexts of the learning and/or play, and the degree to which it is possible to elicit meaning based on the artifacts designed for the learning or research objectives. The differences, affordances, and constraints of these spaces will be part of what explains our insights or learning.

Virtual worlds are an evolution of social, networked, persistent systems. The research and learning endeavors that practitioners pursue in these spaces should reflect the large body of literature that has led to this point, and continues apace. Research organisations and association like Digra (Digital Games Research Association) and AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) bring generations of researchers who work in virtual worlds and similar environments together to exchange knowledge and experience. Similarly, many conferences interested in pedagogy or internet research often have space for specialist groups interested in the web and virtual worlds. We encourage researchers to engage with the scholarship and research in the past and present when they engage with virtual worlds, as that will help to continue to develop and legitimise the fields of virtual worlds research and learning in virtual worlds.

This book draws together research papers from international practitioners who have identified alternative practices of learning and researching in virtual worlds. They deal with environments that break down borders of self-expression, creating spaces for play and expanding discourse in formal and informal settings. They focus on interactions that occu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Learning and researching in virtual worlds
• 2. Immersed in Learning: supporting creative practice in virtual worlds
• 3. Design of learning spaces in 3D virtual worlds: an empirical investigation of Second Life
• 4. Social virtual worlds for technology-enhanced learning on an augmented learning platform
• 5. How to enable knowledge exchange in Second Life in design education?
• 6. ‘Elven Elder LVL59 LFP/RB. Please PM me’: immersion, collaborative tasks and problem-solving in massively multiplayer online games
• 7. Serious playground: using Second Life to engage high school students in urban planning
• 8. The city at play: Second Life and the virtual urban planning studio
• 9. The potential for scientific collaboration in virtual ecosystems
• 10. On being bored and lost (in virtuality)
• Index