Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds [1 ed.] 9789004372153, 9781848881891

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Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds

At the Interface Series Editors Dr Robert Fisher Dr Ken Monteith

Lisa Howard Dr Daniel Riha

Advisory Board James Arvanitakis Simon Bacon Katarzyna Bronk Jo Chipperfield Ann-Marie Cook Phil Fitzsimmons Peter Mario Kreuter

Mira Crouch Stephen Morris John Parry Karl Spracklen Peter Twohig S Ram Vemuri Kenneth Wilson

An At the Interface research and publications project. http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/ The Education Hub ‘Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds’

2013

Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds

Edited by

Mark Childs and Greg Withnail

Inter-Disciplinary Press Oxford, United Kingdom

© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2013 http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/id-press/

The Inter-Disciplinary Press is part of Inter-Disciplinary.Net – a global network for research and publishing. The Inter-Disciplinary Press aims to promote and encourage the kind of work which is collaborative, innovative, imaginative, and which provides an exemplar for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of Inter-Disciplinary Press.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Inter-Disciplinary Press, Priory House, 149B Wroslyn Road, Freeland, Oxfordshire. OX29 8HR, United Kingdom. +44 (0)1993 882087

ISBN: 978-1-84888-189-1 First published in the United Kingdom in Paperback format in 2013. First Edition.

Table of Contents Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds: Keeping it Real? Mark Childs Virtual Worlds Enhancing Student Learning in Higher Education Yvonne Masters and Sue Gregory

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Love It or Hate It: Students’ Responses to the Experience of Virtual Worlds Mark Childs and Anna Peachey

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Problem-Based Learning in Virtual Worlds: Two Case Studies in User Interface Design Spyros Vosinakis, Panayiotis Koutsabasis, Panagiotis Zaharias and Marios Belk

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Lok’tar Ogar! Leadership in the World of Warcraft Melissa Johnson Farrar

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Higher Education Professional Development on Virtual Worlds through Machinima of SLOODLE (Linking Moodle with Second Life) Sue Gregory

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The Courtship Hypothesis and Second Life: Explaining Sexual Behaviour in a Virtual World Paul Jerry

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Experience as an Essential Aspect of Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World Tomàš Bouda

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The Virtualopolis Archipelago: Creatively Interconnecting Work-Based Virtual Scenarios Karen Le Rossignol

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Virtual Hybridity: Multiracial Identity in Second Life Explored Dean Anthony Fabi Gui

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The Future of Virtual Worlds Mark Childs

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Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds: Keeping it Real? Mark Childs ***** 1. Introducing Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds Experiential learning is not a new concept; its roots can be found in the work of Dewey, Lewin and Piaget in the first half of the twentieth century. 1 Experiential learning is intended to educate by taking a cognitive approach. (i.e., Learning is viewed as a development of the student’s internal thought processes. This development requires learners to undertake tasks from which they directly gain new knowledge and understanding and synthesise this with their existing knowledge. 2) Experiential learning differs from many other cognitive approaches however, in that it places emphasis on the experience that the learner has as the initial trigger for learning, and the consequent formulation and integration of the new knowledge occurs through a process of reflecting on this experience. 3 Its advocates also perceive learning as a process, rather than at outcome. 4 A key point to consider when looking at virtual worlds is that experiential learning also involves interactions between the person and the environment. 5 A fuller explanation of Experiential Learning Theory is contained in Chapter Five: ‘Lok’tar Ogar! Leadership in the World of Warcraft’ by Melissa Johnson Farrar. Virtual worlds have a variety of descriptions; a synthesis of these varied definitions has been coined by Mark Bell as ‘A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.’ 6 The key words here are: x

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Synchronous: All users link to the virtual world simultaneously. Bell also uses this to include the concept of space, though this is not implicit in the word. Navigable space is a key feature of virtual worlds, in that it provides: an awareness of space, distance and co-existence of other participants found in real life spaces giving a sense of environment. The concepts of ‘near’ and ‘far’ are difficult to apply to something like CNN.com, but not Second Life. The greatest difference between these entities is that pages of a website, even when shared, do not constitute a navigable landscape ... 7 Persistent: The creations within it remain after the user has logged off, and are still there on his or her return – provided they have not been deliberately removed. In addition, as Paul Jerry describes in Chapter Seven, the persistence of the world also means that changes occur in the environment due to activities of

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people who are present while those logged off are absent. This, says Jerry, ‘lends a sense of living reality to the virtual space.’ Furthermore, identities within the world are maintained over time. Network of People: The majority of virtual worlds are social environments. Even those that focus on the gameplay, such as World of Warcraft are built on social connections. 8 Represented as Avatars: The word avatar is derived from the Sanskrit avatârah, a compound of ava, (‘down’), and tarati, (‘he crosses’). It means therefore ‘the crossing down’ and traditionally referred to the incarnation of a deity in the physical world. For our purposes, an avatar is the crossing down of the user from the physical world to the virtual. 9 However, the experience of many users, however, is not merely that they are represented in-world, but are actually embodied – their perception of self extends to include their avatar. In addition, not all participants in a virtual world are avatars. The word ‘avatar’ refers specifically to instances of human control. If the interaction within the environment is controlled by an autonomous computer program this is usually referred to as a bot 10, or occasionally ‘agent’ or NPC (non-player character) and may even be indistinguishable visually from avatars. Facilitated by Networked Computers: For Bell, the complexity afforded by placing a virtual world within a digital environment (as opposed to a pen-and-paper environment such as Dungeons and DragonsTM) is an essential element. Bell states that only networked computers have sufficient processing power, to enable sufficient size of world, and speed of response, to create a fullyimmersive environment.

Thompson offers an additional dimension to Bell’s definition, suggesting that virtual worlds also support an engagement of belief. 11 According to Towell and Towell, this engagement of belief is made possible by the use of space, and is so powerful it can even create this within a text-based environment, such as a MultiUser Dungeon. 12 For the purposes of this book we shall adopt the following modified version of Bell’s definition of virtual worlds: A synchronous and persistent network of people and computer programs (embodied as avatars and agents), facilitated by networked computers, which uses navigable space to engage the user’s belief.

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__________________________________________________________________ It has been argued that experiential learning is particularly well-supported by these virtual worlds because they promote this sense of participation and belief in the space, hence allowing the activities to convey a perception of direct experience. As Newman notes: Virtual environments capitalize on the biologically innate ability of humans to make sense of physical space and perceptual phenomena. There are complex relationships between the virtual environment’s affordances and other experiential factors such as the user’s individual characteristics, social experience, and interaction experience, and introducing narrative elements in virtual environments has been found to promote good interplay between user and environment. 13 The implication of this statement by Newman is that experiential learning is an ideal practice to employ within virtual worlds, since it makes best use of their unique affordances. 2. The Role of this Book This book is itself the product of experiential learning. Its origins are in the First Global Conference for Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds (hosted by Inter-Disciplinary.Net in Prague in March, 2011. At this conference thirty papers were presented by contributors from across the world. Chapters expanding upon nine of these papers form the core of this book. Each is informed and motivated by the discussions at the conference and in the network that grew from it. We hope this book will be a springboard for further debate and investigation. This book is edited by Mark Childs and Greg Withnail, two participants at that conference. The chapters are presented in no deliberate order; they all draw on, and articulate, various themes related to virtual worlds and experiential learning. In order to synthesise these chapters, and draw linkages between them, rather than simply summarise the chapters, the editors have expanded on themes that recur across the chapters. In this introductory chapter, Mark explores how these chapters articulate the debate about the degree to which virtual experiences and virtual identities can be considered real, and hence of value in learning. In the concluding chapter, Greg reviews what these chapters reveal about the changing role of technology in learning, the changes that are occurring within virtual worlds, and what these might mean for experiential learning in virtual worlds. 3. Reality: What a Concept! When preparing to edit a book, one essential step is to systematise the language being used, in order to provide some consistency across chapters. One area in which the editors agreed to disagree was in the use of the word ‘real’. For many

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__________________________________________________________________ researchers working in the field, to describe the offline world as ‘real’ is an anathema because this implies that in-world experiences have less value or are inauthentic. 14 In fact, the phrase ‘First Life’ is often used by residents of Second Life to describe the physical world, implying that both have validity, but simply exist in different spaces. However, ‘real’ is still used colloquially by the majority of people when discussing the physical world, and terms like ‘offline world’, ‘visceral world’, or ‘meatspace’ can seem contrived to many readers. The decision was made to defer to the individual authors and permit their preferred terms to be used, even though this led to some inconsistency. The question of whether the virtual world is real is more than one of semantics when experiential learning is discussed. The essence of experiential learning is the provision of an experience from which a student can learn. This means that if the authenticity, and ‘realness’ of that experience is limited, then the efficacy of the consequent learning may well be undermined. When a learning activity is purely one of acquiring knowledge or ideas, the ‘realness’ of the environment not necessarily important, but experiential learning, is demands interaction between learner and environment. Interaction between learner and environment can be achieved through different types of engagement (e.g., ‘augmentation’ and ‘immersion’.) 15 Augmentation uses virtual worlds as an extension of physical world interactions. Participants usually use their real names and conduct activities that are extensions of, or intrinsically linked, with physical world activities (e.g., conducting meetings or visualising information in 3-D.) For an augmentation activity, whether the virtual world seems real is irrelevant; the activity conducted in-world only has meaning in its input to physical world activities. For immersion, on the other hand, the activity within the virtual world can stand alone without reference to the physical world activity. Users often take on different identities when immersed in the virtual world. Although learning activities may draw on physical world elements, and be reflected upon outside the virtual world, participants are expected to immerse themselves within the space, and be detached from their physical world roles. How ‘real’ this seems to then becomes is variable. Michele Ryan and Mark Childs note that the very nature of the word ‘virtual’ denotes a space that is synthetic and only having the effect of being real; the term itself is an oxymoron. 16 She also observes that there are two predominant modes of accepting this ‘not-real’ reality: the ‘pseudo-realist’ and ‘synthetic sodalist’. 17 Pseudo-realists treat the virtual world as merely images on screen, with no emotional resonance or social purpose, and see their avatar as a mere mechanism with which to interact with the world. Synthetic sodalists, on the other hand, feel a real emotional connection to the relationships they form and the societies to which they belong. The persistent nature of the world allows relationships to endure and have their own reality, separate from (but sometimes as important as) those in the physical world.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. How the Chapters Approach the Question of the Real In their chapter ‘Virtual Worlds Enhancing Student Learning in Higher Education’, Yvonne Masters and Sue Gregory point out that the connection with the space manifests itself in different types of presence: teaching, social, and cognitive. Masters and Gregory note that students who experience these ‘have positive correlation with student satisfaction and collaborative learning’. It is the ability to support this experience of presence, Masters and Gregory contend, that allows virtual worlds to provide a richer and more engaging experience of online education that permitted by text-based learning-management systems prevalent in online education. As one of their students remarks: ‘Without thinking, [I] got up and moved to where you were all sitting. And then, I thought, that felt so real!’ This quotation encapsulates the idea that defines a virtual world for Bell, and makes it real for Towell and Towell: space. Masters and Gregory found that those students who participated in Second Life also attained higher grades, although note that this does not necessarily mean the virtual world helped; those students may have more motivated. However, the testimony of the students does indicate that the majority found Second Life rewarding because it connected them to each other in a way their learning management system could not. Their sense of presence made the environment and their experiences feel real. This led to a fulfilling educational experience, which (the students inferred) helped their grades. However, not all the students felt that the virtual world helped. One stated ‘It didn’t work for me – much preferred Blackboard or Facebook or wiki.’ Indeed, this reported lack of engagement is found in many examples of student feedback. An explanation is offered for this lack of engagement by Mark Childs and Anna Peachey in, ‘Love It or Hate It: Students’ Responses to the Experience of Virtual Worlds’. They observe that learners vary in their ability, or willingness, to engage their belief in the virtual world, and that this leads to dissatisfaction with the learning activity. Childs and Peachey catalogue the forms that resistance by students to virtual worlds take. This can be due to aesthetic, cultural, or moral positions, but Childs and Peachey also observe a category of students who accept the value of education based in virtual worlds, but still do not ‘get it’. Childs and Peachey’s conclusion is that there is a minority of students who are unable to make the transition necessary to experience their avatar as an extension of their self. Cathie Heeter calls their inability ‘diminished embodiment tendency’. 18 The implication of this is that, for some students, the virtual world can never take on any aspect of the real, and consequently their experiential learning will always be limited. Conversely, Spyros Vosinakis, Panayiotis Koutsabasis, Panagiotis Zaharias and Marios Belk, in, ‘Problem-Based Learning in Virtual Worlds: Two Case Studies in User Interface Design’, observed no such resistance to engaging in the virtual world activities from their students. Both of the cases presented by Vosinakis, et al.

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__________________________________________________________________ are examples of constructivist learning. Vosinakis, et al. contend that constructivist learning exploits the affordances of virtual worlds because it requires effective collaboration and interaction. They state that the features of virtual worlds that make them ‘ideal candidates as constructivist learning environments’ are the sense of presence (also discussed in Masters and Gregory), persistence, embodiment, and the real-time simulation and 3-D interaction capabilities of virtual worlds. All of these have been noted above, and Vosinakias, et al. present compelling evidence of their effectiveness in the learning activities they conduct with their students. Vosinakis, Koutsabasis, Zaharias and Belk also point out that virtual worlds offer another feature: ‘The expressiveness of animated interactive 3-D graphics [which] can be used to present abstract or complex concepts that are difficult to comprehend in a textual form’. They find that virtual worlds enable the use of visual metaphors which ‘help learners to interpret the environments or even construct their own interpretations and communicate them to their peers’. For Vosinakis and his co-authors, the realness of the environment helps their students collaborate, but it is these metaphorical elements made concrete (but which are still non-real) that provide much of the added-value in supporting learning that the physical world cannot provide. In, ‘Lok’tar Ogar! Leadership in the World of Warcraft’, Melissa Johnson Farrar examines an environment very different to Second Life, that of World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online roleplay game (MMORPG), which means that the motivation for the participant is very different from that of a student engaging in a learning activity. Nevertheless, the opportunities for learning are plentiful, and Johnson Farrar focuses on the ways in which World of Warcraft develops leadership skills. Johnson Farrar does not argue that World of Warcraft has a measure of reality for the participants, or that they see their characters as extensions of their selves. She does argue that the nature of their relationships, the structure of their groupings, and the form of their interactions are analogous to those in the physical world. This is true to the extent that Johnson Farrar finds Leadership-Member Exchange Theory applicable to an analysis of the performance of a guild in World of Warcraft. In other words, even if the world of World of Warcraft is not real, its guilds might as well be. Johnson Farrar also finds that experiential learning theory is applicable to the acquisition of leadership skills through guild participation. He further notes contexts in which this learning can be translated to the physical world. The implication of Johnson Farrar’s work is that, in addition to the factors suggested above by Vosinakis, et al., and Masters and Gregory (presence, embodiment, etc.), elements such as social structure and the intragroup interactions can independently have their own reality. At the core, again, it is the perceived authenticity of the factors for the people taking part that make learning effective – in this case the relationships that form part of their guild membership.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gregory, takes a specifically technical look at Sloodle and its application and is examined more closely in the concluding chapter. Like Childs and Peachey, Paul Jerry also finds that participants vary in their willingness, or ability, to engage with the virtual world. He discusses this in, ‘The Courtship Hypothesis and Second Life: Explaining Sexual Behaviour in a Virtual World’. Jerry identifies a tripartite model of the ‘embodiness’ of the participants: some identify completely with their avatar, some are always consciously aware of a splitting between the virtual and the physical parts of themselves (a state referred to as ‘metaxis’ 19), and some are totally disconnected from their avatar. However, Jerry also notes that the boundary between the physical and the virtual is inevitably blurred, and even the most embodied of participants can ‘both identify with and can be detached from their avatar and its relationships’. Jerry develops the concept of interpersonal space and identifies parallels between this idea and virtual worlds. Interpersonal space is a zone in which the projection of internal processes interacts with external reality. Virtual worlds also exist in this area between real and notreal; a participant can project their internal view of reality and have it acted upon by others. In this respect, virtual worlds can provide what Wenger calls a reification of this negotiation of internal and external, i.e., it gives these abstract ideas solidity or ‘thingness’, that others can observe and respond to. 20 Jerry recalls the observation of Vosinakis, et al. of their students’ use of visual metaphors for constructivist learning; it is precisely because virtual worlds exist between (or, perhaps more accurately, as a combination of) real and not-real that they have value as a tool for experiment and exploration. Like Johnson Farrar, Jerry explores the transference of behaviour across this boundary between the physical and the virtual. Whereas Johnson Farrar examines leadership, Jerry looks at sexuality. He argues that because bodiness is so ingrained that participants will tend to ‘bring the avatar into alignment with self-perception’ the perception of the avatar body as an extension of one’s own is normal. This means that, for some participants, the experience of sexuality within a virtual world is more than scatalogia, since they are not talking about sex but actually doing it. On the other, it means that abuses such as rape are possible, since the action does bring about feelings of trauma and violation. However, the blurred boundary between real and not-real means that courtship rituals can be disruptive to communication, in that the perception of the avatar as an extension of self by a participant can clash with the perception by others that the avatar is simply an image on the screen. This adds an extra level of complexity to the Ryan and Childs model described above. In some situations, it appears, people (mainly men, Jerry observes) want to have it both ways. One of Jerry’s conclusions is that because the behaviour in this transitional space can draw on both the real and non-real, and do so inconsistently, and hence disruptively, this has implications for educators. Jerry notes that one of the prerequisites for a feeling of immersion in the environment is being comfortable with it, and free from feelings that the medium is

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__________________________________________________________________ interfering. This is echoed in, ‘Experience as an Essential Aspect of Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World’, in which Tomàš Bouda states that agency – the student’s ability to operate the avatar – also results in a greater sense of self within the environment. Bouda identifies a range of ways of enhancing the learning experience, including structuring learning, providing proper training for new users, and protecting them against inappropriate behaviour. Training not only increases the sense of agency of the learner but helps the environment to feel more real because this reduces how noticeable the technology is that is being employed. Technology that is difficult to use requires the user to focus on it, rather than the task being conducted, or in the case of virtual worlds, the world itself. When using technology, e.g. how to operate the avatar, starts to become autonomic, then the technology begins to become invisible, and the operator feels a greater sense of connection with the avatar and also the world. It becomes more real. This importance of the technology becoming invisible in enhancing this experience of realness is explained by Murray and Sixsmith who state that ‘It is only with the transparency of visual, kinesthetic, aural, and other displays that a sense of virtual embodiment can be engendered’, through enough use technology becomes ‘not separate, but part of bodily experience’. 21 Hence, until the phase of becoming comfortable with the technology is passed, there is a barrier between the user and the direct experience of the world, meaning that the learner does not experience immediacy. 22 In addition to agency, Bouda also names exploration, experience, and connectedness as key aspects of experiential learning. He identifies a series of activities that can be conducted in virtual worlds that exploit their specific features. Bouda also makes the telling point that the additional effort involved in using virtual worlds means there is little point in using them for classroom activities that are no different from the physical world. It is necessary, he says, for educators to find the additional value in using a virtual world and exploit the environment to get it. The debate about the importance of the reality of the environment is revisited by Karen Le Rossignol. In ‘The Virtualopolis Archipelago: Creatively Interconnecting Work-Based Virtual Scenarios’, Le Rossignol recounts projects such as Virtualopolis, Bilby and Newlandia. These were used as a basis for problem-solving activities and also as bases for writing assignments. In each of these spaces, situations from the real world, such as a Pacific island with a water and ecotourism problem, or a socially disadvantaged suburb with a community health centre, are created. These are simulations, not replications (i.e., they employ only the relevant aspects of these places, and are not intended to be completely ‘real’). They have a ‘gaming or fantasy playfulness’ but the situations are real, as are the tasks which the learners are set. Underlying this, Le Rossignol points out, they provide ‘a sense of space, objects and rules’; their realness is integral to the manner in which they are constructed. However, Le Rossignol also notes a tension between two forms of grounding in reality that occur when matching experiential

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__________________________________________________________________ learning to virtual worlds. Experiential learning is, by its nature, non-linear; learners are not guided step-by-step through a problem, but must identify for themselves the relevant and non-relevant aspects of the task and make their own connections and reflect on these. Virtual worlds, too, are non-linear, in that they are open to exploration, with a multiplicity of pathways through them. However, as Le Rossignol notes: There is a danger in providing open-ended virtual simulations, as these can be frustrating in their exploratory methodology, without the strong links to learning aims and graduate attributes. Le Rossignol’s conclusion is that by linking not only the tasks, but also inworld navigation, to learning aims, and anchoring these to workplace realities, participants will have the grounding necessary to feel secure in their learning when moving from the physical to the virtual. In short, educators need to think about the correct way of ‘making it real’ since these can be in opposition. Finally, Dean Anthony Fabi Gui discusses another type of transitional space – that of post-colonial spaces and the cultural hybridity that occurs within them – in Chapter Ten: ‘Virtual Hybridity: Multiracial Identity in Second Life Explored’. As another transitional space, the virtual world could be a forum for an articulation of cultural hybridisation and mixed ethnicities, yet Gui finds no groups in Second Life that define themselves as multiracial (or rather of mixed human races – there are plenty of human/non-human mixtures.) This is partly because skins in Second Life are not labelled as multi-racial, although many can be interpreted as such, and the controls to alter the avatar’s appearance enables users to create any combination of ethnicities. Gui’s observation is that, when creating a human avatar, users will tend to represent a racial type that is close to their appearance in the physical world. Further, the more immersed the participants become in the world (and, presumably, the more the avatar becomes an extension of themselves) the closer the user’s virtual appearance comes to their physical appearance. However, as with the vendors of skins, the participants did not identify themselves as multiracial, except where these mixtures were non-real combinations (human/animal, human/doll, etc.). A possible cause of the resistance to playing with human ethnicities is the Proteus Effect, 23 in which participant behaviours are observed to change to correspond to the expected behaviour of their avatar’s appearance. If this were the case, participants may discover that choosing an ethnicity for their avatar that differs from their physical one leads them to behave in ways that do not correspond to their perceptions of self. Another possibility, mooted by Gui is that the participants are not using the potential of the virtual world as a transient space to deliberately articulate their experiences of cultural hybridity and being multiracial, or experiment with different ethnicities, because they’re just having fun. For the discussion of what is real, this is perhaps an even more salient discovery. For

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__________________________________________________________________ participants who are deliberately not being ‘real’ because they are a blood doll or a furry, identity play is a foregrounded part of their virtual world experience. When they are being ‘real’ (and presumably engaging in what Gui calls more ‘earthbound’ activities) participants adopt their physical world ethnicity or multiethnicity with little or no intent to engage in discourse about the meaning of this representation. They’re just being themselves. 5. Conclusions In their discussion of pseudo-realists and synthetic sodalists, Ryan and Childs propose that the different views of virtual reality have their roots in different ontological views of the physical world. Pseudo-realists, Ryan states, are those who see the virtual world as unreal. They see the physical world as a single, objective reality; anything separate from this is only fantasy. 24 Childs, conversely, suggests that synthetic sodalists tend to view the world from a post-modern standpoint; there are many different realities depending on one’s perspective, and virtual reality is simply an extension of this multiplicity of worldviews. 25 The role that the ideas of real and not-real have in the previous discussion indicates that learners coming to use virtual worlds can adopt either of these two positions, fully or partially – sometimes both simultaneously. This has bearing on the nature of their experience in a virtual world, and therefore experiential learning. The following factors that bear upon the facilitation of experiential learning in virtual worlds can be drawn from this debate: (i) Presence and embodiment are key to effective experiential learning, but do not always occur. As Masters and Gregory note, an experience of presence and immersion within a virtual world has a positive impact on students’ learning, and encouraging learners to feel that the space has some reality is beneficial. Vosinakis, Koutsabasis, Zaharias and Belk also find this, as does Bouda. Bouda additionally offers protocols for improving this level of immersion through the provision of training in the use of the technology to enhance the students’ feeling of agency within the environment. However, as Masters and Gregory, and Childs and Peachey, observe, not all students experience this sense of immersion, even with training. Even with the same environment, the same experiences and the same activities, there is a division amongst learners in how the virtual worlds are perceived. Jerry notes that for some people immersion in the virtual world is total while for others it is minimal, and yet there is also a third group that display a division; they experience metaxis, an experience of being in both places simultaneously, although all users experience this blurring of selves to some extent. (ii) Immersion is fostered by the open navigable space of virtual worlds in balance with appropriate learning design. Masters and Gregory, Vosinakis et al., and Le Rossignol all find that virtual worlds have affordances that make them particularly appropriate for experiential learning. For all of these authors it is the

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__________________________________________________________________ navigable three-dimensional space that has a particular value in conveying reality, even being the basis of a critical moment in developing immersion in the account of one student. Yet Le Rossignol also draws attention to a conflict, in that too open an environment can make the activities in-world too weakly linked to learning goals. Learning design in virtual worlds has to adhere to two opposing principles for effective experiential learning: to enable experiences to have their own reality in-world, but for them also to be structured and scaffolded so that the learners feel they have relevance to the syllabus. This dualism is summarised by Carr as the twin states of immersion and engagement; the former being the sense of being located within the world, or game, the latter being a more distanced, critical stance regarding the activities. 26 Ideally, throughout their participation, learners are able to move fluidly between these two states. (iii) To be effective for learning, not everything has to be perceived as real, but it is more effective if all participants agree on which parts are real and which are not. Further complicating the discussion, there is not a simple division between everything real and everything unreal. As Johnson Farrar notes, participants in a virtual world such as World of Warcraft may find that, although they do not feel their avatar as an extension of self, their relationship with fellow guild members, and the ways they organise their tasks are very real. Gui finds that multiracial participants engaging in roleplay in Second Life may take on what they consider to be hybridised avatars. When developing human avatars to represent themselves, they will tend to adopt a multiracial avatar to match their physical-world identity. However, they do not do this to deliberately project a mixed ethnicity. Their ‘real’ in-world identity is not one they give any thought to, whereas their fantasy character is. Jerry finds that courtship behaviours in Second Life can display in microcosm the conflict implied by the pseudo-realist versus synthetic sodalist worldviews, where one half of a couple perceives the other as an extension of a real person, but is perceived by the other as simply an image on the screen. This disruption of communication is caused by disparate definitions of the reality of the shared space, and typifies the difficulty involved in negotiating this real/non-real divide. (iv) In some cases, it is the non-real aspects that have value for learning. Bouda notes that the added difficulties in using virtual worlds mean that, for the extra effort in using them to be worthwhile, educators must exploit those uses to which virtual worlds can be put that differ from physical classroom activities. An example suggested by Vosinakis et al., is the use of the 3-D design opportunities by learners to make concrete forms from abstract principles, process, etc, so that these can aid communication by being viewed within the shared space of virtual worlds. Virtual worlds can also be considered a reification of transitional space; a place where internal projections of reality can be offered, observed and acted upon by others. Through identity play, in areas such as ethnicity or sexual behaviour,

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__________________________________________________________________ these ideas could be explored. However, the observations of Gui and Jerry are that these are not activities that people normally reflect upon. In conclusion, the real versus not-real debate is not an abstract philosophical question, but one which needs to be borne in mind by educators when developing activities in virtual worlds. Finding the reality (and finding how best to exploit the non-reality) in an activity is an essential part of the process of designing effective experiential learning. The editors hope that the reader will find much in the following chapters to raise more questions on this and other themes, that there will be many ideas which you will find of practical use in creating your own learning designs in virtual worlds, and is sufficiently interested in the content of this book and the community of researchers and educators responsible for it to seek out more work the Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds conferences and publications as well as other Inter-Discplinary.Net programmes.

Notes 1

David Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984). 2 Isobel Falconer, Grainne Conole, Ann Jeffrey and Peter Douglas, Pedagogical Learning Activity Reference Guide (JISC, 2006). 3 Kolb, Experiential Learning, 21. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Ibid., 34. 6 Mark Bell, ‘Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds”’, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1.5 (2008): 2. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 Jerry Isdale, Clive Fencott, Michael Heim and Leonard Daly, ‘Content Design for Virtual Environments’, in Handbook of Virtual Environments: Design Implementation and Applications, ed. Kay Stanney (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 530. 10 Ibid., 530. 11 A. Thomas. ‘Heterotopia and My Second Life’, accessed 1 December 2011, http://anya.blogsome.com/2006/05/27/heterotopia-and-my-second-life/. 12 John Towell and Elizabeth Towell, ‘Presence in Text-Based Networked Virtual Environments or “MUDS”’, Presence 6.5 (1997), 590. 13 Ken Newman, An Investigation of Narrative and Role-Playing Activities in Online Communication Environments (PhD Thesis, Griffith University, Queensland, 2007), 43.

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Tom Boellstorff, Research Seminar at University of Worcester Island, accessed 1 December 2011, http://www.screencast.com/t/b23QDIV3Ec. 15 Henrick Bennetsen, Augmentation vs Immersion, accessed 1 December 2011, http://slcreativity.org/wiki/index.php?title=Augmentation_vs_Immersion. 16 Michele Ryan and Mark Childs, ‘Chapter 13: Synthetic Societies or Pseudo Realities? Debating the Ethical Dilemmas of Second Life’, in From Critique to Action: The Practical Ethics of the Organizational World, ed. David Weir and Nabil Sultan (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), 255. 17 M. Ryan and M. Childs, ‘Synthetic Societies’, 258. 18 Cathie Heeter, ‘Communication Research on Consumer VR’, in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, ed. F. Biocca and M. R. Levy (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 191-218. 19 Thomas, ‘Heterotopia and My Second Life’. 20 Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 62-63. 21 Craig Murray and Judith Sixsmith, ‘The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality’, Ethos: Body, Self, and Technology 27.3 (1999): 324. 22 Stephen Dobson, ‘Remediation: Understanding New Media, Revisiting a Classic’, International Journal of Media, Technology and Lifelong Learning 5.2 (2009): 2. 23 Nick Yee, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mike Yao and Les Nelson, ‘Do Men Heal More When in Drag? Conflicting Identity Cues Between User and Avatar’, CHI 2011, May 7-12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1. 24 Ryan and Childs, ‘Synthetic Societies’, 256. 25 Ibid., 257. 26 Diane Carr, ‘Play and Pleasure’, in Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, ed. Diane Carr, David Buckingham, Andrew Burn and Gareth Schott (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2006), 53-56.

Bibliography Bell, Mark. ‘Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds”’. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 1.1 (2008): 1-5. Carr, Diane. ‘Play and Pleasure’. Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play, edited by Diane Carr, David Buckingham, Andrew Burn and Gareth Schott, 45-58. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2006. Dobson, Stephen. ‘Remediation: Understanding New Media, Revisiting a Classic’. International Journal of Media, Technology and Lifelong Learning 5.2 (2009): 2.

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__________________________________________________________________ Falconer, Isobel, Grainne Conole, Ann Jeffrey and Peter Douglas. Pedagogical Learning Activity Reference Guide. JISC, 2006. Heeter, Cathie ‘Communication Research on Consumer VR’. Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, edited by F. Biocca and M. R. Levy, 119-218. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. Isdale, Jerry, Clive Fencott, Michael Heim and Leonard Daly. ‘Content Design for Virtual Environments’. Handbook of Virtual Environments: Design Implementation and Applications, edited by Kay Stanney, 519-532. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002. Kolb, David. Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984. Murray, Craig. and Judith Sixsmith. ‘The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality’. Ethos: Body, Self, and Technology 27.3 (1999): 315-343. Ryan, Michele, and Mark Childs. ‘Chapter 13: Synthetic Societies or Pseudo Realities? Debating the Ethical Dilemmas of Second Life’. From Critique to Action: The Practical Ethics of the Organizational World, edited by David Weir and Nabil Sultan, 254-272. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011. Towell, John and Elizabeth Towell. ‘Presence in Text-Based Networked Virtual Environments or “MUDS”’, Presence 6.5 (1997): 590-595. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Yee, Nick, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Mike Yao and Les Nelson. ‘Do Men Heal More When in Drag? Conflicting Identity Cues Between User and Avatar’. CHI 2011, May 7-12, 2011, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds Enhancing Student Learning in Higher Education Yvonne Masters and Sue Gregory Abstract Over time, there have been marked changes in the ways in which higher education institutions have delivered their courses. Traditional face-to-face teaching still occurs, but there has been a dramatic shift to encompass the growing trend towards online teaching and learning approaches. On-campus (internal) students are exposed to blended learning (a combination of learning face-to-face and online) while there is the delivery of courses wholly online to off-campus (distance/external) students. This change in approach has required a parallel change in the ways that technology is employed for teaching and learning. At the University of New England (Australia) the authors have been researching the effectiveness for student engagement of teaching and learning in a virtual world, in this case Second Life. Two research studies (commenced in 2008 and 2009 respectively) have already provided data to establish that students were both engaged in their learning and also enthusiastic about this landmark approach to teaching and learning online. In 2010, the authors commenced a new research project to determine whether students learning via this virtual world environment received higher final grades for their assessment tasks than those students who used a traditional learning management system. Data indicated that this was the case and a re-iteration of the study in 2011 showed similar trends. In this chapter, this research project is firstly situated within the range of research previously conducted by the authors in Second Life. Its aims are then outlined, the research methods described and the data presented and analysed. Indications for future research are then examined. Key Words: Virtual worlds, Second Life, higher education, distance education, student outcomes. ***** 1. Introduction In 2010, the authors initiated a research project designed to examine whether those students who used a virtual world for both learning and social interactions performed at a higher standard than those students who interacted through the more traditional online learning management system tools, such as discussion boards, wikis and blogs. Standard of performance was measured by the final grade received, calculated across a number of assessment tasks, and interaction was interpreted as both student-student interaction and student-academic interaction. This project was built on two prior projects that had been undertaken in 2008 and

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__________________________________________________________________ 2009 into teaching and learning in Second Life. These earlier studies are briefly reported as background context in Section 4 and more detailed descriptions are available in other publications. 1 The impetus for all three research studies into the feasibility and effectiveness of teaching and learning in virtual worlds was the changing face of higher education with its greater flexibility for study through distance education and an increased uptake in online learning. These factors were, and still are, particularly evident in the authors’ teaching context. The studies were also influenced by an increase in the use of virtual worlds for education purposes. 2 2. Higher Education and Online Learning Online learning is increasing in momentum in higher education. 3 While oncampus students have access to this online learning, generally in a blended mode (a combination of face-to-face and online learning), the main target has been distance education students. Gutierrez argues that distance education is ‘becoming a reality of the educational environment not only in the US but also worldwide’ 4 and one has only to scan the Internet for distance education courses to discover that this equally applies to Australia and other countries around the globe. The constant innovation in technological tools has facilitated this proliferation of online courses and made feasible the change in distance education from primarily solitary study based on correspondence materials (paper and CD) to study where there is capacity for interaction. 5 The delivery of online learning in educational institutions still occurs predominantly through a learning management system. In these systems the range of available Web 2.0 tools, such as blogs, wikis, discussion boards and chat rooms, facilitate opportunities for greater student interactivity than in the past. However, it must be registered that this interaction is mostly asynchronous. In some instances, an academic uses the learning management system only to deliver learning material through html (hypertext mark-up language) and Portable Document Format (PDF) downloadable documents and to provide discussion boards or forums for answering of student questions. In this situation, the technology is being used more because it is available, and in some cases mandated for use, rather than as a learning tool. However, it is important to note ‘online learning is not about technology. It is about a new paradigm of learning’. 6 Many higher education institutions are embracing new paradigms and are developing online learning experiences not only in a learning management system, but also in virtual worlds. 3. Virtual Worlds in Higher Education Virtual worlds are not new, but they are experiencing exponential growth. Not only do new worlds ‘spring up daily, it seems’, 7 but they ‘are no longer the preserve of the stereotypical geek, nor are they just technical or social curiosities that educators … can safely ignore’. 8 While a variety of virtual world platforms are being used for educational purposes, 9 Second Life emerged as the forerunner in this

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__________________________________________________________________ area. 10 This leading status is now being reviewed given that the removal of educational discounts for Second Life property has seen some education institutions move to other virtual environments such as those freely available through OpenSim (OpenSimulator technology), which is an open source virtual world. 11 Although moves to other virtual worlds has occurred, these institutions have not abandoned virtual worlds altogether and many new areas are being developed. It seems unlikely that virtual worlds are going to be abandoned given that they have had ‘the same growth pattern and potential as the Internet’. 12 Educators are developing the use of virtual worlds in a range of educational spheres, not only higher education, thus helping ‘to claim these spaces for social and educational purposes’. 13 The affordances of virtual worlds, such as the capacity for immersion, simulations and extended interactions, 14 allow for a variety of teaching and learning strategies to be developed in-world (in the virtual world) which can enhance learning for all students and most particularly for off-campus students. A strong factor in this enhanced learning is the capacity of virtual worlds to facilitate social presence. 15 A feeling of having presence in any learning community has been demonstrated to have positive correlation with student satisfaction and collaborative learning 16 and Richardson and Swan report that ‘students’ perceptions of social presence overall ... contributed significantly to the predictor equation for students’ perceived learning overall’. 17 A recent research study by McKerlich, Riis, Anderson and Eastman into student perceptions of a sense of presence (teaching, social and cognitive) in virtual worlds demonstrated that ‘learning in a virtual world is often perceived as a rich educational experience that includes elements of all three presences’. 18 These researchers conclude that: learning is taking place in virtual worlds and this medium will continue to grow. The days of presence deprived online learning could be limited; virtual worlds have the potential to provide a rich learning experience overflowing with presence. 19 Importantly, as research into the efficacy of virtual worlds for educational purposes continues, there is a ‘focus on the actual teaching and learning practices and on their assessment in the virtual learning environment’. 20 The authors’ research forms part of this wider corpus of research. 4. Two Preliminary Research Studies The University of New England (UNE) in New South Wales, Australia, is a regional university with 80% of its students studying in the distance education mode. 21 UNE has had a long tradition of distance education and was the first university in Australia to deliver courses in this way. 22 For many years, the main online teaching and learning platform for these students has been, and still is, the use of a learning management system. The main form of interaction between

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__________________________________________________________________ students and also between students and academics has been via the usual tools of learning management systems – blogs, discussion boards and wikis, with some use of chat room, although this latter is generally between students rather than with academics. As academics in the School of Education at UNE, the authors are of the opinion that, while the use of learning management systems has provided some excellent examples of teaching and learning for off-campus students, the affordances of these platforms are not adequate for the task of developing strong communities of practice. Motivated by a belief that teaching and learning online could be improved by using other, more immersive, online environments (as opposed to learning management systems), in 2008 Gregory commenced the first research project within UNE into the effectiveness of Second Life. She was convinced that this virtual world had the capacity to promote student engagement and learning. This first project commenced with Gregory building a space in Second Life, called Education Online Headquarters, where her students, predominantly preservice teachers, could meet, both formally and informally. The purpose was to discuss study concepts and to explore Second Life as an environment with educational possibilities in the contexts in which these students would be teaching. The data from this study revealed that this virtual world was engaging, promoted learning and also developed a sense of presence. The overwhelming reality of this sense of presence is evocatively depicted when one student had an experience that moved him to say: I had a defining experience last week when we sat down in that open-air lecture space and I sat on one side and the rest of you sat on the other side. Suddenly I felt lonely and, without thinking, got up and moved to where you were all sitting. And then, I thought, that felt so real! 23 The success of this project in instigating student engagement and learning prompted Gregory to continue the study with new students over each semester up to and including the first semester of 2011. 24 With the 2008 project providing such a positive and solid foundation, in 2009 Gregory and Masters commenced a co-researched study on the effectiveness of Second Life for role-play. The main aim of this project was to examine whether Second Life was an environment where teaching and learning strategies, in particular role-plays, which were used with on-campus students, could be replicated in-world. A secondary aim was to explore the ease of use of such a virtual environment for novice users, both academics and students. To conduct this research with pre-service teachers in-world and at the same time to demonstrate the use of the specific role-play for classroom teachers Gregory custom-built a classroom and playground on a Second Life island, named Australis 4 Learning.

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__________________________________________________________________ In the first iteration of this study the teaching and learning occurred with oncampus students to permit monitoring of any possible technical issues for the novices and to provide instant support if this were the case. The results of the project indicated that students had similar perceptions of both the face-to-face and the virtual world teaching. Masters, an experienced teacher, but a novice user of virtual worlds, taught both the real life and Second Life sessions and found that there was improvement in student ability to use the virtual world with each subsequent workshop (five were conducted in all). Masters further reported that teaching within this virtual space became easier over the five workshops. This gave credence to the authors’ belief that Second Life would provide a learning environment that was relatively user-friendly, including for novices. The general success of this study in 2009 with on-campus students resulted in an extension of the project in 2010 to include off-campus students. For the first time on the course, the de Bono Six Thinking Hats strategy, the focus of the roleplay tutorial in the first iteration, was experienced solely in the virtual world. 25 The effectiveness of this teaching and learning in a virtual world space is apparent when an off-campus student commented that: The opportunity to use Six Thinking Hats strategies in a group situation to guide discussion was deeply beneficial. It gave me a clearer understanding of how to use the hats, and provided an insight into how it may be used in a classroom (something that up until the Second Life session had eluded me). 26 5. Aims of the Research Project on Student Performance When the data from the two earlier research projects demonstrated that the use of a virtual world as an educational environment is effective, the decision was taken to commence a new research project that would examine whether the use of Second Life as a learning environment not only increases student engagement, but also whether it has a positive effect on student performance. In 2010, the authors commenced this further research study which was designed to compare student performance, as indicated by formal assessment results, between students who predominantly used the virtual world learning environment for their learning and those whose interactions were exclusively through the learning management system. 6. Method After ethics approval, the authors gathered data across seven education subjects, five of which were Information Communication Technology (ICT) in Education subjects and two of which were Learning and Teaching subjects, an area without a technological focus. All seven of these subjects had off-campus students and three of them were offered only in off-campus mode.

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__________________________________________________________________ At the beginning of each semester students were able to elect which work group they wished to join. These work groups were an integral part of the learning for all students in each subject. They could choose to join groups which would meet in Second Life or to join groups within the learning management system. All students within each subject were to complete common assessment tasks, but discussions for the students who chose to join a Second Life group occurred in-world. For the other students, there were choices between using discussion boards only and using other tools available in the learning management system such as chat rooms, blogs, and wikis. Self-selection into groups studying in Second Life meant that there was no academic bias, such as selecting the ‘best’, in the allocation of students. One factor that impacted significantly on student choice was their computer capacity and Internet bandwidth. Those students without good capacity generally chose not to take part in these groups. Tutorials were held on a voluntary basis in Second Life once a week and were generally scheduled for between one and two hours, but frequently went longer. During these tutorials students were given opportunities to discuss subject material and assessment tasks with their academics as well as interact with each other. Students in non-Second Life groups had the capacity to ask questions and have the same form of discussions via the learning management system. At the end of both semesters students were asked to complete an online survey. This survey collected data about whether they had used Second Life or a learning management system. Data was also collected about their general use of technology. Demographic data such as age and the study location of each student was gathered and each student was also asked to rank, on a four point likert scale from very high to none, various aspects of the learning environment that they used in terms of the impact that they perceived these had on their learning. The survey permitted openended comments to allow students to clarify and expand on their responses. After the official release of results at the end of each semester, analysis was undertaken to compare the final grades achieved by the Second Life cohort (group of students) and by the rest of the off-campus cohort (all Second Life participants were off-campus students) and also to compare these results with the on-campus results. 7. Results and Findings Only one aspect of the research results, performance on final grades, is reported in detail in this discussion. Deeper analysis of the results regarding comparisons between age and gender are continuing, as is analysis of the qualitative data. There were a total of 1,622 students enrolled in the seven subjects that were part of the research project in 2010, with 96 volunteering to study in Second Life and 1,526 opting to study via the learning management system only. Figure 1 depicts the comparison between the final grades that the two groups of students received at the end of their study.

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__________________________________________________________________

Figure 1: Comparison of results across seven education subjects in 2010 between Second Life students (n=96) and those who didn’t use Second Life in their studies (n=1526) (Total n=1622). As can be seen, 29.2% of the group that chose to study via Second Life received a High Distinction (HD) while only 5.6% of the non-Second Life group received this result. A significantly larger percentage was also evident in the Distinctions (D) earned by the Second Life students compared to the learning management system cohort, being 54.2% in comparison to 36.2%. While there was a relatively lower proportion of students who received a Credit (C) grade for their studies in the Second Life group (16.2%) compared with the 37.7% of non-Second Life students who received this grade, it is important to note that this is a result of 93.4% having received HDs and Ds as opposed to any lesser performance. No students from the Second Life group received a grade of Pass (P) compared with 10% of the non-Second Life cohort. The other significant difference in performance (as judged by official grades) is in the Failed/Failed Incomplete (N/NI) results. Only one of the 96 students in the Second Life cohort received an NI (with the other 95 receiving grades of C or higher), whilst 10.5% of the non-Second Life group received an either an N or NI for the subject. Overall, the group that studied in Second Life performed at a much higher grade level. As well as collecting grade data, the survey permitted analysis of student selfreport regarding the students’ perceptions of the impact that either Second Life or the learning management system had on their learning. This data is illustrated in Figures 2 and 3. In these graphs the differences between cohorts are perhaps not as

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__________________________________________________________________ definitive, but they are still indicative of Second Life learning as being advantageous. While self-reporting can be open to criticisms of lacking rigour or tangible evidence, it is important to note that those students who studied primarily in Second Life have reported that they felt that they had a greater learning of concepts than the level reported by those who did not study in Second Life (Figure 2). In respect to learning the concepts associated with the field of study of the seven subjects involved in the study, 40% of the Second Life cohort felt that the virtual world, as a tool for learning, had a highly significant impact. In comparison, the non-Second Life group only reported a highly significant impact at 28%. As with the statistics on performance grades, there is also a difference at the lower end of the scale with only 16% of those using Second Life reporting that there was only minor or no impact on their learning of concepts as opposed to 27% of the nonSecond Life cohort.

Figure 2: Student perceptions of the effect of the learning environment on their learning of concepts (2010). Similar to the reports concerning the learning of the subject related concepts, differences occurred in the reports of how the students perceived that their learning was enhanced by the particular learning environment (virtual world versus learning management system) that they employed (Figure 3). As with both performance

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__________________________________________________________________ grades and learning of concepts, the Second Life cohort reported a higher level of impact to those who did not study in the virtual world. Of the former cohort, 50% reported that there was a significant enhancement of learning through using Second Life as compared to 38% of those who used only the learning management system. In contrast to the results about learning of concepts, the difference at the other end of the scale was negligible in terms of reports about enhancing learning, with only a 1% difference between the two cohorts as regards a minor or no impact.

Figure 3: Student perceptions of the impact of the learning environment on enhancing learning (2010). As with the other studies reported previously, the authors again replicated the study in order to gather further data. This occurred in Semester 1, 2011. The new performance results indicate the same trends as those reported for 2010. As can be seen in Figure 4, in 2011 15.6% of the group that chose to study via Second Life received a High Distinction (HD) with only 7.7% of the non-Second Life group receiving this result. Although the overall percentage of HDs was lower in 2011, there is the same notable trend as outlined in 2010. This considerably larger percentage from the Second Life cohort was also evident in the Distinctions (D) earned by the students, being 58.3% in comparison to 38.1% for the other cohort. There was a relatively low proportion of students who received a Credit (C) grade for their studies in the Second Life group (the majority having received HDs and

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__________________________________________________________________ Ds), whilst almost a third of the non-Second Life students received a Credit. There were several students from the Second Life group receiving a grade of Pass (P) (5.8%) compared with 16.2% of the non-Second Life cohort.

Figure 4: Comparison of results across five education subjects in first semester 2011 between Second Life students (n=103) and those who didn’t use Second Life in their studies (n=686) (Total n=789). Also as in 2010, the other major difference in performance (as judged by official grades) is in the Failed/Failed Incomplete (N/NI) results. 1.9% of the 103 students in the Second Life cohort received an NI, whilst 10.3% of the non-Second Life group received an N or NI for the subject. Overall, the group that studied in Second Life performed at a much higher grade standard as was also the case in 2010. With a further 789 students having participated in this research study in 2011, the final grade data for 2010 and 2011 was aggregated to provide a more statistically sound data set for comparison. The aggregated grade data, as outlined in Table 1, adds to the accumulation of positive data about the effectiveness of virtual worlds as teaching and learning environments gained from all research studies conducted by the authors. 27

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__________________________________________________________________ Table 1: Aggregated performance grade data (2010/2011) for Second Life students (n = 199) and non-Second Life students (n = 2212). Second Life students Non-Second Life students

HD 22.1% 6.2%

D 55.8% 36.8%

C 17.6% 34.6%

P 3.0% 12.0%

N/NI 1.5% 10.4%

When examining the 2011 data regarding student perceptions of the impact that the particular online environment had on their learning there are similar trends to the 2010 data, but the difference between the two cohorts of students is not so marked as for final grade results. The impact data for learning of concepts is outlined in Figure 5 where there is still a considerable difference shown between the two cohorts with 38% of the Second Life cohort perceiving that the learning environment had a highly significant impact on their learning of concepts as compared to 22% of the nonSecond Life cohort.

Figure 5: Student perceptions of the impact of the learning environment on their learning of concepts (2011). Figure 6 graphs the 2011 data on the students’ perceptions of whether the particular learning environment enhanced their learning. It is in this area of focus that the data differs most from the 2010 data. Figure 3 demonstrates that in 2010

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__________________________________________________________________ 50% of the students felt that there was a highly significant impact on enhanced learning from studying via Second Life and this percentage was significantly higher than for the non-Second Life cohort. However, in 2011, only 34% of the Second Life group reported a highly significant impact in comparison to 47% of the other cohort.

Figure 6: Student perceptions of the impact of the learning environment on enhancing learning (2011). It is not clear from the surveys why this difference from 2010 occurred in the enhanced learning data. What is very clear when the data percentages are aggregated is that there are no noteworthy differences between the cohorts as shown in Table 2. Table 2: Aggregated data regarding enhanced learning via the learning environment (2010/2011) for Second Life students (n = 199) and non-Second Life students (n = 2212).

Second Life students Non-Second Life students

Highly Significant Impact 41.7% 40.8%

Significant Impact

Minor Impact

No Impact

38.2% 37.4%

14.6% 11.7%

5.5% 10.1%

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__________________________________________________________________ A large percentage of students in both cohorts rated the learning environment as having either a highly significant or a significant impact on their learning with this overall percentage being 79.9% and 78.2% for the Second Life and non-Second Life cohorts respectively. In future iterations of this study it will be necessary to amend the survey to ascertain the features of each learning environment that students are rating. In contrast to the impact of the learning environment as regards enhanced learning, the aggregated data regarding the impact of the environment on the learning of concepts is skewed more towards Second Life as shown in Table 3. Table 3: Aggregated data regarding the impact of the learning environment on learning of concepts (2010/2011) for Second Life students (n = 199) and nonSecond Life students (n = 2212).

Second Life students Non-Second Life students

Highly Significant Impact 38.7% 26.1%

Significant Impact

Minor Impact

No Impact

44.2% 48.4%

13.6% 17.8%

3.5% 7.6%

The difference between the cohorts in their rating of the learning environment as having an impact on their learning of concepts as either highly significant or significant is 7%, with the Second Life group rating the environment higher. While a small percentage, the authors suggest that there may be a link in this data with the students’ reported sense of presence and thus on learning and grades. As previously mentioned, this link has been shown to exist in other research studies. 28 The students’ comments regarding their views of the learning environments are outlined in the next section. 8. Qualitative Data: Open-Ended Comments The data reported in the previous section is quantitative and builds a solid picture of the efficacy of virtual worlds for student learning. However, this data lacks the rich detail of the written responses in the open-ended questions. It is in this qualitative data that the sense of presence reported earlier is most evident. Below are comments from five students that outline their perceptions of their learning in a virtual environment. The authors have not deliberately chosen to include comments only about Second Life. These responses were open-ended questions for elucidation and were not compulsory and the non-Second Life cohort was apparently not motivated to make much comment on the learning management system.

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__________________________________________________________________ Second Life made an enormous difference to my understanding of the unit material. I was able to engage in more in-depth learning and Second Life made the group assignment much easier to complete. Second Life is a great tool for externals students to get together to discuss issues as you feel that you are not isolated but part of a virtual community. I found Second Life to be an extremely useful tool, and more user friendly than Blackboard. My group had numerous technical problems with Blackboard including being logged off or no access at all. As I was enjoying these units, I was interested and engaged, and frequently talking to people in my office about Second Life. I ensured I was available for every session that was available in Second Life as I found it a valuable way to have some ‘face to face’ time with my lecturer (felt more connected which is important when studying off-campus) as well as with guests who had been organised. I took this question to mean how much I wanted to be a part of the learning, not how much effort it took to be in Second Life. I found the Second Life experience to be educational and entertaining which made it interesting. I found my engagement to be 100% and felt the ability to ask questions of a lecturer/guest lecturer to be easier without an entire room's focus on me. Could be a little frustrating if your question was swallowed up in others and was missed but that is no different to a lecture theatre. 29 A range of comments have been included here as they demonstrate some important areas of focus that have arisen in the authors’ other research studies and which are fruitful areas for further research in the future. 30 Students mentioned ‘engagement’ and also ‘in-depth learning’. The sense of community is also clear with comments such as ‘part of a virtual community’ and ‘a valuable way to have some 'face to face' time’. One comment that was made, ‘felt the ability to ask questions of a lecturer/guest lecturer to be easier without an entire room's focus on me’, also demonstrates how the anonymity of interacting as an avatar can make someone feel more at ease and more willing to participate. This is a factor of virtual world learning that needs to be researched further as it has possibilities for application in other fields, such as counselling.

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__________________________________________________________________ While the comments reported here are generally positive about learning in a virtual world, reflecting the overwhelmingly positive responses that the authors received, it is important to include the following comment: It didn't work for me – much preferred Blackboard or Facebook or wiki. 31 In future iterations of the research study it will be important to tease out the reasons that some people found their experience so negative in order to ascertain whether it lies in the manner of teaching, the particular learning experience or something about the virtual world experience. 9. Limitations From the analysis of the final grades, it could be concluded that virtual worlds provide educational platforms where students attain higher performance grades. The research studies reported here suggest that Second Life is effective and engaging as a learning platform and the grades received by the students suggest that there is no deleterious effect from studying in this way. However, it cannot be argued that the virtual world component of the students’ studies was the only factor that assisted in the achievement of higher grades compared to the non-Second Life cohort. Over 60% of the 2010 and 2011 students were first year students. This has meant that it is difficult to ascertain whether the students who chose to use Second Life were students with a higher grade point average (GPA) than the other students. Preliminary analysis of grades for other subjects compared to the Second Life subject(s) has commenced, but this will be a lengthy process. It is also difficult to compare results across subjects due to the different knowledge and skills required in different disciplines. It is also difficult to ascertain whether those students who chose Second Life are among the more motivated students, thus skewing the results. More empirical research must be conducted including, if possible, research into the lifestyle and study commitment of students and also the motivation behind their choice to use, or not use, a virtual world as a study environment. While these issues need to be addressed, the credibility of the data is increasing each semester as the number of students participating becomes larger. An interesting anecdotal fact about the appeal of learning in virtual worlds is that both authors have had more students wishing to study in this way in 2011 than they could accommodate. 10. Future Directions Further research into the ways in which virtual worlds can be used for learning is continuing. An exciting research development in 2011 has been the receipt of an

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__________________________________________________________________ Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) grant working in collaboration with five other universities, four in Australia and one in Germany. The grant is funding research to explore the use of Second Life as a platform for microteaching and virtual professional experience. Off-campus students, who are currently prepared for their teaching placements solely through online readings and reflections, have had the opportunity to experience teaching in-world with the aid of their peers through role-play. They will soon be able to use pre-programmed child avatars (bots – non-player characters) to enhance their teaching skills and evaluate these skills with peer and self-assessment through machinima (in-world video footage). Moving into an area of virtual teaching practice takes preparation and support for professional experience into a new realm. Virtual world technologies have a facility for active experiential learning that is accessible 24/7 anywhere around the world. It is this facility, arising from such affordances of virtual worlds as the capacity for immersion, simulation and extended interactions, which has provided the potential for the authors to develop a range of classroom, staffroom and playground spaces. These spaces permit practice teaching at least comparable to a live classroom experience and, possibly, enhanced experiential options. 32 The students have opportunities, through interaction in and with the virtual environment, to practise teaching skills and apply concepts in a realistic setting that is also risk free. 33 There have been few attempts to try this form of new approach in Australia indicating that this research is exciting, innovative and cutting edge.

Notes 1

Sue Gregory and Belinda Tynan, ‘Introducing Jass Easterman: My Second Life Learning Space’, in Same Places, Different Spaces, Proceedings Ascilite2009 Auckland, (2009), 377-386, Viewed 26 March 2010, http://www.ascilite.org.au/ conferences/auckland09/procs/gregory.pdf; Sue Gregory and Yvonne Masters, ‘Six Hats in Second Life: Enhancing Pre-Service Teacher Learning in a Virtual World’, in Advancing Learning with ICT: Innovate Collaborate Transform. Presented at the International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology 2010 (iCTLT), Singapore, (2010a); Sue Gregory and Yvonne Masters, ‘Virtual Classrooms and Playgrounds: Why Would Anyone Use Them?’, in Proceedings of the 4th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, (2010b), 120-129; Sue Gregory and Howard Smith, ‘How Virtual Classrooms are Changing the Face of Education: Using Virtual Classrooms in Today’s University Environment’, in International Research in Teacher Education: Current Perspectives, ed. Warren Halloway and John Maurer (Armidale: Kardoorair, 2010), 239-252; Yvonne Masters and Sue Gregory, ‘Second Life: Harnessing Virtual World Technology to Enhance Student Engagement and Learning’, in Rethinking Learning in Your

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__________________________________________________________________ Discipline, (University Learning and Teaching Futures Colloquium, Armidale, NSW, 2010). 2 Gilly Salmon and David Hawkridge, ‘Editorial’, British Journal of Educational Technology 40 (2009): 401-413; Terrence Cummings, ‘Education and the Second Life Ecosystem’, presented at the Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) 2010, VWBPE North Second Life; Barney Dalgarno, et al., ‘3D Immersive Virtual Worlds in Higher Education: An Australian and New Zealand Scoping Study’, in Curriculum, Technology and Transformation for an Unknown Future. Proceedings Ascilite2010 Sydney, (2010), ed. Caroline Steel, Mike Keppell, Philippa Gerbic and Simon Housego, 269-280, Viewed 26 March 2010, http://ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/procs/Dalgarno-full.pdf. 3 Ileana Gutierrez, ‘Global Perspectives in Open and Distance Learning and Open Learning Resources’, Distance Learning 48 (2010): 16-22; Starr R. Hiltz and Murray Turoff, ‘Education Goes Digital: The Evolution of Online Learning and the Revolution in Higher Education’, Communications of the ACM 48.10 (2005): 5964; Maria Puzziferro and Kaye Shelton, ‘Challenging Our Assumptions about Online Learning: A Vision for the Next Generation of Online Higher Education’, Distance Learning 6.4 (2009): 9-20. 4 Gutierrez, ‘Global Perspectives in Open and Distance Learning’, 16. 5 Ibid. 6 Puzziferro and Shelton, ‘Challenging Assumptions about Online Learning’, 9. 7 A. J. Kelton, ‘Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good’, EDUCAUSE Review 43.5 (September/October 2008): 16. 8 Leslie Jarmon, Kenneth Lim and Stephen Carpenter, II, ‘Introduction: Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual Worlds’, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2.1 (2009): 3. 9 Sara de Freitas, Serious Virtual Worlds: A Scoping Study (Bristol, UK: Joint Information Systems Committee, 2008), Viewed 6 January 2010, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/seriousvirtualworldsv1.pdf; Dalgarno, et al., ‘3D Immersive Virtual Worlds in Higher Education’; Sue Gregory, Torsten Reiners and Belinda Tynan, ‘Alternative Realities: Immersive Learning for and with Students’, in Distance Learning Technology, Current Instruction, and the Future of Education: Applications of Today, Practices of Tomorrow, ed. Holim Song (Houston, USA: IGI Global, 2010), 245-271; Sue Gregory, et al., ‘Australian Higher Education Institutions Transforming the Future of Teaching and Learning through Virtual Worlds’, in Curriculum, Technology and Transformation for an Unknown Future, Ascilite2010, ed. Caroline Steel, Mike Keppell, Philippa Gerbic and Simon Housego (Sydney, 2010), 399-415, http://ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/procs/Gregory-full.pdf. 10 Chris Campbell, ‘Learning in a Different Life: Pre-Service Education Students Using an Online Virtual World’, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2.1 (2009):

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__________________________________________________________________ Viewed 12 December 2010, https://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/379/451; Steven Warburton, ‘Second Life in Higher Education: Assessing the Potential for and the Barriers to Deploying Virtual Worlds in Learning and Teaching’, British Journal of Educational Technology 40.3 (2009): 414-426; Gregory, et al., ‘Transforming Teaching and Learning through Virtual Worlds’. 11 OpenSim, ‘OpenSimulator’, October 29, 2011, Viewed 4 November 2011, http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page. 12 Kelton, ‘Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good’, 22. 13 Stefan Schutt and John Martino, ‘Virtual Worlds as an Architecture of Learning’, in Hello! Where are You in the Landscape of Educational Technology? Proceedings Ascilite Melbourne 2008, (2008), 900-902, Viewed 10 December 2010, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/schutt-poster.pdf. 14 Warburton, ‘Second Life in Higher Education’. 15 John Short, Ederyn William and Bruce Christie, The Social Psychology of Communication (NewYork: John Wiley, 1976). 16 Hyo-Jeong So and Thomas A. Brush, ‘Student Perceptions of Collaborative Learning, Social Presence and Satisfaction in a Blended Learning Environment: Relationships and Critical Factors’, Computers and Education 51.1 (2008): 318336. 17 Jennifer Richardson and Karen Swan, ‘Examining Social Presence in Online Courses in Relation to Students’ Perceived Learning and Satisfaction’, Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 7.1 (2003): 68. 18 Ross McKerlich, et al., ‘Student Perceptions of Teaching Presence, Social Presence, and Cognitive Presence in a Virtual World’, Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 7.3 (2011): 334. 19 Ibid. 20 Larmon, Lim and Carpenter, ‘Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual Worlds’, 4. 21 Gregory and Tynan, ‘Introducing Jass Easterman’; Corporate Intelligence Unit, Facts and Figures, 2010 (University of New England: Armidale, 2010). Viewed 2 March 2011, http://planning.une.edu.au/Statistics/overview/index.htm. 22 John Chick, ‘The New England Model in Theory and Practice’, in Perspectives on Distance Education: Distance Education in Single and Dual Mode Universities, ed. Ian Mugridge (Vancouver: The Commonwealth of Learning, 1992), 33-48. 23 University of New England student quote after experiences of learning in a virtual world. 24 For more detailed discussion of this project see: Gregory and Tynan, ‘Introducing Jass Easterman’; Gregory, Reiners and Tynan, ‘Alternative Realities’; Gregory and Smith, ‘Virtual Classrooms are Changing the Face of Education’. 25 Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats (London: Penguin Books, 1985).

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__________________________________________________________________ 26

For more detailed discussion of this project see: Gregory and Masters, ‘Six Hats in Second Life’; Gregory and Masters, ‘Virtual Classrooms and Playgrounds’; Masters and Gregory, ‘Harnessing Virtual World Technology’. 27 Gregory and Tynan, ‘Introducing Jass Easterman’; Gregory and Masters, ‘Six Hats in Second Life’; Masters and Gregory, ‘Harnessing Virtual World Technology’. 28 Richardson and Swan, ‘Examining Social Presence in Online Courses’. 29 University of New England student quote after experiences of learning in a virtual world. 30 Gregory and Masters, ‘Six Hats in Second Life’; Masters and Gregory, ‘Harnessing Virtual World Technology’. 31 University of New England student quote after experiences of learning in a virtual world. 32 Clark Aldrich, Simulations and the Future of Learning (San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2004). 33 David Antonacci and Nellie Modaress, Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW), (2005), Viewed 10 December 2010, http://www2.kumc.edu/ir/tlt/SLEDUCAUSESW2005/SL PresentationOutline.htm.

Bibliography Aldrich, Clark, Simulations and the Future of Learning. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2004. Antonacci, David, and Nellie Modaress. Second Life: The Educational Possibilities of a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW). 2005, Viewed 10 December 2010. http://www2.kumc.edu/ir/tlt/SLEDUCAUSESW2005/SLPresen tationOutline.htm. Chick, John. ‘The New England Model in Theory and Practice’. In Perspectives on Distance Education: Distance Education in Single and Dual Mode Universities, edited by Ian Mugridge, 33-48. Vancouver: The Commonwealth of Learning, 1992. Corporate Intelligence Unit. Facts and Figures, 2010. University of New England: Armidale, 2011. Viewed 2 March 2011. http://planning.une.edu.au/Statistics/over view/index.htm.

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__________________________________________________________________ Cummings, Terrence. ‘Education and the Second Life Ecosystem’. Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWBPE), Presentation, VWBPE North Second Life, 2010. Dalgarno, Barney, Mark J. W. Lee, Lauren Carlson, Sue Gregory and Belinda Tynan. ‘3D Immersive Virtual Worlds in Higher Education: An Australian and New Zealand Scoping Study’. In Curriculum, Technology and Transformation for an Unknown Future. Proceedings Ascilite2010 Sydney, edited by Caroline Steel, Mike Keppell, Philippa Gerbic and Simon Housego, 269-280, Sydney, 2010. Viewed 26 March 2010. http://ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/procs/ Dalgarno-full.pdf. de Bono, Edward. Six Thinking Hats. London: Penguin Books, 1985. de Freitas, Sara. Serious Virtual Worlds: A Scoping Study. Bristol, UK: Joint Information Systems Committee, 2008. Viewed 6 January 2010. http://www. jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/seriousvirtualworldsv1.pdf. Gregory, Sue., Mark J. W. Lee, Allan Ellis, Brent Gregory, Denise Wood, Mathew Hillier, Matthew Campbell, Jenny Grenfell, Steven Pace, Helen Farley, Angela Thomas, Andrew Cram, Suku Sinnappan, Kerrie Smith, Lyn Hay, Shannon Kennedy-Clark, Ian Warren, Scott Grant, David Craven, Heinz Dreher, Carol Matthews, Deborah Murdoch and Lindy McKeown. ‘Australian Higher Education Institutions Transforming the Future of Teaching and Learning through Virtual Worlds’. In Curriculum, Technology and Transformation for an Unknown Future. Proceedings Ascilite2010 Sydney, edited by Caroline Steel, Mike Keppell, Philippa Gerbic and Simon Housego, 399-415. Sydney, 2010. Viewed 12 December 2010. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/Ascilite%20conference%20proce edings%202010/Gregory-full.pdf. Gregory, Sue, and Belinda Tynan. ‘Introducing Jass Easterman: My Second Life Learning Space’. In Same Places, Different Spaces, Proceedings Ascilite2009 Auckland, 377-386. Auckland, 2009. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/ auckland09/procs/gregory.pdf. Gregory, Sue, and Yvonne Masters. ‘Six Hats in Second Life: Enhancing Preservice Teacher Learning in a Virtual World’. In Advancing Learning with ICT: Innovate Collaborate Transform: International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology 2010 (iCTLT), Singapore, 2010.

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. ‘Virtual Classrooms and Playgrounds: Why Would Anyone Use Them?’ In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, 120-129. University of New England, 2010. Gregory, Sue, Torsten Reiners and Belinda Tynan. ‘Alternative Realities: Immersive Learning for and with Students’. In Distance Learning Technology, Current Instruction, and the Future of Education: Applications of Today, Practices of Tomorrow, edited by Holim Song, 245-271. Houston, USA: IGI Global, 2010. Gregory, Sue, and Howard Smith. ‘How Virtual Classrooms are Changing the Face of Education: Using Virtual Classrooms in Today’s University Environment’. In International Research in Teacher Education: Current Perspectives, edited by Warren Halloway and John Maurer, 239-252. Armidale: University of New England, 2010. Gutierrez, Ileana. ‘Global Perspectives in Open and Distance Learning and Open Learning Resources’. Distance Learning 48.1 (2010): 16-22. Hiltz, Starr, and Murray Turoff. ‘Education Goes Digital: The Evolution of Online Learning and the Revolution in Higher Education’. Communications of the ACM 48.10 (2005): 59-64. Jarmon, Leslie, Kenneth Lim and Stephen Carpenter, II. ‘Introduction: Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual Worlds’. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2.1 (2009). Kelton, A. J. ‘Virtual Worlds? Outlook Good’. EDUCAUSE Review 43.5 (September/October 2008): 16-22. McKerlich, Ross, Marianne Riis, Terry Anderson and Brad Eastman. ‘Student Perceptions of Teaching Presence, Social Presence, and Cognitive Presence in a Virtual World’. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 7.3 (2011): 324-336. Masters, Yvonne, and Sue Gregory. ‘Second Life: Harnessing Virtual World Technology to Enhance Student Engagement and Learning’. In Rethinking Learning in Your Discipline. University Learning and Teaching Futures Colloquium, Armidale, NSW, 2010. OpenSim. ‘OpenSimulator’. 29 October 2011. http://opensimulator.org/wiki/ Main_Page.

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__________________________________________________________________ Puzziferro, Maria, and Kaye Shelton. ‘Challenging Our Assumptions about Online Learning: A Vision for the Next Generation of Online Higher Education’. Distance Learning 6.4 (2009): 9-20. Richardson, Jennifer, and Karen Swan. ‘Examining Social Presence in Online Courses in Relation to Students’ Perceived Learning and Satisfaction’. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 7.1 (2003): 68- 88. Salmon, Gilly, and David Hawkridge. ‘Editorial’. British Journal of Educational Technology 40 (2009): 401-413. Schutt, Stefan, and John Martino. ‘Virtual Worlds as an Architecture of Learning’. In Hello! Where are You in the Landscape of Educational Technology? Proceedings Ascilite Melbourne 2008, 900-902. 2008. http://www.ascilite.org. au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/schutt-poster.pdf. Short, John, Ederyn William and Bruce Christie. The Social Psychology of Communication. New York: John Wiley, 1976. So, Hyo-Jeong, and Brush, Thomas. ‘Student Perceptions of Collaborative Learning, Social Presence and Satisfaction in a Blended Learning Environment: Relationships and Critical Factors’. Computers and Education 51.1 (2008): 318336. Warburton, Steven. ‘Second Life in Higher Education: Assessing the Potential for and the Barriers to Deploying Virtual Worlds in Learning and Teaching’. British Journal of Educational Technology 40.3 (2009): 414-426. Yvonne Masters is the Director of Professional Experience at the University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia. She began her research career when a school principal, examining the role of principals. Since commencing at UNE her research interests centre on professional experience and virtual worlds, with a particular focus on distance education students. Yvonne is a member of the ALTC funded project VirtualPREX research team. Sue Gregory is a long term adult educator, a Lecturer in ICT Education and Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG). She is Principal Researcher and Grant Holder of the ALTC funded project VirtualPREX which investigates the feasibility and efficacy of pre-service teacher training virtual professional experience. Sue is researching Adult Learning in a

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__________________________________________________________________ Virtual World and examines student experiences of engagement, collaboration and immersion. The authors would like to acknowledge the School of Education, UNE, which provided internal research grant funding which permitted the research reported here to occur. We also acknowledge the members of the Writing for Publication Group, School of Education, UNE, for their support and their thorough and constructive feedback on a draft of this chapter.

Love It or Hate It: Students’ Responses to the Experience of Virtual Worlds Mark Childs and Anna Peachey Abstract Effective experiential learning within virtual worlds requires students to engage with the virtual world, not only as active learners, but also as embodied actors, fully immersed in the world, with a developed in-world identity and in-world body image. These elements contribute to the added value that immersive virtual worlds bring to educational experiences, but can also be a source of anxiety and resistance for many students. This chapter describes the range of responses to virtual worlds displayed by students, drawn from eight years’ collective experience of teaching in virtual worlds of the authors. The responses were due to a variety of cultural and value-based attitudes to technology in general and virtual worlds in particular. In addition, the authors note the potential existence of an ‘embodiment tendency’ which may be the basis of an innate engagement with, or failure to connect with, virtual worlds. Drawing on particular cases, and evidenced by students’ testimonies, the authors set out a typology of students’ responses, both positive and negative. The typology describes various strategies for engaging with these responses, and discuss the ethical implications that students’ negative opinions raise for educators making use of immersive virtual worlds. Key Words: Virtual worlds, resistance, ethics, culture, values, embodiment tendency. ***** 1. Identifying Resistance as a Field of Study The two authors have been researching and teaching in the virtual world Second Life for 12 years in total. During this time they have written analyses of these activities as case studies, identifying best practice in learning and teaching within these environments, 1 discussing the ethical implications of virtual worlds 2 and collaborating on a book on the role of identity in virtual worlds. 3 Throughout these learning and teaching experiences the authors have observed a particular subset of learners who resist engagement and challenge the notion of learning within virtual worlds. It was to further explore the nature of this resistance, and to support educators in identifying and deconstructing the forms this resistance can take, that the data from previously published case studies were re-examined alongside new data to form a typology of types of resistance presented by students. Although any typology is, by its nature, reductionist, the categories are presented here with the intention of understanding (or at least labelling) the forms of resistance for

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__________________________________________________________________ educators using virtual worlds, and perhaps thereby make encountering them in class less daunting. The case studies from which the quotations and examples are drawn were conducted at universities in the UK and US. The case study at the University of Warwick 4 was based on the exploration of theatre design in Second Life; the York St. John University case study was a performance-based activity, 5 the University of Southern Maine case study required students to explore their own identity and development through an exploration of Second Life 6 and the Open University case study offered students the opportunity to engage with interactive, immersive models of course concepts. 7 A further, unpublished, case study from this institution invited several hundred new students to a range of synchronous and asynchronous induction and social events inworld – something like a virtual Fresher’s Fair. An additional unpublished analysis, of a single session in Disaster Management Communication at Coventry University, also informed the following typology. We quote from a student in the last of these case studies whose remarks exemplify many of the negative impressions that students take away from an experience of a virtual world and indicates the degree of opposition that educators using these technologies face: How does walking around a fake room or flying around a computer game help us learn about real world issues? Not even a fun way to learn. Creating a second life creates a second set of problems without resolving the first set of problems. It takes up the time of researchers who could be doing useful empirical research instead. We learnt nothing that could not be found out with a picture on Google. There are already very sophisticated climate change models made for real world locations. Too many technical flaws. Not even good graphics, slow, a time wasting game not an academic tool. Even simple basic demonstration filled with errors. For academics to escape to a virtual world instead of solving issues in the real world. Even a few people overloaded the system. You cannot counter vulnerability to society’s reliance upon technology using this complicated technology, it just creates a difficult learning environment. These and other responses are explored in the remainder of this chapter. 2. Literature on Resistance to Virtual Worlds Observations regarding antipathy towards virtual worlds have been noted previously, with various explanations as to why this antipathy may occur.

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__________________________________________________________________ Thackray, Good and Howland consider the boundary issues that working within a virtual worlds raise. They summarise these boundaries as between: Institutions with different learning emphases. Curriculum disciplines. Physical and virtual roles and personae. Face-to-face and distance education delivery methods and expectations. x Safety and risk taking. 8

x x x x

Those students willing to take risks and cross boundaries fall into the ‘innovators’ and ‘early-adopters’ categories defined by Rogers. 9 Those who are risk averse are those in the categories ‘early majority’, ‘late majority’ and ‘laggards’. Bayne 10 identifies another boundary crossing in dealing with virtual worlds; this is an ontological one between the real world and an uncanny alternative world, which she relates to Freud’s notion of Unheimliche (literally ‘unhomely’). Some participants find this half-world unpleasant, with the division of self between the physical and the digital being reminiscent of feelings of death or of blasphemy; others find it a liberating and enlightening experience. 11 Trinder 12 explores the anxieties felt by people engaging in Second Life and found that the causes of these feelings were perception of ability, discomfort at new social experiences and control. However, although these all cause anxiety, they do not necessarily result in withdrawal. The issue of discomfort at being in an unfamiliar environment, where one is unsure of the rules or who the people with whom one is interacting are, or where they are really located, would presumably be experienced by all, yet some find it a far more challenging experience than others. Again this may be a willingness to take risks or cross boundaries. An alternative explanation may be that some participants do not feel a loss of competence in moving to a virtual world because they do not feel they have particular competence in the real world. It is perhaps those participants who have a particularly strong degree of social competence in the real world who feel the virtual world to be most alienating since they are losing their usual advantage over their peers. Running classes with a contingent of students that are disengaged presents difficulties, therefore, understanding and identifying strategies for dealing with these groups of students is also a valuable exercise. The following categories of resistance have been identified from studies so far. 3. The Students who aren’t Embodied Many students do not feel the environment to be engaging. Typical statements in the Warwick case study were:

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__________________________________________________________________ ... it doesn’t feel like actual theatre. ...you just feel like you’re just watching a game. At the end of the day you’re still sat in your bedroom You don’t have the feeling of it. Students in other case studies stated that ‘Sitting at my laptop when I don't have to is usually something I don't care to do’ or felt that they were ‘just staring at the screen for ages’. For these students, although they do not express a disapproval of the concept of virtual worlds, participating in the virtual world felt as if the experience was just sitting and looking at a computer screen. As one of the students who did not feel engaged noted, ‘someone like me has a disconnect from that kind of environment,’ i.e. he acknowledged the subjective nature of the experience. However, other students taking part in the same activities found the experience to be highly immersive. The students had the same tasks, the same software and very similar hardware, yet whereas the students above felt the environment was neither realistic nor engaging, the majority felt it was authentic and immersive. These students discussed the liberating experiences of being able to visit the various places within the environment. For them, this was not a sedentary experience since they are not as aware of their bodies being stationary in front of the screen; they had managed to ‘transform’ or ‘transport’ themselves to the virtual world. For students who have not made this transference, the perception of their real bodies disrupted the sense of presence within that space. A suggested explanation for this difference in reaction to the experience of virtual worlds is given by Heeter, in which she states: About one fourth of the population is so strongly situated in the real world and their real body that they have a difficult time becoming involved in a virtual world. 13 Murray and Sixsmith state that a diminishment of awareness of the physical body is required to experience embodiment in virtual reality. 14 If some participants are always aware of their bodies, and so feel static and sedentary when sitting at the computer in the physical world, rather than embodied and free-moving within the virtual environment, then this may explain the difference between their experiences and those of the students who did feel embodied. These students will not value the additional benefit of being in a virtual world through experiencing embodiment, but will judge this experience as no different to looking at a website or a 3D model.

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__________________________________________________________________ 4. Students who Equate Virtual with Inauthentic Another set of statements from the Warwick case study can be described as normative values concerning what is the proper way of living; that virtual experiences and virtual identities are inauthentic, and that people should only occupy themselves with experiences that are located in the physical world. In a study exploring the notion of honesty in a range of online spaces for learning and teaching, Hemmi et al 15 suggested that many students viewed alternative constructions of identity as morally wrong. Statements made by those in this category from the Warwick case study were: ... it’s the new era of virtual relationships and stuff is quite scary. I can’t think that people would actually want to be in-world. I don’t think you should have a second life on your laptop. It seems kind of pointless because in one aspect people can represent themselves however they want to. Four categories of disapproval were noted. These were in regard to: x x x x

Relationships in virtual worlds Activities in virtual worlds Living in virtual worlds. Virtual identities

In a survey about attitudes, all of the students who displayed this disapproval also displayed disclosurist tendencies (i.e. they expressed the belief that people should reveal their offline identities in in-world interactions). 16 The York St John University students also reflected this position: Please excuse me from the IT session tomorrow. I have thought hard about this idea of virtual travel and experience, and it’s not something I am drawn to at all! In fact, I rather think all the opportunities which are available to participants sound rather unhealthy. Personal interaction and real experiences are much more positive. Even my young student colleagues seem very suspicious of the Second Life merits, and the project has been banned in some schools apparently. Sadly I do feel that much of education is poorer because of the emphasis on technology. This could be due to the anxiety about crossing the boundary between first and second life roles and identities, or about the ‘impersonal’ nature of distanced communication, since the same students also discussed the ‘scary’ nature of virtual action. However, the statements also indicate that they are not only anxious about

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__________________________________________________________________ these activities, but actually see them as dehumanising. The view of technology as dehumanising has its roots in what Mitcham 17 refers to as ancient scepticism. Ancient scepticism is a ‘distrust or uneasiness about technical activities (that) can be detected in the earliest strata of Western philosophy.’ 18 The idea that interaction conducted online cannot be personal or that experiences encountered within a virtual world are not real are each expressed within the York St. John students’ comments as if they were incontrovertible, though neither of these statements are true, as many people who experience virtual worlds will confirm. However, these opinions lead to the position that it is self-evident that technologically-based experiences are less authentic than the natural, and so contesting these viewpoints can be problematic for any educator. Mitcham contrasts this position with two other philosophies of technology: that of enlightenment optimism, which ‘argues the inherent goodness of technology and the consequent accidental character of all misuse’: 19 and that of romantic uneasiness, which ‘reflects an uneasiness about technology that ... distinct from ancient scepticism and modern optimism, in its parts it nevertheless exhibits differential affinities with both.’ 20 These three attitudes to technology are summarised by Mitcham in a table (Table 1, on following page). The positions that are adopted by learners with respect to technology can be seen to echo many of these arguments: arguments that Mitcham dates back to Plato’s The Republic. In The Republic, Socrates states ‘The orientation of technics, because it is concerned to remedy the defects in nature, is always towards the lower or weaker.’ 21 This opinion is similar to those of students who opposed the use of virtual worlds in the classroom, or the role of virtual worlds in society as a whole, in that this use creates or reinforces unhealthy behaviours or appeals only to the socially inept. Superficial arguments about the effects of technology on behaviour, such as those espoused by Greenfield on the subject of computer games 22 frame their argument in the tradition of ‘technical affluence undermines individual virtue’. Students who oppose the use of virtual worlds for learning draw on the argument that technical information is not true wisdom, for example the Coventry student who stated that virtual worlds were ‘for academics to escape to a virtual world instead of solving issues in the real world’ and that the ‘technology takes up the time of researchers who could be doing useful empirical research instead’. The implication of taking on a virtual identity, or of taking part in activities in a virtual world, is that these lack authenticity, or are even immoral, and appease those members of society who are weakest, because they are relying on technology.

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__________________________________________________________________ Table 1: Attitudes to technology from Mitcham 23 Ancient scepticism (suspicious of technology)

Enlightenment optimism (promotion of technology)

Volition (transcendence)

Will to technology involves tendency to turn away from God or the gods

Will to technology is ordained by God or by nature

Activity (ethics)

Personal: Technical affluence undermines individual virtue Societal: Technical change weakens political stability

Personal: Technical activities socialise individuals Societal: Technology creates public wealth

Knowledge (epistemological)

Technical information is not true wisdom

Technical engagement with the world yields true knowledge (pragmatism)

Objects (metaphysics)

Artefacts are less real than natural objects and thus require external guidance

Nature and artifice operate by the same mechanical principles

Romantic uneasiness (ambivalent about technology) Will to technology is an aspect of creativity, which tends to crowd out other aspects Personal: Technology engenders freedom but alienates from affective strength to exercise it Societal: Technology weakens social bonds of affection Imagination and vision are more crucial than technical knowledge Artefacts expand the process of life and reveal the sublime

5. The Students who Disapprove of Games Another factor that emerges from comments by those who would not take part is the antipathy towards games. A typical statement from this group is ‘I pay my university fees to learn and acquire relevant skills, not to play a game.’ However, Second Life does not meet the essential definitions of a game (e,g, given by Begg et al. 24) in that it does not set specific goals, and does not have a scoring mechanism or an evolving narrative. Furthermore, to state that games should not be used for education contradicts the case for using games in education that has been made repeatedly, for example de Freitas; 25 McFarlane, Sparrowhawk and Heald; 26 Steinkuehler; 27 and Bell, Smith-Robbins and Withnail. 28

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__________________________________________________________________ Whitton and Hollins discuss the problems of using games to teach adults, based on misconceptions that adult learners have that game environments are: x x x x x

Frivolous and time-wasting Only for young children Not a respectable thing to do Easy Unable to provide authentic learning. 29

If mediated environments, particularly virtual worlds, are seen as games, then they may fall prey to the same misconceptions. Whitton and Hollins also place the argument against the use of games in education in the context of adult learning theory, which makes the following (unfounded) assumptions regarding how adults learn differently to children: x Adults need to know why they need to know something before they will put the time in to learn it x Adults need to be self-directing and want to take responsibility for their learning x It is only at the point when they need to apply knowledge in real-life that adults are ready to acquire it. The more open-ended, experimental and disruptive forms of learning that take place in virtual worlds particularly would not meet these criteria. Although the assumptions of adult learning theory are unsupported, if some adults do display these prejudices, this may explain some of the resistance to the use of virtual worlds. 6. Students who Disapprove of the Culture of the Virtual World Two students in the York St John University case study also objected to the behaviour of some of the residents of the virtual world to which they had been exposed. Further comments indicated that this was limited to some public nudity and being in the vicinity of risqué discussions. This is also an aspect referred to by Maine student D when reporting on the behaviour she had encountered inworld and how her peers may have reacted to it. I’m standing in just the original site I went into [a welcome area for new users of the platform] and a guy comes in with an erection that big [indicates through gesture a large erect penis] next to me and I find those sites that ... It's offensive to some people.

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__________________________________________________________________ Maine student R also stated that ‘the people I have met own my own have been perverted’. Other references are to ‘unpleasant conversations’ and ‘creepy’ behaviour. Many Open University students referred to a perceived reputation of virtual worlds as an environment intended for licentious behaviour, perpetuated by sensationalised accounts in the mainstream media of in-world extramarital affairs. Some dismissed this as polarised reporting, making comments such as ‘it’s not like you have to be in Second Life to have an affair’, while others, perhaps those who felt antipathy to the environment anyway, used the media accounting as a credible hook on which to hang their own less tangible reservations. Not all students feel this anxiety towards transgressive behaviour. As Maine student D stated, following the above comment about their classmates finding erections offensive, ‘I don’t really care’. Maine student F stated that ‘I would say the biggest thing for anybody who wants to start using it is, you have to keep an open mind ... if you have one negative experience and you close off ... I don't think you’re going to grow as much in the world.’ As Balsamo states, 30 the roots of the culture of virtual worlds are in the cyberpunk movement, which has transgressive and counter-cultural aspects, in addition to its posthumanism. Entering a virtual world may mean exposing oneself to these counter-cultural communities and transgressive behaviours. As Trinder 31 notes, in the offline world participants adopting conventional value systems are in a position of power, however, once inworld they are in an environment that is unregulated, and in which transgressive behaviour is accepted as the norm. Those students who are used to being part of mainstream culture in offline society may feel themselves to be marginalised once in the virtual world, and find themselves placed in the unusual position of having their conventions challenged. It could be argued that exposing students to situations where these preconceptions are challenged is actually of benefit to their personal growth and ability to act within a diverse society. Acting with maturity and tolerance constitute, it can be argued, part of the ‘graduateness’ which, as educators, we have an obligation to develop. Although this position applies to the experience of interacting within the larger society of a virtual world such as Second Life, it does not apply to the interaction within the group of learners itself. For example, in an established in-world community, such as that supported by The Open University, we find that structure, protocols and rules of behaviour contribute significantly to the development of trust, reputation and authenticity. 32 7. Students’ Need for Realism Although not a factor in students’ resistance to virtual worlds per se, students who have engaged with the environment may find parts of the world cause anxiety. In a discussion of non-humanoid avatars, Maine student L stated that ‘it’s frightening when it's so new to even consider representing yourself as non-human’

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__________________________________________________________________ indicating that, although being in a virtual world may be acceptable, if the in-world experience strays too far from the real it may cross additional boundaries for some students. This could be seen as a clash between two forms of immersionism; those who see the virtual world as an opportunity to immerse themselves in an alternative, but realistic world (a simulation or mirrorworld), and those who see them as an opportunity to break free from all constraints of the physical. 33 When we ask students to enter a virtual world, we are asking them to channel their specific identity as a student into this space, and this may load their expectation of the physical metaphors of their virtual environment. Thus someone joining Second Life motivated by an interest in exploring may be significantly more open to a fantastical environment than he or she would if joining as a student to attend a student event. Also, a student’s physical world identity may be so central to their sense of self that failing to ensure its continuance within the virtual world can place too great a demand on them. For example, during their Fresher's Fair, the Open University found evidence that female Muslim students were distressed to enter the environment with any of the default Second Life avatars, as none were appropriately dressed according to their religious and cultural requirements. A study is currently in progress at the Open University to explore this observation in more detail. For many students, this resistance to a more fantastic environment is a transient phase, and they become adjusted to the nature of the virtual world over time. For these students, the more mundane replications of the physical world act as a bridging point between the familiar and the unfamiliar. For example, in a study by Minocha, 34 it was found that when asked to choose an environment in which to conduct meetings, students preferred realistic classrooms at the start of their engagement with virtual worlds, but switched to more fantastic settings once they became accustomed to the environment. 8. The Categories of Resistance Merriam states that in developing categories within a typology, concepts should be merged or divided where appropriate, to create clear distinct categories, and eliminate redundancy as much as possible; that categories should be formed with ‘parsimony of variables and formulation and scope in the applicability’. 35 These categories aim to fulfil these criteria and, although they are not mutually exclusive, they are discrete and unique. Where students may report lack of presence alongside a disapproval of the environment, it is not always possible to determine cause or effect. Students may feel lack of presence due to having normative values that are opposed to virtual experience and so do not allow themselves to feel presence,. Alternatively, they may have developed normative values that are opposed to virtual experience because they do not feel presence. Or there may be no link. However, the occurrence of these differing attitudes and/or abilities presents added

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__________________________________________________________________ complexity for teachers engaging with students in these environments. The typology of student reactions to learning in virtual worlds is summarised in table 2. Table 2: Typology of students’ reactions to virtual worlds Category A. Positive

B. Need realism C. Not embodied

D. Virtual is inauthentic

E. Don’t like games in education F. Don’t like the culture

Characteristics Students feel presence within the environment, and rate the quality of the learning experience as high. Tend to be risktaking. Tend to be accepting of crossing boundaries. Find the environment to be realistic. Adjust to the unreliability of some aspects of the technology. Positive regarding the overall experience. Experience presence. Uneasy about the non-real aspects. May or may not have a normative stance against the idea of a virtual world, and may be risk-takers, but state that ‘it’s not for them’ and rate the learning experience as low. Their sense of presence is located so strongly within their physical body that they develop no sense of connection with their avatar or the virtual space. Tend to rate the quality of the design as low. Have anxiety about crossing boundaries. Have normative values about the lack of authenticity of the virtual and about the ‘proper’ activity of people being located within the visceral world. They rate the learning activity as a poor experience and even inappropriate or unethical. May or may not experience presence. Identify virtual worlds as a game, possibly focusing on the make-believe aspects of the environment. Gainsay the argument that games have a positive role in education. They rate the learning activity as of low value, and even inappropriate. Have anxiety about the ‘creepy’ behaviour of some of the residents in virtual worlds. Identify this as a rationale for lack of engagement. They rate the learning activity as of low value, and even inappropriate or upsetting.

Students in categories D, E and F also tend to be unaware of the subjective nature of their responses, which, for an educator, may make their assumptions more difficult to challenge. Students in these categories have taken the position that it is permissible to refuse to attend Second Life sessions due to their disapproval of the environment and have also withdrawn from sessions, perhaps not considering them legitimate learning activities and hence ones that could be justifiably dismissed as inappropriate.

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__________________________________________________________________ Not included in the above categories, since this type of learner has emerged from anecdotal reports rather than from case study data, are those learners that feel reticence because they are worried about becoming too immersed. These learners fear that the experience of the virtual world will be so absorbing that they will either end up spending too much time within the world, lose their sense of self, or even simply fear the sense of embodiment within the virtual world or the diminishment of awareness of the physical body that accompanies it, as described by Murray and Sixsmith. 36 9. Casting Doubt on the Categories An aspect that needs to be borne in mind when considering these reactions is that students’ stated reasons for resistance may be very different to their actual reasons; indeed there is some neurological evidence that decisions tend to be made on an emotional basis, and subsequently rationalised to appear to be logical ones. 37 Kirrimuir notes that the responses to virtual worlds are far stronger than for other technologies used in education: The most striking element, over and over, has been the widely varying attitude that people display when confronted by an avatar ... Some people take to it with great enthusiasm; others recoil in dismay, horror or anger. In 18 years, the researcher for VWW hasn’t ever seen such an extreme range of views, and emotions, when academics have been asked, or made, to use a particular ICT system or software. 38 Learners are subject to these same polarised responses. Identifying the trigger for these emotions, and perhaps the underlying cause (if the objection stated in the quote above is simply a rationalisation) is difficult to determine. Possibly it is the alien nature of the environment, the ‘uncanny’ in Bayne’s usage, or the sense of loss of body and of identity which can, in some learners, produce an emotional response that is extreme enough to constitute revulsion. 39 Identifying the causes for it, and find ways to ameliorate its effects, will do much to ensure the take-up of virtual worlds within education. 10. Educators’ Responses to Learners’ Resistance Although a generalisation, grouping students’ reactions in this way does provide the first step in describing and understanding the various reactions. Once these arguments are known and can be prepared for, it may be possible to counter them through debate within the learning activities although, it should be reiterated, students may also be unaware of the subjective nature of their responses, which for an educator may make the assumptions more difficult to challenge. A standard response within psychology 40 is to allow students to voice concerns and, through

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__________________________________________________________________ initial dialogue, express many of their anxieties which the teacher can then assuage, or at least provide, a counter point of view. If taken beyond this initial ‘talking cure’, the resolution of conflicts that may arise due to students’ resistance to virtual worlds raises several ethical dilemmas. On the one hand, educators employing technology in support of learning should not be party to an uncritical acceptance of technology, as there may be legitimate concerns regarding the use of some technologies. On the other hand, the automatic gainsaying of a technology is not a habit we would wish to encourage in our students. Part of the role of education is to equip students with the skills they require in functioning in the world beyond university, and digital literacies, including an ability to interact in virtual worlds, are an integral part of this skill set. Inclusion is also a cornerstone of effective educational practice, and making ‘reasonable adjustments’ to facilitate inclusion is an essential part of learning design. However, this must be done without compromising the provision of new, engaging and diverse learning experiences. Again a quote from Zen and the Art of Avatar Maintenance encapsulates this position: If we ditched every technology which someone just didn’t want to use, then we’d be back to chalk and slate. Actually, someone would probably object to that too. In a job, you have to put up with using things you would rather not to get the job done, and it’s arguable that education should reflect that. 41 An option that could be presented to students is to allow them not to take part as long as they can identify an alternative means to fulfil the learning objectives. 42 This would place the onus on the students to consider their learning needs, and enable educators to take into consideration individual learning preferences without compromising the educational provision. Safeguarding students from harm is essential, but in cases such as those presented here, that take place in Higher Education, these students are adults. Students may be discomforted, and perhaps offended, but these experiences do not, except in extreme cases, constitute ‘harm’. Putting up with discomfort and offence (within reason) is also a life skill that must be acquired to function within the world. Tolerating cultural differences (even those that could be perceived as transgressive) and providing an opportunity to experience these within a critical, reflective and supportive environment such as a classroom could be seen as a valuable learning opportunity. Ultimately, guidelines for addressing these issues need to be identified by the educational community, but put into operation by individual educators according to their personal ethical stance. 43

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__________________________________________________________________ 11. Conclusions Virtual worlds are environments that have enormous potential for exploration, creativity and expression. As such they can be innovative and absorbing resources for learning and teaching, but it is these qualities that can also alienate and deter a minority of students. Anticipating and addressing the opposition that students express can be useful as a springboard to further discussions about learners’ preconceptions of learning, of technology and of their own values. If the use of virtual worlds is to develop into a mainstream activity in institutions of higher education, then identifying, challenging and confronting some of the antipathies to entering and engaging with such spaces, and understanding the sources of these attitudes, will need to be at the foundation of educators’ teaching strategies.

Notes 1

Mark Childs, ‘The Role of Presence in Learning in Telematic Environments’, in M. Childs, L. Schnieders, P. van Parreeren and J. Oomen (eds), DIVERSE Conference Proceedings 2007 & 2008, Haarlem: InHolland University, 73-85. 2009; Jacquie Bennett and Anna Peachey, ‘Mashing The MUVE: A Mashup Model for Collaborative Learning in Multi-User Virtual Environments’, Proceedings of the International Conference of ‘Interactive Computer Aided Learning’ ICL2007: EPortofolio and Quality in e-Learning, 2007’. 2 Michele Ryan and Mark Childs, ‘Synthetic Societies or Pseudo Realities? Debating the Ethical Dilemmas of Second Life’, in Ethics in Business, Management and Computer Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2011). 3 Anna Peachey and Mark Childs, eds., Reinventing Ourselves: Exploring Identity in Virtual Worlds (London: Springer, 2011). 4 Mark Childs and Iryna Kuksa, ‘Why are We in the Floor?’ Learning about Theatre Design in Second LifeTM’, EDULEARN09 International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, Barcelona, Spain, 6-8 July 2009. 5 Mark Childs, Lori Schnieders and Gweno Williams, ‘“This above All: To Thine Own Self be True”: Ethical Considerations and Risks in Conducting Learning and Teaching Activities in Immersive Virtual Worlds’, Interactive Learning Environments, 2011. 6 Ibid. 7 Anna Peachey and Greg Withnail, Exploring Information And Communication Technologies Through A Virtual World, Open University, 2009, viewed 1 February 2010, http://www.open.ac.uk/cetl-workspace/cetlcontent/documents/4ad445933312c.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ 8

Liz Thackray, J. Good and K. Howland, ‘Difficult, Dangerous, Impossible...: Crossing the Boundaries into Virtual Worlds’, Proceedings of the ReLIVE 08 Conference, 20-21 November 2008, Open University, 324-333. 9 Ibid., 330. 10 Sian Bayne, ‘Uncanny Spaces for Higher Education: Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds’, ALT-J 16.3 (2008): 197-205. 11 Ibid., 201. 12 Kathryn Trinder, ‘Fearing your Avatar? Exploring the Scary Journey to the 3rd Dimension’, Proceedings of the ReLIVE 08 Conference, 20-21 November, 2008, Open University, 2008, 356-358 13 Cathie Heeter, ‘Communication Research on Consumer VR,’ in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, eds. F. Biocca and M. R. Levy (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 191-218. 14 Craig Murray and Judith Sixsmith, ‘The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality’, Ethos 27.3 (1999): 315-343. 15 Akiko Hemmi, Sian Bayne and Ray Land, ‘The Appropriation and Repurposing of Social Technologies in Higher Education’, Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning 25 (2009): 19-30. 16 Kate Amdahl, ‘New World, New Words!’ The Winged Girl Blog, 23rd May, 2007, http://kateamdahl.livejournal.com/13121.html, 2007. 17 Carl Mitcham, Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 277. 18 Ibid., 277. 19 Ibid., 283. 20 Ibid., 290. 21 Ibid., 280. 22 Ben Goldacre, ‘Serious Claims Belong in a Serious Scientific Paper’, The Guardian, 21st October, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/bad-science-publishingclaims. 23 Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology, 298. 24 Michael Begg, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst and Hamish Macleod, ‘Transforming Professional Healthcare Narratives into Structured Game-InformedLearning Activities’, Innovate 3.6 (2007). 25 Sara de Freitas, ‘Using Games and Simulations for Supporting Learning’, Learning, Media and Technology 31.4 (2006): 343-358. 26 Angela McFarlane, Anne Sparrowhawk and Ysanne Heald, Report on the Educational Use of Games: An Exploration by TEEM of the Contribution Which Games can Make to the Education Process. TEEM. http://www.teem.org.uk/publications/teem_gamesined_full.pdf. 2002.

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__________________________________________________________________ 27

Constance Steinkuehler, Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games, (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2005), viewed 3rd June, 2005, https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/mmogresearch.html. 28 Mark Bell, Sarah Smith-Robbins and Greg Withnail, ‘This is Not a Game: Social Virtual Worlds, Fun and Learning’, in Researching Learning in Virtual Worlds, eds. A. Peachey, J. Gillen, D. Livingstone and S. Smith-Robbins (London: Springer, 2010). 29 Nicola Whitton and Paul Hollins, ‘Collaborative Virtual Gaming Worlds in Higher Education’. ALT-J. 16.3 (2008): 221-229. 30 Anne Balsamo, ‘Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture!’ in Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 359. 31 Kathryn Trinder, ‘Fearing your Avatar? Exploring the Scary Journey to the 3rd Dimension’, Proceedings of the ReLIVE 08 Conference, 351-361. 32 Anna Peachey and Greg Withnail, ‘A Sociocultural Perspective on Negotiating Digital Identities in a Community of Learners,’ in Digital Identity and Social Media, eds. S. Warburton and S. Hatzipanagos (USA: IGI Global, 2011). 33 Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 244. 34 Shailey Minocha, ‘Conducting Empirical Research in Virtual Worlds’, Innovative Research in Virtual Worlds, 2011 Conference, Coventry, 3-4 November 2011. 35 Sharan Merriam, Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1998). 36 Murray and Sixsmith, ‘The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality, 327. 37 Robin Wight, ‘The Evolution of Advertising Engagement: From Mad Men to Virtual Worlds’, ReLIVE11 Creative Solutions for New Futures, Opening Keynote 21-22 September 2011, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, 2011. 38 John Kirriemuir, Zen and the Art of Avatar Maintenance: A Meditation on Virtual Worlds, Eduserv, 2010, viewed 25th Jan, 2011. http://virtualworldwatch.net/vww/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Zen-redux.pdf. 39 K. Johnson, personal communication. 40 R. Gilbert, personal communication. 41 Kirriemuir, Zen and the Art, 3. 42 F. Deepwell, personal communication. 43 Childs, Schnieders and Williams, ‘To Thine Own Self be True’.

Bibliography Amdahl, Kate. ‘New World, New Words!’ The Winged Girl Blog, 23rd May, 2007, http://kateamdahl.livejournal.com/13121.html, 2007.

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__________________________________________________________________ Balsamo, Anne. ‘Signal to Noise: On the Meaning of Cyberpunk Subculture!’ Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1995. Bayne, Sian. ‘Uncanny Spaces for Higher Education: Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds’. ALT-J 16.3 (2008): 197-205. Bell, Mark, Sarah Smith-Robbins and Greg Withnail. ‘This is Not a Game: Social Virtual Worlds, Fun and Learning’. Researching Learning in Virtual Worlds, edited by A. Peachey, J. Gillen, D. Livingstone and S. Smith-Robbins. London: Springer, 2010. Begg, Michael, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst and Hamish Macleod. ‘Transforming Professional Healthcare Narratives into Structured Game-InformedLearning Activities’. Innovate 3.6 (2007). Bennett, Jacquie and Anna Peachey. ’Mashing The MUVE: A Mashup Model for Collaborative Learning in Multi-User Virtual Environments’. Proceedings of the International Conference of ‘Interactive Computer Aided Learning’ ICL2007: EPortofolio and Quality in e-Learning, 2007. Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Childs, Mark. ‘The Role of Presence in Learning in Telematic Environments’. DIVERSE Conference Proceedings 2007 & 2008, edited by M. Childs, L. Schnieders, P. van Parreeren and J. Oomen, 73-85. Haarlem: Holland University, 2009. Childs, Mark and Iryna Kuksa. ‘Why are We in the Floor? Learning about Theatre Design in Second LifeTM’. EDULEARN09 International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies. Barcelona (Spain), 6-8 July, 2009. Childs, Mark, Lori Schnieders and Gweno Williams. ‘This above All: To Thine own Self be True: Ethical Considerations and Risks in Conducting Learning and Teaching Activities in Immersive Virtual Worlds’. Interactive Learning Environments, 2011. de Freitas, Sara. ‘Using Games and Simulations for Supporting Learning.’ Learning, Media and Technology 31.4 (2006): 343-358.

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__________________________________________________________________ Goldacre, Ben. ‘Serious Claims belong in a Serious Scientific Paper’, The Guardian, 21st October, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/21/bad-science-publishingclaims. Heeter, Cathie. ‘Communication Research on Consumer VR.’ Communication in the Age of Virtual Reality, edited by F. Biocca and M. R. Levy, 191-218. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995. Hemmi, Akiko, Sian Bayne and Ray Land. ‘The Appropriation and Repurposing of Social Technologies in Higher Education’. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 25 (2009). Kirriemuir, John. Zen and the Art of Avatar Maintenance: A Meditation on Virtual Worlds. Eduserv, 2010. Viewed 25th Jan, 2011. http://virtualworldwatch.net/vww/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Zen-redux.pdf. McFarlane, Angela, Anne Sparrowhawk and Ysanne Heald. Report on the Educational Use of Games: An Exploration by TEEM of the Contribution Which Games can Make to the Education Process. TEEM, 2002. http://www.teem.org.uk/publications/teem_gamesined_full.pdf. Merriam, Sharan. Qualitative Research and Case Study Applications in Education, 2ND Edition. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 1998. Minocha, Shailey. ‘Conducting Empirical Research in Virtual Worlds’. Innovative Research in Virtual Worlds, 2011 Conference. Coventry, 3-4 November 2011. Mitcham, Carl. Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Murray, Craig and Judith Sixsmith. ‘The Corporeal Body in Virtual Reality’. Ethos 27.3 (1999): 315-343. Peachey, Anna and Mark Childs, eds. Reinventing Ourselves: Exploring Identity in Virtual Worlds. London: Springer, 2011. Peachey, Anna and Greg Withnail. Exploring Information and Communication Technologies through a Virtual World. Open University, 2009. Viewed 1 February, 2010. http://www.open.ac.uk/cetl-workspace/cetlcontent/documents/4ad445933312c.pdf.

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__________________________________________________________________ Peachey, Anna and Greg Withnail. ‘A Sociocultural Perspective on Negotiating Digital Identities in a Community of Learners’. Digital Identity and Social Media, edited by S. Warburton and S. Hatzipanagos. USA: IGI Global, 2011. Ryan, Michele and Mark Childs. ‘Synthetic Societies or Pseudo Realities? Debating the Ethical Dilemmas of Second Life’. Ethics in Business, Management and Computer Science. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Steinkuehler, Constance. Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Madison: University of Wisconsin. 2005. Viewed 3 June 2005. https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/mmogresearch.html. Thackray, Liz, J. Good and K. Howland. ‘Difficult, Dangerous, Impossible...: Crossing the Boundaries into Virtual Worlds’. Proceedings of the ReLIVE 08 conference, 20-21 November 2008. Open University, 2008. Trinder, Kathryn. ‘Fearing your Avatar? Exploring the Scary Journey to the 3rd Dimension’. Proceedings of the ReLIVE 08 conference, 20-21 November 2008. Open University, 2008. Whitton, Nicola and Paul Hollins. ‘Collaborative Virtual Gaming Worlds in Higher Education’. ALT-J 16.3 (2008): 221-229. Wight, Robin. ‘The Evolution of Advertising Engagement: From Mad Men to Virtual Worlds’. ReLIVE11 Creative Solutions for New Futures, Opening Keynote 21-22 September, 2011. The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, 2011. Mark Childs is a Senior Research Fellow at Coventry University where he develops and researches online synchronous learning experiences and virtual collaborations, with 15 years experience in this field. He completed a PhD on learners’ experience of presence in virtual worlds in 2010 and his area of interest is digital identity, embodiment and telepresence. Anna Peachey spent 4 years researching identity and community in virtual worlds as a Teaching Fellow with The Open University UK. She continues to teach, study and research with The Open University, and established their virtual world project with her company, Eygus Ltd. She has published a range of texts on activity in virtual worlds and is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer book series on Immersive Environments.

Problem-Based Learning in Virtual Worlds: Two Case Studies in User Interface Design Spyros Vosinakis, Panayiotis Koutsabasis, Panagiotis Zaharias and Marios Belk Abstract Problem-based Learning (PBL) is a pedagogy based on student collaboration and self-directed learning. In PBL, students learn by addressing ill-defined and openended problems and then reflecting on their experiences. This chapter aims to investigate the suitability of the virtual world as a platform for hosting PBL activities and to report on their strengths and difficulties in terms of usability, collaboration support and learning effectiveness. We set up a virtual world using open source software, developed a number of in-world supporting tools, and ran two PBL activities in the area of User Interface Design. Students were asked to collaboratively design and present the user interface of applications in various problem areas and platforms. Each group collected resources, presented and argued about concepts, and built together an interactive user interface prototype with explanatory annotations. The final prototypes were presented to the class. The learning activities have been evaluated and the results revealed several strong points of virtual worlds that validate their potential for PBL activities, but also indicated a number of problems to be tackled. Key Words: Virtual worlds, virtual environments, education, Problem-based Learning, PBL, user interface design, computer-supported collaborative work, CSCW. ***** 1. Introduction Problem-based learning is a pedagogy directly related to the basic tenets of constructivism that has been widely adopted during the last 20 years in traditional and online educational settings. In PBL, students learn by addressing ill-defined and open-ended real-life problems collaboratively, usually without prior knowledge about the problem domain. During the process students identify their knowledge deficiencies, decide what they need to learn, propose solutions, evaluate them and reflect on their experiences, thus developing problem-solving strategies and building domain knowledge in a self-directed manner. 1 This approach has several advantages, as students are actively gaining transferable skills by investigating, explaining and resolving meaningful problems. Group participation in problem-solving activities, as well as the fact that they are working on real-life problems rather than simplified ones, are highly motivating factors for them. Studies have shown that students following a PBL approach have developed

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__________________________________________________________________ more effective problem-solving and self-directed learning skills without having significantly lower performance in understanding facts and concepts, compared to students following traditional approaches. 2 Collaboration and interaction are two of the critical factors for PBL success in both traditional and online learning settings. 3 Therefore, it is not surprising that PBL has been characterized as one of the most appropriate learning methods in virtual worlds. 4 Virtual worlds provide great opportunities for both synchronous and asynchronous learning and are highly collaborative, interactive and persistent 3-D environments. Instructors and educators can prepare learning materials as inworld tutorials and develop interactive learning scenarios, and students/learners are invited to interact with the world and become active participants in these scenarios. However, the majority of institutions that currently use virtual worlds as part of their curricula simply employ them for resource sharing and conferencing, and the common activities that take place within the environment are text- or voice-based communication, document storage and exchange, group discussions, and presentations. 5 These approaches do not exploit such powerful affordances of virtual world in as presenting real-time simulations of custom environments, in which users can actively participate in an experiential and constructivist manner. To date there have been few attempts to realize PBL and other constructivist learning methods in virtual worlds. 6 This is to some extent reasonable since virtual worlds form a new medium that is currently being explored in many dimensions with respect to their affordances for learning. Much of the relevant research on PBL is still conceptual and information about detailed evaluation with regard to specific methods and practices is lacking. We argue that virtual worlds should be explored with a view to setting up novel educational interventions. These interventions should support and visualize evolving in-world activities with the presence and participation of people who construct and manipulate 3-D objects and tools. The aim of our work is to explore meaningful ways to facilitate collaborative PBL activities in virtual worlds. We present the design and evaluation of two PBL interventions in the area of user interface design. Our goal was to engage students in PBL activities through their collaborative design, experimentation, and evaluation of user interface prototypes. We designed an educational environment on an existing virtual world platform, built a number of supporting tools for collaboration and prototyping, and facilitated a set of learning activities over two studies. The first intervention was a laboratory study that occurred as an additional lecture to undergraduate students of product design engineering, and lasted for a single day. For this study we performed a detailed evaluation of the activities, combining various methods of data collection and analysis, in order to explore dimensions of collaboration, learning, and usability. Following the first study, we used the same environment for a field study. This was carried out as part of the laboratory course of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) at a computer science

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__________________________________________________________________ department and lasted two months. In this study we put much emphasis on the evaluation of collaborative learning activities according to the PBL philosophy, and were able to obtain qualitative results about the learners’ experience within the virtual world. Our evaluation results and experiences in these studies reveal several strengths and weaknesses of virtual worlds as potential PBL platforms. 2. Virtual Worlds as Constructivist Learning Platforms Virtual Worlds have a number of important characteristics that can facilitate educational activities. They can be used to support distant and asynchronous collaboration of learning communities. They offer various tools for communication in real-time, such as voice and text chat, avatar co-presence, gestures, etc. They also have the means for offline collaboration, such as creating and maintaining resource collections organized using various spatial metaphors, commenting, placing annotations, sending offline messages, etc. Although traditional CSCW (Computer-Supported Collaborative Work) tools may be considerably more effective in some of the aforementioned tasks, virtual worlds have the advantage that they afford all these features in an integrated environment that allows for mutual awareness. This characteristic is very important for the socialization and co-operation of the learning community. 7 Compared with other learning tools, virtual worlds have the unique properties of presence and autonomy. They may generate rich experiential learning environments, through which learners find themselves in realistic or imaginary spaces, perform experiments, observe the results and formulate theories. Given that imitation of reality is not necessary, a virtual learning environment may use custom visual metaphors and rules for the behavior of its objects to present complex abstract concepts in novel ways. 8 Instructors and learners may also be able to create their own interactive objects to communicate their ideas and concepts in a much more vivid way compared to textual and graphical descriptions. Finally, virtual worlds are an engaging medium that may attract younger learners in a variety of ways. Based on the aforementioned characteristics, virtual worlds seem to be ideal candidates as constructivist learning environments, because: x The sense of presence that users feel when immersed in a virtual world allows them to perceive it as a space they belong to, rather than a digital environment they are interacting with, such as a website. x The characteristics of direct manipulation and persistence found in virtual worlds lets users reform the space and construct their own meaningful structures. x The embodiment of users as avatars in the virtual world allows them to interact with others in richer ways, e.g. using

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__________________________________________________________________ nonverbal forms of communication, compared to other means of mediated interaction, such as chat, forums, etc. x The expressiveness of animated interactive 3-D graphics can be used to present abstract or complex concepts that are difficult to comprehend in a textual form using metaphors. This helps learners to interpret the environments or even construct their own interpretations and communicate them to their peers. x The real-time simulation and 3-D interaction capabilities of virtual worlds can be exploited to implement appropriate tools and devices for experiential learning and problem solving. There has not been much research into how PBL and other constructivist learning methods can be realized in virtual worlds. Girvan and Savage proposed Communal Constructivism as a potentially appropriate pedagogy for use in Second LifeTM. 9 According to communal constructivism, learners try to build knowledge not only with a focus on themselves but for future learners as well. Some distinctive features of this pedagogy are: interaction with the environment to construct knowledge, active collaboration of learners, and transfer of knowledge between groups. Bignell and Parson claim Problem-based Learning is one of the most appropriate learning methods in virtual worlds, especially in Second Life. 10 They support the idea that instructors and educators can prepare learning materials as immersive tutorials and develop interactive learning scenarios, and that students/learners can be invited to interact with the world and become active participants in these scenarios, usually in small groups. A number of case studies has been presented in the last few years that involved PBL activities in virtual worlds. Brown et al. demonstrated the suitability of Second Life for problem-based learning through the mapping of learning activities to PBL goals, as stated in the framework of Hmelo-Silver. 11 The problems posed to the students were to create short video clips from their activities in Second Life using the technique of machinima (i.e., the generation of cinematic video by capturing in real-time the rendered screen of virtual worlds). Their findings indicate that the development of wider transferable skills can be realized through virtual worlds such as Second Life. In another related study, Good et al. reported findings from a case study with a ‘strong’ PBL approach where students were asked to create learning experiences within Second Life for external clients. 12 The emphasis was mainly placed on the process of how students formed groups and created the interactive learning experiences by using the affordances of Second Life. It was found that Second Life can contribute to PBL as a pedagogical approach in several ways, such as supporting the roles of tutors and students,

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__________________________________________________________________ facilitating their relationships, enhancing students’ motivation and ownership of the project, and easing the assessment activities by the tutors. Omale et al. sought to discover how unique attributes of virtual worlds – such as the avatars, the 3-D space, and the bubble dialogue boxes – are being used for PBL activities. 13 They present a case study of an online PBL environment in which participants were asked to select appropriate learning theories and instructional strategies for a science education program. The evaluation results suggest that the virtual world had a positive impact on the learners’ social presence, but that learning was not enhanced; rather, they were distracted by the technology. Also, the evaluation results showed that the virtual world attributes promoted negotiation, clarification, and brainstorming among participants, but had less influence on organizational issues. Vrellis et al. used Second Life to implement a collaborative Problem-based Learning activity following a constructivist approach. 14 The virtual world presented a simple physics experiment (calculating the direction of a bullet in a shooting task). Pairs of students had to collaboratively propose a solution to the problem using a calculator, two rulers, and a shared whiteboard. The empirical results highlighted several advantages of virtual worlds for constructivist learning, such as the persistence of the environment, the in-world object manipulation, and the use of learning tools. Notwithstanding the value of these approaches for investigating the appropriateness of virtual worlds as constructivist learning environments, these works do not fully conform to important PBL principles mainly because they do not pose authentic, ill-defined problems to students who in turn are not engaged in self-directed learning and deep critical thinking. In some cases the problem domain was related to activities that are inherently supported by virtual worlds, e.g., machinima production, and in other cases the 3-D environment has been mainly used for group discussions and brainstorming. Activities such as the use of tools to collaboratively experiment with various problem solutions have not been included. 3. A Virtual World for User-Interface Design The authors set up a virtual world as a platform to host PBL activities in User Interface Design. The implementation was based entirely on open source software. The world server was installed in a standalone PC using the OpenSimulator platform, 15 and the FreeSwitch server 16 was used for voice communication support. Problem-based Learning activities are based on the communication and collaboration of the learning community. Therefore, the Virtual World that will host these activities must satisfy these requirements. To specify the user community needs, designers should first identify and analyse the common tasks that students are expected to carry out during a Problem-based Learning session. For our study in the area of user interface design we have identified the following tasks in group-based PBL activities:

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__________________________________________________________________ x In the early stages, students discuss the problem, write down facts and reveal aspects for which further knowledge may be required. x Then they assign roles to group members, search for and share resources, and formulate, present, and explain their ideas. x Finally, they collaboratively assemble a final solution, refine it, and present it to the class to be further evaluated. The platform we have employed for our study provided inherent support for only for some of these tasks. We have therefore implemented a number of additional tools that were available to students during the study in order to overcome these obstacles and to enhance the collaboration affordances of the environment. The implemented tools were: x Resource: an object that links to external web resources. It can be used by the teacher to provide some initial resources (guidelines, design patterns, templates, etc.) to the students, to aid them during their tasks, and by the student groups in order to share and organize the resources they found in their self-directed learning activities. x Comment Recorder: a tool to record and playback text messages. It can be used to take notes from conversations during the early collaboration stages and to record viewer comments during the final evaluation stage. x Annotation: an object that contains a written message. Annotations can be used for asynchronous collaboration between group members (e.g., in the form of comments, notes about things to be done, role descriptions, etc.) or they may be attached to the user interface prototype as further notes or explanations of design choices. x Interface Element: an object with scripted behaviour that can be used as a user interface component in the working prototype. During the final stages of the learning activity, students can combine and configure copies of the Interface Element object to design buttons, windows, and image containers. Using these elements, they can collaboratively construct an interactive user interface prototype.

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__________________________________________________________________

b.

a. c.

d.

Image 1: The supporting tools of the environment. a. Interface Element, b. Resource, c. Comment Recorder, d. Annotation. © 2011. Image courtesy of the authors. These objects were given to each student at the start of the activity. Students could insert multiple copies of them into the environment. Image 1 presents a screenshot of the four tools. 4. User Studies A. Laboratory Study The first study was an exploratory laboratory experiment that simulated the use of virtual worlds for user interface design. The participants were ten students, who had considerable experience in user interface design, since that they had all attended the courses: Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, and Multimedia Design. The participants were split into three equivalent groups in terms of their experience in virtual worlds and their user interface design skills. They communicated with an audio link and text chat, thus simulating a remote collaborative work situation. The Problem-based Learning activity was given to the participants in the following ‘design brief’: Design the user interface of a multimedia kiosk system for browsing available rooms to let in the island of Syros. The intended users are tourists (Greeks and foreigners), who can access the system from the harbour of Syros. You should take into account usability guidelines for multimedia presentations and information seeking. You should design the 5-7 most basic screens of the system, in wireframes.

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__________________________________________________________________ In addition, the participants were presented with an abstract work plan that included several optional tasks with typical times for completion. The learning goals of this activity were: a) to discover the usability and accessibility requirements of touch screen interfaces, b) to understand the differences in the design of such interfaces compared to other, more conventional ones, and c) to apply this knowledge in a specific practical context. We have constructed a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) method for interaction analysis of problem-based computer supported collaborative learning in virtual worlds. More specifically, we used the following methods: x Monitoring of student behaviour: this was achieved by video capturing of the activity within the virtual world, logfile analysis with respect to the use of the tools, and observation of the state of the world during and after the exercise. x Dialogue analysis: voice chat was recorded for most of the exercise and an analysis of utterances was performed. We followed the taxonomy of Fussell et al., 17 who classify utterances in one of the following content categories: Procedure, task status, reference, internal state and acknowledgement. x Students’ self-reporting: We used a questionnaire that covered several aspects of the problem-based CSCL experience, as well as follow-up discussion. x Tutors’ evaluation of the outcome: This was performed during and after the activity, taking into account all data gathered. The method for interaction analysis explores the dimensions: task performance, group functioning, social support, and learning performance and outcome. The first three dimensions are those proposed by Daradumis et al., 18 while the fourth was added to investigate issues particular to the Problem-based Learning process. The learning activity lasted for a total of 6.5 hours. The first 2 hours were devoted to a tutorial about the use of the virtual world. Then, a total of 3.5 hours were devoted to the activity of user interface design, presentations (Image 2) and follow-up discussion. A total of 1 hour was allocated to the breaks. Participants were asked how much time they would need to carry out the user-interface task in a face-to-face situation and deliver work of the same quality. Some of them said about the same time (3.5 hours); others said about an hour less. This is a quite interesting result considering other time consuming activities in face-to-face situations (e.g., time and space arrangements).

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__________________________________________________________________

Image 2: Group presentation inside the virtual world. © 2011. Image courtesy of the authors. All teams made use of the tools provided in the environment to document the design process (Table 1). Table 1: What tools of the virtual world contributed to the development of your knowledge about the problem? (Bad 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Excellent). Mean

Median

Mode

St.Dev.

Resources

5.5

7.0

7

2.9

Annotations

6.0

6.0

6

1.6

Comment listener

4.1

5.5

0

3.7

Interactive objects

6.7

7.0

7

1.4

Chat (text)

7.5

8.0

9

1.9

Voice Chat

9.0

10.0

10

0.5

We observed that students devoted a large portion of their available time to discussing their understanding of the design problem. Their discussions were intertwined with periods of self-directed learning, which occurred either from ‘assignments’ or ‘requests’ by other team mates (e.g., ‘Will you find photos and content about hotels?’) or from individual initiative (e.g., ‘I can find some text to write about the history of Syros’). This was also identified by the dialogue analysis (Image 3): most of discussion was about the procedure and task coordination

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__________________________________________________________________ (38.7%) and acknowledgements (24.0%), while less time was devoted to discuss about the task status (6.2%) and to refer to virtual objects and tools (11.0%).

Image 3: Categories of Utterance Self-evaluation results for individual and group performance were quite similar for all participants. The average self-rating was: 7 (1: Bad – 10: Excellent) (st.dev.: 1.1). That was very similar to their rating of their team’s performance, i.e., an average of 7.1 (st.dev.: 1.3). Their responses varied more when they were asked about their performance with respect to the task of user interface design. They rated their individual performance with an average of 6 (st.dev.: 1.8) and their team’s performance with an average of 5.9 (st.dev.: 1.9). Having closely observed the process, we consider the self-assessment scores somewhat misleading. In fact, students experienced many difficulties in using the virtual world, and the fact that they finally succeeded in making use of the tools encouraged them to rate their performance rather higher than appropriate. On the other hand, the final outcome of the process was interesting from many aspects. Students have underestimated their performance in this respect because they needed more time for improvements. With regard to active participation, we observed (mainly from dialogue analysis and self-reporting) that all participants were actively involved in the collaboration and conversations, especially in the first phases of the collaborative activity. All teams exhibited active participation with respect to monitoring the progress of group work. This was especially evident from dialogue analysis: Quite a few utterances were questions about how to proceed with the activity and specific tasks (14.1%), or acknowledgements (24.0%) of group work. Each team used a different style of coordination of the work. All participants reported that the result of their

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__________________________________________________________________ work was a collaborative product and that the environment contributed positively to their collaboration. Students performed very well with respect to social support; they were all highly motivated and acquainted with each other. More specifically, they rated their commitment towards the achievement of their goal at an average of 7.5 (1: Poor – 10: Excellent). The main reason for this rating not being higher was that some of the participants got carried away by their curiosity to explore the virtual world! When they had to wait for their team mates, they kept exploring the world in a playful manner. During the learning task we identified several disagreements about aspects of the design. However, these were openly expressed, discussed, and quickly resolved. This is a positive finding: the collaborating participants in the virtual world seem encouraged to individually contribute to group work as well as to constructively resolve conflicts that may arise. Regarding the learning performance and outcomes, the main result was that all three teams achieved the goal of the exercise (i.e., to provide the design of the user interface of an information kiosk) at a fairly satisfactory level. All teams demonstrated interesting designs that took related guidelines and content into account. However they all reported that they would need more time to develop fully their design solutions. The participants reported that they had developed their knowledge about the activity at hand considerably (an average of 6; 1: Bad – 10: Excellent; st. dev.: 1.2). They also reported that they had devoted about half of the time to self-directed learning: an average of 4.4 (1: None – 10: All; st.dev.:2.3). Also, when asked in which situations they had best contributed to the team with respect to whether they followed the agreed plan, they admitted that their contributions had been more suitable when they had stuck to the plan (an average of 7.2; 1: Alone – 10: ‘I stick to the plan’; st. dev.:1.9). Regarding the issue of developing problem-solving skills, students first reported on a number of problems faced: most reported difficulties in using the virtual world, and a few found it difficult to document their design choices and opinions with some of the tools provided. Then they reported on their ability to overcome these problems (average of 5.2; 1: Bad – 10: Excellent; std. dev.: 2.4). The main reason for not performing better in this respect was that they had limited experience with virtual worlds. However, we note that the final outcome of the activity (i.e., the user-interface design) was quite satisfactory for all teams. The main positive aspects of the experience were identified as follows: (a) ‘Shared space’: Participants felt engaged with the shared space and motivated to work towards their common goal. (b) ‘Persistence’: They highlighted the fact that they could log off or postpone some of their activities in the world (especially when they performed self-directed learning) and that seeing the world as they had left it was extremely conducive to mentally focusing fast on their task. (c) ‘The virtual world promotes problem-based collaboration’: It was fairly easy to discuss

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__________________________________________________________________ the task since they had all material uploaded to the shared space, to compare design ideas and comment on others’ work. (d) ‘Fun, engaging, and immersive’: Despite the long periods time in the lab, all participants were kept occupied in the virtual world (e) ‘Awareness of others’ work, activity, and progress’, mainly as a motivating factor in one’s own work. The main problems identified were as follows: (a) ‘Focus on the virtual world environment, not on the task’: Some users’ attention was reduced by the difficulties of using the environment. (b) ‘Hard to perform organizational tasks’: The teams did not manage to keep track of their decisions. (d) ‘The roles of participants were not mapped to their appearance’: They would like to easily visualize their roles through their avatars (e.g., by wearing special clothes or tags). (e) ‘More 2-D functions’: e.g., the ability to embed applications from their desktop environment in the virtual world. (f) ‘Familiarity with the environment’: This was perhaps the most important constraint for this study. None of the students was proficient with the use of a virtual world, although some had limited experience. They felt that if they had been more familiar, the final result would have been much better. B. Field Study This second study was based on the rationale of the first. The main purpose was to employ a virtual world environment for a Problem-based Learning task: designing user interfaces. The participants were forty students at the Computer Science Department of the University of Cyprus, who were following the course Human-Computer Interaction in the fourth year of studies. 57% of the participants were male and 43% were female and their age varied from 20 to 24. The main pedagogical goal of this experiment was: a) to design an interface according to multimedia and usability design guidelines, b) to understand the differences and particularities of the design of such interfaces within virtual worlds as compared to the design in a more conventional manner such as using a visual editor, and c) to apply this knowledge in a specific practical context. The course lectures took place three times weekly: Two 75-minute theoretical lectures and a 2-hour hands-on lab session. The course content was primarily concentrated around principles of interaction design, usability, and user experience. These included key components of HCI such as requirements specification, task analysis, system design, prototype implementation, research methodologies, usability evaluation methods, and techniques with an emphasis on heuristic evaluation and usability testing (see Table 1). The teaching team comprised the

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__________________________________________________________________ authors themselves, who also provided technical support and facilitated the collaboration and learning activities during the whole intervention.

Image 4: A user interface prototype designed by the students and presented in-world. © 2011. Image courtesy of the authors. This study lasted for two months and followed the HCI course programme. The participants formed eight groups of 3-4 students. Each group had to design user interfaces for different interactive systems. The overall educational objective was to teach the students all the phases of the User-Centric Design (UCD) process utilizing a Virtual World. To undertake the learning tasks and activities, the same virtual world environment and in-world collaboration tools and techniques (i.e., live text and voice chatting, forums for comments, etc.) were employed as in the laboratory study described in previous sections. Most of the students did not have any previous experience with such a virtual world. Therefore, a series of introductory tutorials on virtual worlds like Second Life, OpenSim, etc., was conducted (e.g., how to configure an avatar, how to create objects, etc.). After the introductory courses, the students were asked to design and develop interfaces for several interactive systems (e.g., Realtor’s Agency, Online Game Shop, University’s Management System, Smart Home Management System, etc.) utilizing the virtual world environment. The interface design of each system was based on the Logical User-Centred Interactive Design (LUCID) methodology. 19 Some indicative tasks the students had to undertake throughout the design/development cycle were: (a) review literature on similar systems, (b) determine the typical users of the system, (c) analyse the interface’s design,

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__________________________________________________________________ following the Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) methodology, (d) design and develop the system’s interface prototypes (Image 4), (e) design users’ navigation model. During the two-month project, the students participated in a weekly Problembased Learning activity through the virtual world. The students and instructors created avatars. All communication during the PBL activity was done through the virtual world environment. In each session, the students were initially given a problem. They then had to discuss the problem using in-world chat tools. They wrote notes on what information was known, and what information was needed. They then had to specify an action plan for working on the problem. Furthermore, the students engaged in an independent study on their learning issues, using such things as digital libraries and encyclopaedias and resource people (i.e., other avatars in the virtual world). Then students shared and evaluated the resources gathered for the various learning issues, and reviewed what they had learned from working on the problem. Throughout the PBL session, the instructors’ avatars acted as a facilitators and mentors; they asked the students questions like, ‘What is it that you don’t know?’ or ‘Where can you find that information?’ or ‘What do you think should be done next?’ The facilitators did not provide clues with any of these questions, but, rather, prompted the students to consider ‘next steps’ and processes along the way, thus engaging them in a typical constructivist learning situation. Table 2 describes how typical PBL activities (according to (Barrett, 2005) 20) were implemented in this study. The main positive aspect was that the vast majority of the students felt that the virtual world provided the means for a fruitful collaboration. Students claimed that the environment functioned as a shared space where processes such as discussion and exchange of ideas, creation of new ideas, and brainstorming were promoted in an effective and efficient way. For some students – particularly those without similar virtual world experience – this study provided new ways of communicating and collaborating. Some of the students noted that the virtual world provided the opportunity for them to ‘prove their communication skills’. Some of their comments are very expressive: -

‘The virtual world helped us to share ideas for the design process.’ ‘I found the environment very useful while testing the interfaces we created.’ ‘Comments from teammates facilitated the learning process. Comment listener and chatting were the tools that helped me the most.’ ‘The virtual world helped us in the process of work allocation.’

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__________________________________________________________________ -

‘It helped me to be more patient with the other members of the team.’

Table 2: Implementation of typical PBL activities in the virtual world – adapted from Barrett, 2005. Typical PBL activities 1) Students are presented with a problem ‘Design interactive interfaces for the system of your choice according to the main user tasks you have identified.’ 2) Students discuss the problem in small groups. They clarify the facts of the case. They define the problem. They brainstorm ideas based on prior knowledge. They identify what they need to learn to work on the problem (learning issues). They reason through the problem and specify an action plan for working on the problem. 3) Students engage in independent study on their learning issues outside the tutorial. This can include use of: library, databases, the Web, resource people and observations.

4) They come back to the PBL tutorial(s) sharing information, peer teaching, and working together on the problem.

5) They present their solution to the problem. 6) They review what they have learned from working on the problem. Participants engage in self, peer and tutor review of the PBL process and reflect on each person’s contribution to that process.

Interface design in the virtual world Throughout the course, students make use of virtual world tools and affordances to discuss the problem and coordinate their own. Introductory lectures are given on the PBL processes, the OpenSimulator environment and the scripting language. Chat tool is used for collaboration . The ‘Annotation’ tool is used to make notes and clarify and define the problem and the learning issues. The ‘Resource’ object is utilized to access external Web resources. The ‘Comment Recorder’ is used to record user messages. The Annotation tool is used to make notes while studying the learning issues respectively. The Chat tool is used for synchronous communication. The ‘Annotation’ tool is used to share the findings of each student. The ‘Interface Element’ object is used as a shared interactive canvas thus helping them to work together . The ‘Interface Element’ object is used to present their solution. Chat tool is used. Students were ‘flying’ from island to island to see the work of their peers.

The students also pointed out the affordance of persistence of the virtual world, which helped motivate them to go on for a period of two months. Additionally they emphasized the ability to see the work and the progress that other groups had achieved. This kind of transparency was unprecedented for the most of the students, and led to a greater engagement and positive feelings, despite several technical problems. The main problems identified were very like those found in the first study. There was a strong focus on handling the technical problems that arose. In addition

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__________________________________________________________________ students stated that they would need more 2-D functionalities such as the ability to embed and share applications from their desktop environment in the virtual world, to co-edit documents etc. Another problem that was common to both empirical studies was the issue of unfamiliarity with the environment. The majority of the students did not have previous experience with such virtual worlds, while some of them claimed that virtual world would have to be more ‘authentic’ in terms of representational fidelity. 5. Discussion The results of and experiences in the user studies indicate that virtual worlds have considerable potential as constructivist learning environments, provided that learning interventions are designed as authentic problems, students are engaged in co-creation activities, and related tools are provided within the virtual world. On the other hand, they still lack the usability and robustness of more traditional computer-supported approaches, such as the Web, and a lot of time and effort has to be invested to properly prepare and support the learning environment throughout the courses. A notable advantage of the use of the virtual world compared to other technology-mediated approaches to PBL lies in the awareness and integration. The group progress was visible to all, so both the tutors and the students could be aware of the activities that took place, then observe and comment on the documents and solutions that were proposed. This integrated environment allowed remote users to collaboratively construct solutions and communicate in real time using voice or text chat. In the second case they could also record their discussion for later use. Furthermore, the virtual world and the tools created for the course offered various collaboration capabilities that allowed the group to work on their solution in parallel and exchange opinions and ideas through messages, drawings and sketches. Finally, the creative freedom offered by the virtual world, allowing students to modify their appearance and construct and decorate their own collaborative space, was highly engaging for most of them. These results comply with the claims that virtual worlds have significant potential as constructivist learning environments. Students were engaged in the medium and, despite the difficulties, managed to complete their tasks in a highly collaborative and constructive manner. On the other hand, the problems identified were sometimes critical and required interventions from the instructors. These findings suggest that virtual worlds are still not mature enough as learning environments, and further research is needed to improve their usability and effectiveness. Inexperienced users often find it difficult to navigate and to manipulate elements in 3-D. Also, the large number of available commands and parameters needed to make full use of the environment makes the user interface quite complicated. Therefore, in-world support by experienced users should be available during the learning activities in order to assist new users to

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__________________________________________________________________ overcome such difficulties. Furthermore, PBL activities are based on student collaboration, but there was a notable lack of collaborative work tools in the virtual world. Elements such as shared documents and sketch boards would be useful during these activities. Ideally, as some students suggested, these tools should be interfaced with desktop applications that they are familiar with, such as wordprocessing and image-processing programs. Finally, virtual worlds are also lacking in tools and metaphors for organizational coordination and awareness (e.g., means to visualize work progress, task dependencies, user roles and assignments). To overcome these issues, the design of virtual worlds as constructivist learning environments has to take into account computer-supported collaborative work practices combined with intuitive metaphors for the 3-D user interface.

Notes 1

John R. Savery and Thomas M. Duffy, ‘Problem Based Learning: An Instructional Model and its Constructivist Framework’, Designing Constructivist Learning Environments, ed. B. G. Wilson (Englewood Cliffs, 1995), 135-148. 2 Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver, ‘Problem-Based Learning: What and How Do Students Learn?’, Educational Psychology Review 16 (2004): 235-266. 3 Roisin Donnelly, ‘Blended Problem-Based Learning for Teacher Education: Lessons Learnt’, Learning, Media and Technology 31 (2006): 93-116; Jancis K. Dennis, ‘Problem-Based Learning in Online vs. Face-to-face’, Education for Health 16 (2003): 198-209; Selcuk Ozdemir, The Effects of Individual and Collaborative Problem-Based Learning Using an Online Asynchronized Learning Tool on Critical Thinking Abilities, Academic Achievements, and Attitudes Toward Internet Use, Phd dissertation, (Ankara: Gazi University Graduate School of Educational Sciences, 2005). 4 Simon Bignell and Vanessa Parson, ‘Best Practice in Virtual Worlds Teaching: A Guide to Using Problem-Based Learning in Second Life’, Viewed 7 November 2011, Online archive available at http://previewpsych.org/BPD2.0.pdf. 5 Christos Bouras, Eri Giannaka and Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos, ‘Virtual Collaboration Spaces: The EVE Community’, Proceedings of 2003 Symposium on Applications and the Internet (2003): 48-55; Andrea De Lucia, Rite Francese, Ignazio Passero and Genoveffa Tortora, ‘Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Campus on Second Life: The Case of SecondDMI’, Computers & Education 52 (2009): 220233; Teresa Monahan, Gavin McArdle, and Michela Bertolotto, ‘Virtual Reality for Collaborative E-Learning’, Computers & Education 50 (2008): 1339-1353. 6 Elaine Brown, Marie Gordon and Mike Hobbs, ‘Second Life as a Holistic Learning Environment for Problem-Based Learning and Transferable Skills’, in Proceedings of Researching Learning in Virtual Environments Conference, (2008): 39-48; Judith Good, Katherine Howland and Liz Thackray, ‘Problem-Based

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__________________________________________________________________ Learning Spanning Real and Virtual Words: A Case Study in Second Life’, Alt-J: Research in Learning Technology 16 (2008): 163-172; Nicholas Omale, Wei-Chen Hung, Lara Luetkehans and Jessamine Cooke-Plagwitz, ‘Learning in 3-D Multiuser Virtual Environments: Exploring the Use of Unique 3-D Attributes for Online Problem-Based Learning’, British Journal of Educational Technology 40 (2009): 480-495. 7 Shailey Minocha and Ahmad Reeves, ‘Design of Learning Spaces in 3D Virtual Worlds: An Empirical Investigation of Second Life’, Learning, Media and Technology 35 (2010): 111-137. 8 Alvaro Sánchez, Jose María Barreiro, Victor Maojo, ‘Design of Virtual Reality Systems for Education: A Cognitive Approach’, Education and Information Technologies 5 (2000): 345-362. 9 Carina Girvan and Timothy Savage, ‘Identifying an Appropriate Pedagogy for Virtual Worlds: A Communal Constructivism Case Study’, Computers & Education 55 (2010): 342-349. 10 Bignell and Parson, ‘Best Practice in Virtual Worlds Teaching’. 11 Brown, Gordon and Hobbs, ‘Second Life as a Holistic Learning Environment’. 12 Good, Howland and Thackray, ‘Problem-Based Learning Spanning Real and Virtual Words’. 13 Omale et al., ‘Learning in 3-D Multiuser Virtual Environments’. 14 Ioannis Vrellis, Nikiforos M. Papachristos, Joan Bellou, Nikolaos Avouris and Tassos A. Mikropoulos, ‘Designing a Collaborative Learning Activity in Second Life: An Exploratory Study in Physics’, in Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, (2010). 15 ‘Open Simulator Home Page’, Viewed 7 October 2011, http://www.opensimulator.org. 16 ‘FreeSwitch Home Page’, viewed 7 October 2011, http://www.freeswitch.org. 17 Susan R. Fussell, Robert E. Kraut and Jane Siegel, ‘Coordination of Communication: Effects of Shared Visual Context on Collaborative Work’, in Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, ACM, (2000): 21-30. 18 Thanasis Daradoumis, Alejandra Martinez-Mones and Fatos Xhafa, ‘A Layered Framework for Evaluating On-Line Collaborative Learning Interactions’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 64 (2006): 622-635. 19 Charles B. Kreitzberg, The LUCID Framework: An Introduction (New Jersey: Cognetics Corporation, 2000). 20 Terry Barrett, Iain Mac Labhrainn and Helen Fallon, eds., Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-Based Learning (Galway: AISHE and CELT, 2005).

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Bibliography Barrett, Terry, Mac Labhrainn, Iain and Fallon, Helen, eds., Handbook of Enquiry and Problem-Based Learning. Galway: AISHE and CELT, 2005. Bignell, Simon and Vanessa Parson. ‘Best Practice in Virtual Worlds Teaching: A Guide to Using Problem-Based Learning in Second Life’. Online archive accessed Jan. 2011. http://previewpsych.org/BPD2.0.pdf. Bouras, Christos, Eri Giannaka and Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos. ‘Virtual Collaboration Spaces: The EVE Community’. In Proceedings of 2003 Symposium on Applications and the Internet, 48-55, 2003. Brown, Elaine, Marie Gordon and Mike Hobbs. ‘Second Life as a Holistic Learning Environment for Problem-Based Learning and Transferable Skills’. In Proceedings of Researching Learning in Virtual Environments Conference, 39-48, 2008. Daradoumis, Thanasis, Alejandra Martinez-Mones and Fatos Xhafa. ‘A Layered Framework for Evaluating On-line Collaborative Learning Interactions’. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 64 (2006): 622-635. De Lucia, Andrea, Rite Francese, Ignazio Passero and Genoveffa Tortora. ‘Development and Evaluation of a Virtual Campus on Second Life: The Case of SecondDMI’. Computers & Education 52 (2009): 220-233. Dennis, Jancis K. ‘Problem-Based Learning in Online vs. Face-to-face’. Education for Health 16 (2003): 198–209. Donnelly, Roisin. ‘Blended Problem-Based Learning for Teacher Education: Lessons Learnt’. Learning, Media and Technology 31 (2006): 93-116. Fussell, Susan R., Robert E. Kraut and Jane Siegel. ‘Coordination of Communication: Effects of Shared Visual Context on Collaborative Work’. In Proceedings of the 2000 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 21-30. ACM, 2000. Girvan, Carina and Timothy Savage. ‘Identifying an Appropriate Pedagogy for Virtual Worlds: A Communal Constructivism Case Study’. Computers & Education 55 (2010): 342-349.

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__________________________________________________________________ Good, Judith, Katherine Howland and Liz Thackray. ‘Problem-Based Learning Spanning Real and Virtual Words: a Case Study in Second Life’. Alt-J: Research in Learning Technology 16 (2008): 163-172. Hmelo-Silver, Cindy E. ‘Problem-Based Learning: What and How Do Students Learn?’. Educational Psychology Review 16 (2004): 235-266. Kreitzberg, Charles B. The LUCID Framework: An Introduction. New Jersey: Cognetics Corporation, 2000. Minocha, Shailey and Ahmad Reeves. ‘Design of Learning Spaces in 3D Virtual Worlds: an Empirical Investigation of Second Life’. Learning, Media and Technology 35 (2010): 111-137. Monahan, Teresa, Gavin McArdle and Michela Bertolotto. ‘Virtual Reality for Collaborative E-Learning’. Computers & Education 50 (2008): 1339-1353. Omale, Nicholas, Wei-Chen Hung, Lara Luetkehans and Jessamine CookePlagwitz. ‘Learning in 3-D Multiuser Virtual Environments: Exploring the Use of Unique 3-D Attributes for Online Problem-Based Learning’. British Journal of Educational Technology 40 (2009): 480-495. Ozdemir, Selcuk. ‘The Effects of Individual and Collaborative Problem-Based Learning using an Online Asynchronized Learning Tool on Critical Thinking Abilities, Academic Achievements, and Attitudes toward Internet Use’, Phd dissertation, Ankara: Gazi University Graduate School of Educational Sciences, 2005. Pearson, John. ‘Investigating ICT using Problem-Based Learning in Face-to-Face and Online Learning Environments’. Computers & Education 47 (2006): 56-73. Sánchez, Alvaro, Jose María Barreiro and Victor Maojo. ‘Design of Virtual Reality Systems for Education: A Cognitive Approach’. Education and Information Technologies, 5 (2000): 345-362. Savery, John R. and Thomas M. Duffy. ‘Problem Based Learning: An Instructional Model and its Constructivist Framework’. In Designing Constructivist Learning Environments, edited by B.G. Wilson, 135-148. Englewood Cliffs, 1995.

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__________________________________________________________________ Vrellis, Ioannis, Nikiforos M. Papachristos, Joan Bellou, Nikolaos Avouris and Tassos A. Mikropoulos. ‘Designing a Collaborative Learning Activity in Second Life: An Exploratory Study in Physics’. In Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, 2010. Spyros Vosinakis is a Lecturer at the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. His research interests include: Virtual Reality, Intelligent Virtual Agents, Collaborative Virtual Environments, Adaptation and Personalization in 3D Environments. Panayiotis Koutsabasis is a Lecturer at the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean, Greece. His research interests include: design and evaluation methods for HCI, natural HCI, intelligent and personalized interaction, User Experience studies and systems thinking in Interaction Design. Panagiotis Zaharias is a Visiting Academic at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus. His research interests include: E-learning design, Usability and User experience evaluation methods, Virtual worlds in education and training, Serious games and MMOGs. Marios Belk is a Ph.D. Student and Research Associate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus. His research interests include: Web Adaptation and Personalization Environments and Systems, Database Systems, Ontologies, Internet Technologies and the Semantic Web.

Lok’tar Ogar! Leadership in the World of Warcraft Melissa Johnson Farrar Abstract Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) like World of Warcraft are viable platforms for people to practice leadership skills. There are currently over 12 million people playing World of Warcraft and while not all of them take leadership roles as raid or guild leaders, a large portion of the games population has some raid or guild leadership experience. As the negative perception surrounding video gamers disappears and is replaced by a legitimate recognition of the time and dedication put into leadership skill development, gamers may finally feel more inclined to post their raid and guild leadership skills on resumes, thus improving their career advancement opportunities. Additionally, individuals seeking to develop their leadership skills in a safe, simulated environment would have a viable platform to use. This chapter explores how leadership skills are used and developed in the virtual game environment and real life leadership opportunities and responds to the following questions: are leadership skills context specific, are leadership skills transferable from an MMORPG to real life, and is the development of leadership skills between contexts transferable? 1 Key Words: MMORPG, experiential learning, World of Warcraft, leadership, transferability. ***** 1. Introduction World of Warcraft is a Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with over 12 million players.2 Players interact with the video game in real time, are able to communicate live with other players and affect the outcome of other players experiences through their own actions. World of Warcraft has a variety of ways players can interact within the game, but the goal of most of the player base is to level a character and participate in end-game raiding events with members of their guild. I began playing World of Warcraft in October 2007 during the Burning Crusade Expansion. I spent the first year and a half questing and levelling characters. I joined a guild of friends and family members, people I knew in real life, but did not began participating in any end game dungeons or raid until the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. My raiding experience began only after deciding I wanted to participate in the end game events. I left my guild and joined a medium core raiding guild. I raided with Infinity for a year and a half during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I was an officer and a main healer on the 25-man raid team,

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__________________________________________________________________ raiding 5-6 nights a week. As the end of the expansion neared and internal guild politics started breaking the guild apart, I made the move to a new realm in hopes of new raid opportunities on a higher population server. I found a new 25-man team and dropped my raiding down to 3-4 nights a week. When the Cataclysm expansion was released on 7 December 2010 I made the decision to cut back on raiding. I am currently a substitute healer for my guild. When someone is absent, I am ready to fill in; this raid position has allowed me to clear all current raid content while keeping my total raiding time to 3-4 days per month. I bring my previous experience as a raid team member to my research. I have participated on teams who continued to persevere through the toughest battles and those that fell apart on the first boss. As a healer, whose main raid responsibility is to mitigate damage taken and keep everyone alive, I have been able to observe a variety of team dynamics as the team works to progress through the raid content. Role Playing Games (RPGs), specifically World of Warcraft are viable platforms for people to practice leadership skills 3 and are increasingly becoming recognized as such. ‘Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.’ 4 While not all players are raid or guild leaders, a large portion of the games population is or has some raid or guild leadership experience. Many of these raid and guild leaders do not hold positions of leadership in their real lives. The other leaders in our guild including class leaders and [guild administrators] include unemployed bartenders, construction workers, students, a priest, a folk music singer, web designers, moms and government employees. 5 It has been suggested that rather than focusing on the game as something outside of life, we should understand games as meaning generating spaces within life. In games, ordinary rules of social interaction are changed, but that does not mean they are not important and consequential. 6 Role Playing (RP) in games like World of Warcraft ‘involves performing a socially defined position or status with its associated duties and functions.’ 7 The point of role playing is to ‘provide learning in context, in a situation where support systems are in place and assistance is ready to hand, but the environment and practice are otherwise as authentic as possible.’ 8 Role Playing Games (RPGs) are potentially powerful spaces for practising and developing skills…as they have the unique ability to provide experiences that are entirely constructed by both

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__________________________________________________________________ designer and player…This kind of environment…is essential for the development of competency as a participant in a democratic society. 9 2. Basic Guild Structure Guilds in the World of Warcraft are a collection of players who develop a smaller community within the larger game. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. 10 There are many different types of guilds whose primary focus is what attracts other players to seek guild affiliation. A guild’s primary focus typically surrounds one of the following areas: social, levelling, raiding, Player vs. Player (PvP), or Role Playing (RP). Guilds can be structured and run however the members of the leaders of the guild choose. Frequently there is one Guild Master who selects a collection of Guild Officers to help run and facilitate the day to day aspects of running a guild. Guild Leaders (Guild Master and Guild Officers) often face challenges depending on the focus of their guild. Most frequently, raid teams are comprised of guild members, a self selected ‘family’ of players who frequently play and interact with each other. Raid Leaders, typically Guild Officers, face the challenge of building successful raid teams with the current active players. End-game raids require a team of players to form groups of 10 to 25 different players, consisting of different types of players and compete, as a team, against non-player controlled (NPC) monsters. Each team must work together to complete the objective of killing the monster while the monsters’ special abilities attempt to eliminate the raid team. Each raid team is led by a raid leader whose responsibility is to place the correct combination of players together who have the greatest chances of success in killing the monster. Several factors must be considered to put a team together; raid experience, gear level, player class, and talents as well as real life schedules and personal dynamics all play key roles in decisions a raid leader must make when building the team. The success of the raid team is not guaranteed by selecting the right team. Raid leaders ‘conduct extensive after-action reviews of their performances as well as that of the leader.’ 11 Raid and Guild Leaders, as well as players, ‘customize their own game interfaces to offer statistics and rate performance in areas they consider critical to their strategy – all key skills for any management professional.’ 12 The experiential learning available within the context of an MMORPG can:

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__________________________________________________________________ accommodate more complex and diverse approaches to learning processes and outcomes; allow for interactivity; promote collaboration and peer learning; allow for addressing cognitive as well as affective learning issues; and perhaps most important, foster active learning. 13 The structure of different roles within a guild or a raid team mirror the structures commonly found in business and education environments. 14 The skills being used by guild and raid leaders within World of Warcraft should be able to transfer into a real world environment. 3. Leadership-Member Exchange Theory Leadership plays a significant role in supporting the cohesiveness, communication, and relationship development of the team. Using Leader-Member Exchange Theory (LMX), the leader’s actions contribute to members feeling included or excluded. These feelings contribute to the overall success of the individual members of the team. 15 LMX theory suggests low or high quality relationships between the leader and member will develop over time based on the level of the individual member’s performance. 16 ‘LMX relations involve high levels of interpersonal trust’ 17 so the leader must work to build and sustain the LMX relationship. There are several behaviours leaders can exhibit to help maintain and further develop these high quality trust and LMX relationships. The goal of Scandura and Pellegrini’s study 18 was to explore the relationship of different trust dimensions and the quality of LMX relationships. The results indicate ‘high-quality relationships are characterized by social transactions involving high levels of affective trust.’ 19 Implications of these findings indicate it is not only important for the leader to build this trust, but to sustain it as well through the development of high-quality LMX relationships. When developing or joining an existing team, the leader’s trust in an employee or team member plays a significant role in whether the employee or team member feels part of the group. 20 Employees who feel trusted by their supervisors have a better or higher quality LMX relationship. When this higher quality LMX relationship exists, the employee experiences a ‘higher levels of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact.’ 21 Additionally, a leader needs to remain aware of placing members in this out group status based on non-work related factors. A leader who has built trust using only non-work related tasks will, in a sense, have created their own problem in team members feeling they are not part of the group. As the leader, in order to increase group productivity, team members must feel included. 22 Trust can be built in high-quality LMX relationships through the initial interactions between members, by increasing communication, by recognizing personality differences, and by clarifying the expectations of the leader and the engagement of the member.

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__________________________________________________________________ Initial Interaction. Dockery and Steiner’s study 23 discusses the process of how exchange relationships develop. Understanding how this relationship develops will help explain how a leader can use that knowledge to build higher quality relationship with members. They tested three hypotheses: 1) Liking by a leader for a member during the initial interaction significantly influences the leader to initiate a leadership exchange with that member; 2) Upward-influence tactics directed toward the leader by a member during the initial interaction significantly influence the leader to initiate a leadership exchange with that member; 3) Greater member ability significantly influences the leader’s decision to initiate a leadership exchange with that member. 24 Their results showed correlational support between liking and ability as consistently significant predictors of LMX. 25 ‘Members who have higher ability would be seen as having capability for high productivity, and members who are liked by the leaders would be seen as making full use of this capability.’ 26 As a leader, initial interactions with the included members of a team will help foster a high quality LMX relationship. A leader who identifies ability and likes team members on the outside helps to bring those members into the group. The data also suggest members tend to place greater importance on the ‘emotional or interactive aspects’ of their relationship with the leaders, while the leader, who must also consider productivity, may put more attention toward member ability. 27 When working with a team to develop trust or high quality LMX, it is important for the leader to consider the emotional needs of the team members and not just their perceived abilities. Failure to consider likability and ability by the leader could result in low quality LMX and a less trusting or less productive team. Increasing Communication. According to the 2003 study by Campbell, White, & Johnson, ‘leaders can improve their relationships with members by focusing on interpersonal communication strategy.’ 28 A less effective leader, one with little trust or respect from team members, can improve their effectiveness by choosing a communication strategy based on one of the following heuristic: 1. Am I striving to consolidate internal processes, to maximize output, to adapt, or to build human commitment by communicating this message? 2. Do I intend to inform, direct, consult, or build trust with the member? 3. How urgent is my need to communicate with the member? 4. What is the quality of my current relationship with the member?

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Will the member’s face wants or sociality rights be threatened by my message? 6. Should my primary emphasis be on my message or my relationship? 29 An effective leader may be able to process these questions innately before speaking to members, while a less effective leader will need time to reflect on these answers. In doing so, the leader is focusing the communication with the member and as a result, opening the opportunity of trust and respect to be built in the leader-member relationship. Personality Differences. When looking at a building a strong dyad relationship between leader-member, the leader should consider the personality dynamic between the two. Bernerth, Armenakis, Field, and Giles studied the connection between employee and supervisor emotional stability, extraversion, intellectual openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness and their effect on group function. 30 They found the more similar the dyad personalities exhibited a stronger relationship and higher quality LMX. There results also indicate there may be a connection between the size of the groups in relation to the personality differences, where the differences seem to be magnified in a smaller group setting. 31 When building trust with team members focusing on the similarities between the personality traits of the leader-member will provide the greatest result in developing this relationship. In a small group setting, it is important for the team leader to consider the personality of potential candidates joining the team. A new team member who is too different in personality may cause the team productivity to decrease and contribute to a lack of trust or lower quality LMX within the group. Expectation and Engagement. In their study to investigate which leader behaviours mediate the relationship between leader expectation and employee engagement, Bezuijen, ven den Berg, van Dam, and Thierry explored how managers could stimulate engagement from employees in learning activities. 32 They found when leaders had higher expectations for employees, the employees participated more in learning activities and the quality and performance of the leader-member relationship was higher. These behaviours resulted in the leadermember dyad setting more challenging goals and increased opportunities for learning. 33 The leader has the ability to influence employee learning by setting high and specific learning goals. While building trust and respect within this relationship, the leader can promote ability and capability through employee professional development and learning activities by setting high expectations and increasing learning opportunities. 4. Experiential Learning Theory The Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) is based on Bruner and Piaget’s work in cognitive theory and developed by Kurt Lewin’s research on group dynamics. 34

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__________________________________________________________________ Experiential Learning is not just dealing with things happening to us, but instead, looking at what we do with those things. 35 The core of the model is a learning cycle which reflects effective information processing. It depicts learning in the following four-stage cycles: 1. The learner has a concrete experience. 2. This concrete experience is the basis for observation and reflection. 3. The observations are assimilated into an idea or theory from which implications for action can be deduced. 4. These implications serve as guides in acting to create new experiences. 36 Experiential Learning and Learning Acquisition. ERIC defines learning as the acquisition of skills and attitudes in addition to knowledge content. 37 ‘Individual learning refers to the change of skills, insights, knowledge, attitudes, and values acquired by a person through experience, self-study, technology-based instruction, and observation. 38 If the application of the content, through the acquisition of skills, and the acceptance of the relevance of the content, through a change toward a positive attitude, are not achieved, then often the concept and the content lay fallow and unused. 39 Learning occurs when learners are active in the process. 40 ‘Experiential education can validate the learner’s real-world experiences and provide continuing relevant opportunities.’ 41 Experiential Learning in Groups and Teams. ‘Organizational learning represents the enhanced intellectual and productive capability gained through corporate-wide commitment to continuous improvement.’ 42 Team leadership involves joining the ideas of others in a thoughtful, caring way to achieve mutually agreed on, quality results. 43 Group or team learning alludes to an increase in capability, that is, people’s individual learning as well as the integrated use of people’s cognitive powers, values, self-esteem, motivation, emotional development, and personal qualities. 44 Groups move through a development process to achieve the desired goal. Each group has its own incentives and problems with several potential solutions. 45 How groups move through this process to arrive at a solution contributes to the overall effectiveness of the group.

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__________________________________________________________________ Experiential Learning in Games. Games are used to develop learning; they can lead to improved general learning, increased motivation, and improved performance. 46 .

Experiential learning in a simulation is different from the traditional classroom. Students have to learn many different things to be participants. They have to learn their roles, the rules, strategies, relationships, outcomes, and the interrelationships among the components. 47 The process of completing and delivering projects in a team-based system in business or industry is quite similar to that of accomplishing missions in a teambased guild system in a Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). 48 During a game a student has not merely to ‘learn’ some information, but has to fit it into a social structure in order to achieve a particular goal…The game supplies the structure for retention and usable information. 49 ‘As a result, online games can be an efficient tool for game players to develop their own leadership skills and engage in enriching, holistic leadership experiences.’ 50 Leadership Skill Development in Experiential Learning. ‘In the 21st century, leaders are no longer those who take important information and distribute it from a superior position.’ 51 One of the most important characteristics of the [leader] is to actively engage in the process of guiding participants to reflect on, intensify, and generalize their own and other group members’ experiences. 52 ‘By engaging [leaders] in opportunities for focused practice over several sessions and for informed peer feedback on their performance, [we] better achieve the conditions known to result in improved learning.’ 53 ‘Individuals may have blind spots regarding their strengths and areas that need improvement. They may thus require feedback from others to facilitate interpersonal growth.’ 54 Leaders are those who make rapid decisions and persuade team members, while listening to others’ opinions and modifying and integrating them to pursue higher missions. MMORPGs are suitable environments for people to have this type of leadership experience. 55

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__________________________________________________________________ 5. Experiential Learning in World of Warcraft Kayes, Kayes, and Kolb use the Experiential Learning Theory (ELT), based on ideas developed by Kurt Lewin’s research on group dynamics, as ‘a framework for understanding and managing the way teams learn from experience.’ 56 This same three pronged framework, commonly applied to real world teams and groups, can also be applied to guilds and raid team structures within World of Warcraft. To learn from their experiences, teams must create a conversational space where members can reflect on and talk about their experiences together. 57 Within the game, several spaces exist for guilds to converse, reflect and discuss their experiences together. The game provides a chat channel for text based messages to be communicated to all members of the guild. The messages are tagged as guild messages and can only be seen by registered guild members. In addition to the guild chat channel, an officer channel allows guild officers to have a separate space for conversation and decision making in a chat channel unviewable by other members of the guild. In addition to the chat channels provided by the game, many guilds use a Voice over IP (VoIP) system to communicate in real time audio. It is impractical for a guild to all talk on the same phone line on a traditional conference call as guilds are not limited by geographical space; many members are out of state or out of country. Specific VoIP systems developed by video gamers, like Mumble, Team Speak, and Ventrilo, are commonly used by guilds to communicate. These voice servers allow members to connect to a voice chat channel increasing the ease of communication. World of Warcraft is playable 24 hours a day. The only downtime for the game is a scheduled maintenance time for servers to be updated and content to be hotfixed or patched to the user. As a result, guild members can communicate and share stories and information at all times. The complication is that not all members are on all the time. This leaves the opportunity for members to miss important information and discussion. To deal with this, most established guilds develop a webpage for guild members. A niche market of webhosting allows guilds to develop web pages specific to their needs. These web pages commonly include forums or bulletin boards for threaded communication and conversation. They are often restricted to guild members, but the public can usually access documents and forums dedicated to guild recruitment. Mega-guilds, like Alea Iacta Est on the Earthen Ring-US server, are branching out and are now offering a podcast catering to guild news, discussions, and concerns. 58 As a team develops from a group of individuals into an effective learning system, members share the functional tasks necessary for team effectiveness. 59 This can most commonly be seen in the officer structure of a guild. A guild is led by a Guild Master (GM) who is supported by a variety of levels of officers. The exact structure is flexible to meet the needs of a variety of guild structures. The Light Bringers on the Winterhoof-US server list their officer structure as: Bank admin,

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__________________________________________________________________ Member Liaison, Equipment Specialist, Class Specialist, Dungeon Master, Dungeon Coordinator, Events Coordinator, and Morale/Mediator Officer. A description of each role is included so guild members understand the purpose of each position. 60 The Syndicate from Arygos-US server list their guild structure and descriptions as: Guild Master, Guild Overseer, Officer, Officer Alt, Veteran Raider, Raider, Associate, Initiate, and Probation. 61 Cataclysm, the current expansion of World of Warcraft, brought with it many changes for guilds. 62 Guilds can now level up within the game by members completing quests and earning achievements. Unlocking a new level as a guild opens up perks and rewards for guild members. There are new achievements designed for guild members to complete together. As players earn individual skills in their professions, they can use their skills to help and support guild endeavours. For example, a guild member who has levelled up their skills in Alchemy can access the ability to create special potion cauldrons for the guild. These cauldrons add additional statistics to members as they participate in raids and dungeons together. 63 Now, non-officer members can make significant contributions to the guild making everyone more effective. Teams develop by following the experiential learning cycle. 64 The experiential learning cycle consists of four different stages; diverging, assimilating, converging, and accommodating. This learning cycle illustrates the process a guild raid team goes through when working on a new raid instance. In the diverging stage, ideas are generated and information is gathered from many different points of view. When a raid team encounters new content they will often conduct research on strategies other teams have used to complete the encounter. This research often comes from videos posted to the web, blogs, and other forum postings. After the information on different strategies has been gathered, it is compiled in the assimilation phase. The raid team decides on a strategy to attempt and sets out to implement the strategy in the raid encounter. During the initial attempts at new raid content, the raid team processes through the different strategies until they converge on the one that works best for their team make-up and skill level. Once a particular strategy is been deemed most successful, all future attempts at the specific portion of the raid instance will follow the strategy. If new members join the group, they will be expected to subscribe to the established strategy. This level of accommodation from a new team member will stay in effect until the strategy proves to no longer be effective. This cycle is repeated at every new challenge within the raid instance because each phase or boss fight within the raid instance poses a new set of challenges for the team to deal with. 6. Transformational Leadership and Adaptive Performance Charbonnier-Voirin, El Asremi, and Vandenberghe define adaptive performance as ‘the ability to work creatively and learn new skills, the capacity to

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__________________________________________________________________ manage stressful situations, as well as the capacity to accommodate diverse social contexts.’ 65 Within the context of World of Warcraft, the actions of guilds and raid teams fit in this definition as providing opportunities for adaptive practice to exist. If guild and raid leaders act as transformational leaders, they ‘present challenging visions of the future that instil commitment, favour the emergence of empowerment in teams, and have been found to enhance outcomes closely related to adaptive performance such as creativity and organizational innovation.’ 66 The perception of a transformational leader varies when look at different levels of involvement. At the individual level, transformational leadership refers to ‘leadership behaviours that are experienced and perceived as discretionary stimuli and result from differential relationships being developed between leaders and followers.’ 67 On a 10-man raid team, this might look like the raid leader using private chat channels to provide specific information regarding an individual’s specific performance instead of bringing up the issue to the whole team in a public conversation. This action empowers the individual to make changes to his performance and improve his participation with the team. At the team level, transformational leadership is ‘conceptualized ‘as a climate variable that is shared among all team members.’’ 68 If a guild or raid leader is also a transformational leader, the team might appear to have no leader. Individuals might pool resources to improve team supplies for item enchantments, potions, and buff foods for the betterment of the team. Ultimately, goals and objectives are decided upon by raid and guild leaders, but the decisions are made knowing the motivations, strengths, and weaknesses of team members. Transformational leadership reflects a climate where ‘a team has established shared norms regarding the prevalence of transforming actions from the leader such as idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration.’ 69 For a raid team leader these actions could involve encouraging team members to review several raid boss strategies and view problems from different angles, developing team members to reach higher performance by evaluation of combat log parses, and energizing them through a challenging content. ‘These influences should be facilitated when the team has developed practices and norms that encourage personal initiatives, new ideas and creative thinking.’ 70 Promoting higher order values provides meaning to work by creating a state where work activities come to be aligned with personal values. 71 A transformational raid leader could achieve this result when the individual team member is more concerned with completing the team goal (downing the boss) than the individual goal (acquiring best-in-slot gear for his toon). ‘As transformational leaders’ followers are more connected with their deep values and implicit selfesteem, they are less susceptible to the experience of negative emotions that oftentimes accompanies changing stressful, and flexible work context.’ 72 In a raid setting, this type of leadership might contribute to alleviating player frustration at

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__________________________________________________________________ repeated wipes on challenging boss fights. The individual level of transformational leadership enhances team member performance by transforming each individual’s attitude. At the team level, this style of leadership ‘acts via a climate that embodies a shared understanding of the leaders influence, challenging vision, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration.’ 73 Charbonnier-Voirin, El Asremi, and Vandenberghe define organizational climate as ‘a set of shared perceptions regarding the policies, practices, and procedures that convey messages regarding what is rewarded, supported, and valued in an organization, and is often thought to emerge through social interaction process at the group level.’ 74 This type of climate for innovation reflects behaviours that encourage flexibility, the expression of ideas, and learning among team members. It also denotes behaviours, supported and rewarded by the organization, that value individuals, teams and leaders taking charge and adapting to changing contexts. 75 ‘A climate for innovation conveys the message that building on one’s inner resources to contribute to the organization’s mission creatively and adaptively is a strategic priority for the organization.’ 76 7. Transfer of Leadership Skills and MMORPGs One important distinction of an MMORPG is the game is played in real time and players are interacting with other players in addition to the computer programmed characters (NPC). 77 This interaction allows for this to be an authentic environment in which to practice leadership skills and the ability to transfer of skills, ‘the consequences or impact training in one situation has on a new situation,’ 78 from the game to the real world. Jang and Ryu’s 79 study explores the in-game experiences of MMORPG players and their leadership both in game and offline. They found players who belong to an online game community, and prefer to play as a team, encounter more in game leadership opportunities. ‘As the findings show, online games, especially MMORPGs might have much potential in acquiring leadership skills and transferring them into real-life situations.’ 80 The study recognizes its limits to the research because the information was gathered through online surveys and selfreporting in South Korean online game players and recommend further research be conducted in the area of leadership skill transferability. Intentional transfer of these skills outside of the game to a real world scenario (using the game as a simulator) is more likely to occur when the following five transfer principles are considered: perceived relevance, practice and feedback, follow-up, identical elements, and generalization. 81 Direct connections between the relevant situations in World of Warcraft and the real world occur with frequency, but using the game as a simulator would require the trainer to be familiar with the game and know how to work with non-gamers to use the platform effectively. A model for current players of the game to see how the skills they have acquired in-

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__________________________________________________________________ game can be used outside of the game can be developed to help gamers transfer these high level leadership skills into their real lives. 8. Conclusion If business is beginning to see and use games like World of Warcraft to support and train executives, they need to be aware of the mail room clerk who already possesses the leadership skills for which they are looking. If we know World of Warcraft raid and guild leaders exist, yet they are facing barriers to using their skills in real life, we can examine those barriers and create strategies and supports for existing leaders to put their skills to use in the real world. As the negative perception surrounding gamers disappears and is replaced by a legitimate recognition of the time and dedication put into leadership skill development, gamers may finally feel more inclined to post their raid and guild leadership skills on resumes. Highly skilled leaders assist companies and organizations in creating positive change, assisting in mission, vision and goal achievement, in obtaining higher profits, and creating positive, dynamic work environments. These same qualities can be found in the experiences of successful guild leaders. These underutilized resources need to be tapped. Key Terms Boss: The boss is a non-player combatant (NPC) in a raid or dungeon and is the primary target for combat. The boss is generally a few levels above the cap and cannot be defeated by a solo at-level player. Each boss has its own set of special abilities and skills it uses to attack the raid team. Teams able to effectively manage these attacks have a higher likelihood of success in defeating the boss. Rewards (loot) for defeating the boss include gold, higher quality clothes and weapons. The amount of loot dropped by each boss is dependent on the number of people in the group (more loot drops in bigger raids) but averages 2-3 pieces in a 10-man raid and 4-5 pieces in a 25-man raid. Loot is typically class specific and drops randomly so raid teams must repeatedly defeat the boss to outfit all players and classes with all available loot. Expansion: Over the course of time, the content of the game has been expanded. Expansions include major increases or changes to content. These increases always include a higher level cap, new 10- and 25-man raid content, new 5-man dungeons, new questing locations to level, and new skills and abilities awarded at the new levels. Other changes have included: new playable races or classes, new professions, and new talent trees (ways to personalize the power of your skills and abilities).

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__________________________________________________________________ Guild: A player may elect to join a guild within World of Warcraft. While a realm might comprise tens of thousands of people, guild membership offers players the chance to connect together in a much smaller community. Guilds range in size but can contain no more than 1,000 individual characters or toons. A guilds purpose can also differ, many are comprised of friends and family, are considered social or casual, while others are hardcore raid focused. Guilds will often have an application and screening process and will only grant membership to those applicants who seem to show a similar interest in the goals of the guild. Guilds can gain levels and rewards when guild members participate in quests, raids, and dungeon activities. Progression level raid teams are most typically comprised of guild members. Healer: There are three different roles a player can play on a raid team; Tank, Damage, or Healer. The Tank’s primary responsibility is to use his skills and abilities to focus the current targets attacks on him. While this is occurring, the Damage players use their skills and abilities to cause damage to the target, depleting its health pool and killing it to gain loot. Healers use their skills and abilities to regenerate the health of any team member who has been affected by the damage being dealt by the current target. Hotfix: A hotfix is a small update for in-game content typically focused on repairing in-game bugs where game content is not responding in the way it was designed. Level (and levelling up): Players work to raise their toon’s level by completing quest objectives and other game content designed to grant experience (XP). All toons start at level 1 and, as of the current expansion, can reach a maximum level of 85. At each new level a toon earns new spells, skills, or talents and gains the chance to wear better quality gear and weapons. As a toon moves through the content they are exposed to new areas of the game designed to challenge the player at that level. New quests become available with greater rewards at each new level. Patch: A patch is a large update for in-game content occurring between expansions typically focused on offering new playable content or features to the game. New dungeons, raid bosses, or raid content will appear via game patches. A patch also allows the game developers the opportunity to address file clean up and storage in addition to other technical systems fixes. Raid (and clearing raid content): A raid is a closed environment within the game designed to offer a team of 10 or 25 players the chance to match their skills against the most challenging bosses offering the best gear available in-game. Each boss within a raid offers different challenges and successful teams who can defeat

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__________________________________________________________________ all bosses in a dungeon are considered to have cleared the raid content. Because gear and weapon drops from defeated bosses are random, teams will repeatedly clear the raid to get all team members the optimum gear. Toon: The term toon is used by players when referring to their in-game avatar.

Notes 1

Title: Loc’Tar Ogar, An orcish phrase meaning ‘Victory or death’; often used as a battle cry. 2 Blizard Entertainment, Press Release, (World of Warcraft, 7 October 2010) retrieved 2010, World of Warcraft. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?101007. 3 Knowledge@Wharton, Entrepreneurs Get An Edge Playing Videogames (Forbes, 28 June 2010) retrieved 9 July 2010, http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/28/world-of-warcraft-entrepreneurs-technologywharton.html. 4 John Seely Brown and Doug Thomas, You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired! (Wired, April 2006) retrieved 9 July 2010, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html. 5 Joi Ito, Leadership in World of Warcraft, 13 March 2006, retrieved 9 July 2010, http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2006/03/13/leadership-in-w.html. 6 David W. Simkins and Constance Steinkuehler, Critical Ethical Reasoning and Role-Play (Games and Culture, 2008), 338-339. 7 Ibid., 339. 8 Ibid., 339. 9 Ibid., 339. 10 Brown and Thomas, You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired! 11 Mike Smith, Fortune 500 CIO Learned Everything from World of Warcraft, (30 June 2010), retrieved 9 July 2010, http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/fortune-500-cio-learnedeverything-from-world-of-warcraft/1403849. 12 Ibid. 13 Brent D. Ruben, Simulations, Games, and Experience-Based Learning: The Quest for a New Paradigm for Teachign and Learning (Simulation & Gaming, 1999), 501. 14 Mark G. Chen, Communication, Coordination and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft (Games and Culture, 2009). 15 Win van Breukelen, Brigit Schyns, and Pacsale Le Blacn, Leader-Member Exchange Thoery and Research: Acomplishments and Future Challenges (Leadership, 2006). 16 Ibid.

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__________________________________________________________________ 17

Terri A. Scandura, and Elkin K. Pellegrini, ‘Trust and Leader-Member Exchange: A Closer Look at Relational Vulnerability’, Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies (November 2008). 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Carolina Gomez and Benson Rosen, The Leader-Member Exchange as a Link between Managerial Trust and Employee Empowerment, (Group Organization Management, March 2001). 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.; Scandura and Pellegrini, ‘Trust and Leader-Member Exchange: A Closer Look at Relational Vulnerability’; van Breukelen, Brigit Schyns, and Pacsale Le Blacn, Leader-Member Exchange Thoery and Research: Acomplishments and Future Challenges. 23 Terry M. Dockery and Dirk D. Steiner. ‘The Role of the Initial Interaction in Leader-Member Exchange (Group Organization Management, December 1990). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 407. 27 Ibid. 28 Kim Sydow Campbell, Charles D. White, and Diane E. Johnson, LeaderMember Relations as a Function of Rapport Management (Journal of Business Communication, July 2003). 29 Ibid. 30 Jeremy B. Bernerth, Achilies A. Armenakis, Hubert S. Feild, and William F. Giles, The Influence of Personality Differences Between Subordinates and Supervisors on Perceptions of LMX: An Empirical Investigation (Group Organization Management, April 2008). 31 Ibid. 32 Xander M. Bezuijen, Peter T. van den Berg, Karen van Dam, and Henk Thierry, ‘Pygmalion and Employee Learning: The Role of Leader Behaviors’, Journal of Management (October 2009). 33 Ibid. 34 Anna B. Kayes, D. Christopher Kayes and David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning in Teams (Simulation & Gaming, 2005); Jon C. Marshall and Sharon L. Merritt, Reliability and Construct Validity of the Learning Style Questionnaire, (Educational and Psychological Measurement, 1986). 35 Charles F. Petranek, Susan Corey and Rebecca Black, ‘Three Levels of Learning in Simulations: Participating, Debriefing, and Journal Writing’, Simulation Gaming, June 1992. 36 Marshall and Merritt, Reliability and Construct Validity of the Learning Style Questionnaire, 258.

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Louise W. Smith and Doris C Van Dorren, ‘The Reality-Based Learning Method: A Simple Method for Keeping Teaching Activities Relevant and Effective’, Journal of Marketing Education (April 2004): 66-74. 38 Francesco Sofo, Roland K. Yeo and Jacqueline Villafane, ‘Oprimizing the Learning in Action Learning: Reflective Questions, Levels of Learning, and Coaching’, Advances in Development Human Resources (2010): 214. 39 Smith and Dorren, The Reality-Based Learning Method: A Simple Method for Keeping Teaching Activities Relevant and Effective, 67. 40 Petranek, Corey, and Black. Three Levels of Learning in Simulations: Participating, Debriefing, and Journal Writing. 41 Phillp E. Johnson, ‘Changing Teaching for a Changing World: Implications of the Knowledge Explosion’, Community College Review (1991): 55. 42 Sofo, Yeo, and Villafane, Oprimizing the Learning in Action Learning: Reflective Questions, Levels of Learning, and Coaching, 215. 43 Dennis O'Connor and Leodones Yballe, ‘Team Leadership: Critical Steps To Great Projects’, Journal of Management Education (April 2007). 44 Sofo, Yeo, and Villafane, Oprimizing the Learning in Action Learning: Reflective Questions, Levels of Learning, and Coaching, 214. 45 Fumitoshi Kato, ‘How We Think and Talk About Facilitation’, Simulation and Gaming, 2010. 46 Katherine A. Wilson, et al., ‘Relationships Between Game Attributes and Learning Outcomes: Review and Research Proposals’, Simulation Gaming, April 2009. 47 Petranek, Corey, and Black, Three Levels of Learning in Simulations: Participating, Debriefing, and Journal Writing,183. 48 YiBeech Jang and Seoung Ryu, ‘Exploring Game Experiences and Game Leadership in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games’, British Journal of Educational Technology (2010). 49 Petranek, Corey, and Black, Three Levels of Learning in Simulations: Participating, Debriefing, and Journal Writing,175. 50 Jang and Ryu, Exploring Game Experiences and Game Leadership in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games, 2. 51 Ibid., 7. 52 Kato, How We Think and Talk About Facilitation, 697. 53 Peter W. Hess, ‘Enhancing Leadership Skill Development By creating Practice/Feedback Opportunities in the Classroom’, Journal of Management Education (April 2007): 210. 54 Michael J. Tews and J. Bruce Tracey, ‘Helping Managers Help Themselves: The Use and Utility of On-the-Job Interventions to Improve the Impact of Interpersonal Skills Training’, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly (May 2009): 255.

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Jang and Ryu, Exploring Game Experiences and Game Leadership in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games, 7. 56 Kayes, Kayes and Kolb, Experiential Learning in Teams, 330. 57 Ibid., 332. 58 AIE Wiki, The AIE Podcast, (The AIE Wiki, 30 January 2010), retrieved 26 January 2011, http://wiki.aie-guild.org/index.php?title=The_AIE_Podcast. 59 Kayes, Kayes and Kolb, Experiential Learning in Teams, 333. 60 G. M. Kriah, Our Officer Structure, (The Lightbringers, 30 October 2010), retrieved 26 January 2011, http://thelightbringers.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=370745&TabID=3109 337&ForumID=1770171&TopicID=9332049. 61 Resonator, The Syndicate Rank Structure, (The Syndicate, 20 July 2010), retrieved 26 January 2011, http://thesyndicate.guildtastic.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9. 62 Blizzard Entertainment, Guild Advancement and You, (World of Warcraft, 21 January 2010), retrieved 26 January 2011, http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2113741. 63 Wowhead, Guild Advancement, (2010), retrieved 26 January 2011, http://www.wowhead.com/guide=cataclysm&guilds#. 64 Kayes, Kayes and Kolb, Experiential Learning in Teams, 333. 65 Charbonnier-Voirin, Audrey, El Akremi, Assaad, and Vandenberghe, Christian, ‘A Multilevel Model of Transformational Leadership and Adaptive Performance and the Moderating Role of Climate for Innovation’, Group & Organization Management (2010): 700. 66 Ibid., 700. 67 Ibid., 700. 68 Ibid., 700. 69 Ibid., 701. 70 Ibid., 701. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 704. 73 Ibid., 704. 74 Ibid., 705. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 706. 77 Ruben, Simulations, Games, and Experience-Based Learning: The Quest for a New Paradigm for Teachign and Learning. 78 Deborah R. Ettington and Richaurd R. Camp, ‘Facilitating Transfer of Skills between Group Projects and Work Teams’, Journal of Management Education 26.4 (2002): 357.

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Jang and Ryu, Exploring Game Experiences and Game Leadership in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. 80 Ibid., 7. 81 Ettington and Camp, Facilitating Transfer of Skills between Group Projects and Work Teams.

Bibliography AIE Wiki. The AIE Podcast. January 30, 2010. Accessed January 26, 2011. http://wiki.aie-guild.org/index.php?title=The_AIE_Podcast. Bernerth, Jeremy B., Achilies A. Armenakis, Hubert S. Feild and William F. Giles. ‘The Influence of Personality Differences Between Subordinates and Supervisors on Perceptions of LMX: An Empirical Investigation.’ Group Organization Management 35. 2 (April 2008): 216-240. Bezuijen, Xander M., Peter T. van den Berg, Karen van Dam, and Henk Thierry. ‘Pygmalion and Employee Learning: The Role of Leader Behaviors.’ Journal of Management 35.5 (October 2009): 1248-1267. Blizard Entertainment. Press Release. October 7, 2010. Accessed 2010. http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/press/pressreleases.html?101007. Blizzard Entertainment. Guild Advancement and You. January 21, 2011. Accessed 26 January 2011. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2113741. Brown, John Seely and Douglas Thomas. You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired! April 2006. Accessed 9 July 2010. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html. Campbell, Kim Sydow, Charles D. White, and Diane E. Johnson. ‘Leader-Member Relations as a Function of Rapport Management.’ Journal of Business Communication 40.3 (July 2003): 170-194. Chen, Mark G. ‘Communication, Coordination and Camaraderie in World of Warcraft.’ Games and Culture (Sage Publications, Inc.) 4.1 (January 2009): 47-73. Charbonnier-Voirin, Audrey, El Akremi, Assaad, and Vandenberghe, Christian. ‘A Multilevel Model of Transformational Leadership and Adaptive Performance and the Moderating Role of Climate for Innovation.’ Group & Organization Management 35.6 (2010): 699-726.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dockery, Terry M., and Dirk D. Steiner. ‘The Role of the Initial Interaction in Leader-Member Exchange.’ Group Organization Management 15.4 (December 1990): 395-413. Ettington, Deborah R., and Richaurd R. Camp. ‘Facilitating Transfer of Skills between Group Projects and Work Teams.’ Journal of Management Education 26.4 (August 2002): 356-379. GMKriah. Our Officer Structure. October 30, 2010. Accessed 26 January 2010. http://thelightbringers.guildportal.com/Guild.aspx?GuildID=370745&TabID=3109 337&ForumID=1770171&TopicID=9332049. Gomez, Carolina, and Benson Rosen. ‘The Leader-Member Exchange as a Link between Managerial Trust and Employee Empowerment.’ Group Organization Management 26.1 (March 2001): 53-69. Hess, Peter W. ‘Enhancing Leadership Skill Development By creating Practice/Feedback Opportunities in the Classroom.’ Journal of Management Education 31.2 (April 2007): 195-213. Ito, Joi. Leadership in World of Warcraft. Accessed 9 July 2010. http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2006/03/13/leadership-in-w.html. Jang, YiBeech, and Seoung Ryu. ‘Exploring Game Experiences and Game Leadership in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.’ British Journal of Educational Technology (2010): 1-8. Johnson, Phillp E. ‘Changing Teaching for a Changing World: Implications of the Knowledge Explosion.’ Community College Review 19.3 (1991): 54-58. Kato, Fumitoshi. ‘How We Think and Talk About Facilitation.’ Simulation and Gaming 41.5 (2010): 694-704. Kayes, Anna B, D. Christopher Kayes, and David A. Kolb. ‘Experiential learning in teams.’ Simulation & Gaming 36.3 (September 2005): 330-354. Knowledge@Wharton. Entrepreneurs Get An Edge Playing Videogames. Accessed July 9, 2010. http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/28/world-of-warcraft-entrepreneurs-technologywharton.html.

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__________________________________________________________________ Marshall, Jon C., and Sharon L. Merritt. ‘Reliability and Construct Validity of the Learning Style Questionnaire.’ Educational and Psychological Measurement 46 (1986): 257-262. O’Connor, Dennis, and Leodones Yballe. ‘Team Leadership: Critical Steps To Great Projects.’ Journal of Management Education 31.2 (April 2007): 292-312. Petranek, Charles F, Susan Corey, and Rebecca Black. ‘Three Levels of Learning in Simulations: Participating, Debriefing, and Journal Writing.’ Simulation Gaming 23.2 (June 1992): 174-185. Resonator. The Syndicate Rank Structure. Accessed 26 January 2010. http://thesyndicate.guildtastic.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9. Ruben, Brent D. ‘Simulations, Games, and Experience-Based Learning: The Quest for a New Paradigm for Teachign and Learning.’ Simulation & Gaming (Sage Publications, Inc.) 30.4 (December 1999): 498-505. Scandura, Terri A. and Elkin K. Pellegrini. ‘Trust and Leader-Member Exchange: A Closer Look at Relational Vulnerability.’ Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 15.2 (November 2008): 101-110. Simkins, David W, and Constance Steinkuehler. ‘Critical Ethical Reasoning and Role-Play.’ Games and Culture (2008): 333-355. Smith, Louise W. and Doris C. Van Dorren. ‘The Reality-Based Learning Method: A Simple Method for Keeping Teaching Activities Relevant and Effective.’ Journal of Marketing Education 26.1 (April 2004): 66-74. Smith, Mike. Fortune 500 CIO learned everything from World of Warcraft. Accessed 9 July 2010. http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/fortune-500-cio-learnedeverything-from-world-of-warcraft/1403849. Sofo, Francesco, Roland K Yeo, and Jacqueline Villafane. ‘Oprimizing the Learning in Action Learning: Reflective Questions, Levels of Learning, and Coaching.’ Advances in Development Human Resources 12.2 (2010): 205- 224. Tews, Michael J, and J. Bruce Tracey. ‘Helping Managers Help Themselves: The Use and Utility of On-the-Job Interventions to Improve the Impact of Interpersonal Skills Training.’ Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 50. 2 (May 2009): 245-258.

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__________________________________________________________________ van Breukelen, Win, Brigit Schyns, and Pacsale Le Blacn. ‘Leader-Member Exchange Thoery and Research: Acomplishments and Future Challenges.’ Leadership 2.3 (2006): 295-316. Wilson, Katherine A, et al. ‘Relationships Between Game Attributes and Learning Outcomes: Review and Research Proposals.’ Simulation Gaming 40.2 (April 2009): 217-266. Wowhead. Guild Advancement. Accessed 26 January 2010. http://www.wowhead.com/guide=cataclysm&guilds#. Melissa Johnson Farrar is a doctoral candidate in the Organizational Leadership Program at the University of La Verne. She is also a level 85 Blood Elf Holy Priest who enjoys slaying dragons in her spare time.

Higher Education Professional Development on Virtual Worlds through Machinima of SLOODLE: Linking Moodle with Second Life Sue Gregory Abstract 2012 saw Australian higher education institutions competing in a new demanddriven marketplace, to enrol students through engaging and innovative teaching strategies. One such strategy is the implementation of a virtual world into an educator’s repertoire of teaching and learning materials. As virtual worlds are coming to the fore, and more educators want to use them in their teaching, a plan needs to be put in place to enable the smooth transition to implement them. Professional development through virtual world video (machinima) will enable educators to use SLOODLE, a set of tools which integrates the virtual world Second Life™ with the learning management system Moodle. This professional development can take place at the educators’ own pace and in their own place. Professional development undertaken via machinima of SLOODLE can be a more effective way of providing the learning for the educators. By having educators able to teach using SLOODLE, an institution could attract more students and therefore increase student enrolment due to its innovative and engaging teaching model. Key Words: Second Life, Moodle, SLOODLE, virtual worlds, machinima, professional development, higher education, learning management system, marketplace, enrolments. ***** 1. Introduction Higher education institutions in Australia will need to offer something special to their students to set them apart from other institutions for the enrolment intakes of 2012 and beyond. Institutions will need to offer something other institutions do not so that students see advantages in making it their choice of study. The Bradley Report of 2008 proposed that universities should be funded on the basis of the students they enrolled, with no apparent limits, using a student-driven market for higher education. 1 While the University of New England (UNE) has a unique residential system, offering traditional college accommodation in a rural university setting, it also needs to offer something exciting and innovative that is available to both on- and off-campus students through their studies. Outlined herein is how educators and students can be assisted in using the institution’s learning management system integrated with the virtual world of Second Life in their teaching and learning. This integration of the learning management system, Moodle with Second Life is known as SLOODLE. Second Life is being utilized by

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__________________________________________________________________ increasing numbers of educators across this university and throughout Australia. 2 It is a logical transition to be able to provide educators and students in a hassle-free way in which to receive training in its uses and implementation, through machinima (virtual world video recordings). 2. Background The higher education sector is about to undergo a dramatic change with the Government’s new demand-driven market removing caps for student enrolment. 3 To encourage students to enroll at their institution, higher education institutions need to position themselves in the marketplace. 4 This means that they have to market themselves as having something special to offer future students. To be a university of choice, institutions need to be viable, of quality, and strategically placed. 5 Described below is a method for higher education institutions to consider for positioning themselves at the forefront of students’ minds when choosing an institution for their study. Webb presented a teaching and learning model to the School of Education at the University of New England. 6 The model had the student learning experience at the core. Branching off from this is the interaction between teachers and students; resources for learning; collaboration between peers and the community; and support by academics, administration, technical and social staff. The interaction between teacher and students, resources for learning, and collaboration between peers are the areas addressed in the professional development machinima of SLOODLE. At the University of New England, as at other higher education institutions, there is an aim to enhance course offerings. Outlined herein is an example of how an institution can position itself at the forefront of students’ minds when considering their institution of choice, by providing innovative and engaging learning strategies. For educators to be able to deliver the best student learning experience, they have to incorporate many strategies of the teaching and learning model into their teaching. The model that the University of New England will present to the student driven market is one in which students are provided with a variety of subject-level elearning tools available through the learning management system. One of these tools is a virtual world. 3. What are Virtual Worlds, Second Life, Moodle, SLOODLE and Machinima? Virtual worlds have features of real and fantasy life and are low cost computerbased simulations that can be an alternative for many real world activities. 7 Second Life is one virtual world available from a selection of somewhere between 100 and 200. 8 In 2008, Mitham predicted the number to be approximately 900 by 2012. 9 It is unknown how many virtual worlds there actually are. These figures continually change. When people interact in a virtual world, they do so via their avatar, an

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__________________________________________________________________ electronic presence that ‘imitates real life in the form of a personal presence’, and can be personalised. 10 Avatars move virtually by talking, walking, running, sitting, dancing, flying, driving, riding and teleporting. They make gestures (such as clapping or waving). They change aspects of appearance (such as clothing, gender, hair and skin colour). They also interact with other avatars and the environment which includes land formations. 11 For example, if the user wishes his or her avatar to enter a building, they have to make it walk through a doorway as they cannot walk through walls; gravity exists, so if someone jumps off a ledge, they fall down; the wind blows and leaves on the trees move. Aspects of the real world can be replicated in context, which makes a virtual world an ideal place to incorporate teaching and learning into student study materials. Second Life lets members inhabit and build their own 3-D immersive virtual world, allowing them a high level of freedom. It is becoming the choice of most universities. 12 In this context the term 3-D immersive virtual worlds includes ‘both the physical aspects of the environment and psychological sense of being in the environment’. 13 In a conversation with John Lester in July 2008, the former Academic Director of Linden Lab (the proprietors of Second Life) stated that worldwide there were over 1,000 educational institutions using Second Life. 14 In 2010, Cummings, Manager of Strategy and Customer Insights at Linden Lab, claimed there were approximately 750 educational institutions operating their own islands in Second Life, not including much smaller parcel-owned land. 15 Second Life presents the ‘most mature of the social virtual world platforms and the high usage figures compared with other competing platforms reflects this dominance within the educational world’ and it has a ‘burgeoning practitioner community’. 16 This is evidenced by the increase in institutions from Australia reporting on using a virtual world in their teaching in 2010 and 2011 and the increase in the number of students who chose to study using a virtual world at the University of New England, reported in Table 2. 17 With Moodle being the learning management system of choice at the University of New England and many other higher education institutions, academics will have to undertake professional development to learn how to use it so that students have a seamless transition into learning the new platform. Moodle was chosen because of the flexibility it offers academics. It incorporates many standard and optional subject level elearning tools, such as wikis, blogs, discussion boards, as outlined in Table 1. Virtual worlds are an optional tool. If educators are going to use virtual worlds as part of their suite of teaching and learning tools, they have the ability to incorporate Second Life into the Moodle software, via SLOODLE; (both Moodle and SLOODLE are Open Source software). By integrating Moodle with Second Life, educators will be able to provide students with a plethora of tools from the one portal. The name SLOODLE, the merging of the two words; Second Life and Moodle, apparently stands for Simulation Linked Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. 18

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__________________________________________________________________ Sloodle is also compatible with OpenSim (OpenSimulator technology) an open source virtual world built for all ages. Machinima is the recording, screen capture or videoing of interaction in a virtual world. It is machine-based cinema. It has real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence. 19 Machinima involves pre-production, preparation, capture, editing and tagging of video so that it can be viewed anywhere and at anytime. 4. Professional Development via Machinima Professional development resources are provided to staff, students and other parties interested in SLOODLE, so that they have access from the one portal, enabling anywhere, anytime learning. In his presentation, Webb outlined how study materials should be presented to students in the University of New England’s future model of the demand-driven market for student enrolments. 20 Educators will be able to provide a variety of standard and optional tools from within Moodle, as listed in Table 1. Virtual worlds are an optional tool that can be used as a resource material for students. Table 1: Subject level eLearning tools offered through Moodle Standard Tools Modules of digital content Announcements Calendar Wiki Forums Chat Assignments Quizzes External links

Optional Tools Rich media

Blogs

Intensive schools Mobile technologies Virtual worlds e-portfolios Desktop video conferencing Google docs Glossary Survey module

Off-campus pracs e-books Skype Pod/voc casts Wimba tools Twitter Workshop module Choke module

Students are in fact being offered many more tools with the integration of Moodle and Second Life. Within Moodle and Second Life, using SLOODLE, the following tools could be available to students: survey modules, announcements, calendars, assignments, quizzes, external links, blogs, ebooks, pod/vod casts, presentations, and YouTube™ videos, to name a few. Many of which are standard tools. SLOODLE offers a combination of all the tools Moodle offers within Second Life. Therefore, when in a virtual world, students will receive the tools already available in Moodle, including the generic interactive tools only available in the virtual world. These generic virtual world interactive tools could include:

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__________________________________________________________________ x The ability to walk through a heart or computer hard drive to see the intricacies of how they function; x Attending a virtual excursion to another planet to learn its composition and other important information; x Visit educational sites where actions/animations happen at the click of a button or interactions occur with non-player characters (bots), including interacting with the environment and tools in the virtual world through role-play. There are many different ways in which interaction can occur in the virtual world that are simply not available in the real world. The use of SLOODLE also provides students who do not have access to Second Life with the ability to see the interactions that have taken place there through Moodle. However, it should be remembered that educators need to be adequately trained in the use of these tools. The creation of professional development machinima for educators will assist them to learn to use the two tools in combination. Why would someone want to view machinima for professional development instead of attending face-to-face learning? Educators need time to absorb new concepts and require access to ongoing support to implement the instructional strategies they gain from the professional development. 21 If educators (and students) are provided with machinima to learn how to use a virtual world, they can learn in their own time, at their own pace and from their own place. They can revisit the machinima to reinforce the learning that has taken place. For educators to embrace teaching in a virtual world, it is best to fast track their training so that they are able to teach in a virtual world as soon as possible. Having a mentor to fast track this process assists the teacher (and student) considerably. It takes time to learn how to teach (and learn) in a virtual world. In fact, having a mentor can take months off training time. However, why not let the educator and student learn by themselves, without the need for a mentor through a suite of machinima? 22 Machinima is a step towards fast tracking the learning. If someone does not know how to do something, short machinima can be accessed to demonstrate the step-by-step process. If one were to read about the author’s journey on learning how to use a virtual world as a teaching and elearning tool he or she would probably not even try the environment. 23 However, with only a little over an hour of one-on-one mentoring (via avatars) with an experienced user, someone can get up to speed in how to use the environment quickly. One example is the mentoring of a peer by the author with just over an hour of training; this academic has gone on to take their own group of students for classroom discussions, in the virtual world. 24 The experience has been very successful, as outlined by a comment from one of her students:

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__________________________________________________________________ I was buzzing after last night! I loved feeling like I was part of a tutorial group (albeit virtually), it felt like social and academic...and it was interesting gauging interest or passion by the amount of avatars typing!!! 25 Machinima can be a substitute for this training. Teaching and learning in virtual worlds is nearing the ‘Plateau of Productivity’ of Gartner’s Hype Cycle in many higher education institutions. 26 More and more educators are seeing its potential as a teaching and learning tool, particularly to be used with distance learning. This can be attested to by the plethora of publications that are currently being published in this area. An example is a snapshot outlining how 28 higher education institutions in Australia are using virtual worlds in their teaching. 27 In 2010 the University of New England saw the introduction of off-campus mode of study to one ICT (Information Communication Technology) Education subject previously only offered to on-campus students. There was a large increase in the number of enrolled students and a dramatic increase in the number of students wanting to explore Second Life as an optional part of their studies. This increase is demonstrated in Table 2 which applies to subjects the author has been involved with through teaching and research. The increase in numbers shown above shows the acceptance of learning in a virtual world by students at University of New England. A colleague in the School of Education took twenty students into Second Life to discuss some of their study materials. This required one-on-one mentoring so that she was able to use the environment and tools required for her sessions. As more and more people take up the opportunity to explore virtual worlds as a teaching and learning tool, more and more time is spent in mentoring the academics and students. The academics and students could be using professional development machinima so that they can learn how to use the environment at their own pace, in their own time, in their own place, taking away the need for one-on-one mentoring. The major benefit of this is that anyone can access the professional development machinima and then go on to teach in the virtual world without having to rely on another’s input. It also saves them considerable time learning; the author had to rely on conventional learning over a period of months to become proficient through classes and experimentation. All the tricks and shorts cuts are outlined in easy to access and use professional development machinima. 5. Sustainability of Second Life and Open Source Virtual Worlds Second Life is a virtual world that was opened to the public by Linden Lab in 2003. Residents can inhabit and build their own environment through their avatars. It is open to anyone over the age of 13 years. 28 ReactionGrid™ was established in 2009 and is an example of an OpenSim. 29 Professional development machinima have been created in Second Life and OpenSim and are available to anyone

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__________________________________________________________________ worldwide from a designated website. A user of Second Life or OpenSim can enter either world and operate in them as they can be built with the same interface. OpenSim is lacking the content that Second Life has because it is relatively new. However, OpenSim virtual worlds are an Open Source space where future teachers can take their students. They are even accessible from Facebook, of which many students are members. 30 In fact, Kitely is a new virtual world released in 2011 and is accessible via a Facebook app. 31 It operates within the Web browser. Once again, the interface is the same as many other virtual worlds enabling the transfer of skills from one to another seamlessly. It also means that the professional development machinima created in one virtual world can be used to learn skills required for another virtual world. Once someone learns how to operate in Second Life, the skills are transferable to many other virtual worlds. Creators and developers of virtual worlds, particularly OpenSim ones, are looking at how to make their worlds cross platform, (i.e. moving from one world to another seamlessly and being able to take the content with them). Currently, this is not as easy as it would seem. All content created by users in Second Life remains the users’ intellectual property. 32 Arguably, they should be able to move their own content from one virtual world to another. Table 2: Number of students signing up to participate in virtual world sessions at the University of New England, 2008-2011. Year

Total number

2008

12

2009

114

2010

147

2011

182

Subjects in which virtual worlds component is offered Two Graduate Diploma in Education/Double Degree subjects Two Graduate Diploma in Education/Double Degree subjects One Bachelor of Education (Primary) (compulsory participation) Seven Graduate Diploma in Education/Double Degree/Bachelor of Education (Primary)/ Masters in Education (eLearning) subjects One Bachelor of Education (Primary) (compulsory participation) Six Graduate Diploma in Education/Double Degree/Bachelor of Education (Primary)/ Masters in Education (eLearning) subjects One Bachelor of Education (Primary) (compulsory participation)

Voluntary/ Compulsory student participation numbers n=12 (voluntary) n=18 (voluntary) n=94 (compulsory component) n=99 (voluntary) n=71 (compulsory component)

n=110 (voluntary) n=72 (compulsory component)

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__________________________________________________________________ Educators have to consider the transformations that are currently occurring in the virtual world of Second Life. For instance, on 9 June 2010, Linden Lab announced that it was dismissing 30 percent of its staff. 33 It also announced it was aiming to make its virtual world more browsers-based and extending social networks. 34 Others believe Linden Lab will concentrate on smaller markets, such as education. 35 Linden Lab removed the post ‘Education Programmes Manager’ and subsequently abolished the educational discount on sim tier. Jamison suggests that this is so they can take their vision forward so that it is sustainable and reliable. 36 Companies such as IBM are withdrawing from Second Life and creating business in OpenSim platforms. 37 This provides new opportunities for learning. 38 Jamison continues with his argument stating that if Second Life were to disappear then educators would take what has been learned and transfer it to whatever platform emerges to take its place. According to Robinson, Second Life remains vibrant but with many web applications now in the computing cloud, users do not like having to download the software needed to enter Second Life. 39 Teen Second Life™, a duplicate of Second Life for the 13-18 age bracket was decommissioned in January 2011. The content was moved over to Second Life. Many schools have used Teen Second Life to educate their students in a virtual world. This provides opportunities for OpenSim platforms to develop further. 6. Adult Learners in a Virtual World and the Current State of Second Life Use at the University of New England The University of New England has approximately 80% of its students enrolled in an off-campus mode of study, (i.e. studying from a distance). As Gregory and Tynan state, off-campus study has: …traditionally been perceived as students studying independently from paper-based resources, with little or no support from academics or peers. As universities move into online methods of distributing study materials, students are now required to use Web 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 refers to online tools such as blogs, wikis, chat rooms and discussion boards where interactivity occurs through the tools as opposed to Web 1.0, which are purely for retrieving information from static websites. Students now learn through virtual classrooms, or learning management systems, that provide these interactive tools in the one portal. With the introduction of a virtual world such as Second Life, students can come together in a context that feels like face-to-face lectures and workshops in their own lounge room. 40

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__________________________________________________________________ Virtual worlds provide off-campus mode of study the flexibility to enable students to connect through a highly interactive, immersive, multi-modal learning environment. 41 Consideration needs to be given to how adults learn when they are immersed and engaged in a virtual learning environment. Adults who are selfdirected learners and ready to learn are more engaged with Problem-based Learning and become more motivated due to their maturity and greater knowledge. 42 Learners construct new ideas or concepts based on their current or past knowledge. 43 Students learn by building on knowledge already acquired. Piaget had the notion that knowledge should be organised, structured and restructured around thoughts, and then modified and expanded upon. 44 He wrote that ‘knowledge is constructed in the mind of the learner’. 45 By following the constructivist approach to learning, over time, students integrate new experiences into their knowledgebase through teacher-led activities in a virtual world. 46 Learning in a virtual world is for highly motivated students who want to experience the potential of a virtual world as a teaching and learning tool. Also, as students are learning in the rapidly-changing digital age, teaching and learning in virtual worlds requires educators and students to learn new things as ‘knowledge is growing exponentially’. 47 The most popular virtual world platform for educators at present is Second Life. 48 Most of the University of New England’s students are studying by the offcampus mode where much of the learning takes place through a learning management system (Sakai, Blackboard, or Moodle). They utilise downloads of PDF (portable document format) files, HTML (hypertext markup language) documents, discussion boards/forums, wikis, chat rooms and blogs. 49 The studentdriven market of 2012 sees the University of New England move to the open source learning management system, Moodle. Moodle allows academics to make their study materials more interactive for students to engage with. To more deeply engage off-campus students, a virtual world, such as Second Life or OpenSim, could be used to conduct classes either synchronously or asynchronously. Research conducted by the author demonstrated that students appreciate learning in a virtual world because they feel they are really there with their peers and the educator. For these students it is like a face-to-face encounter. 50 This mode of learning is more engaging and meaningful for students. To be able to use SLOODLE, educators and students need to learn how to use the virtual world. This could be done through the viewing of a suite of ‘How to’ machinima so that they can enter the world and know how to undertake different tasks without the need to call upon an individual person to teach them. (Example machinima may be viewed at http://www.virtualclassrooms.info/machinima.htm). Moodle offers a plethora of elearning tools to assist students and academics in engaging with subject content. When SLOODLE is used, many of the tools available to students can be used through one portal simultaneously. Students choosing a place of study may see institutions that offer SLOODLE as innovative.

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__________________________________________________________________ Learning opportunities in the virtual world are currently provided to students in Education and Pharmacy by five staff members at the University of New England. The School of Business is about to take on the challenge with this learning resource with their students, firstly in accounting subjects. If more staff come on board and use SLOODLE as a teaching and learning tool, a suite of how to machinima could enable them to do so quickly. This professional development through machinima would provide the learning required in a timely manner. 7. Why Machinima of SLOODLE for Professional Development? Various studies have found that machinima has the ability to engage its audience. Machinima provides a reusable, critically rich, reflective learning experience that is highly visual. It can be used as an anchor to mediate authentic learning experiences. 51 The creation of machinima means scenes are ‘storyboarded, constructed, shot and edited using techniques similar to professional film production, drawing upon a cast of virtual world avatars controlled through a human-computer interface’. 52 Professional development through machinima can inform learning activities and, where the media is specifically designed to set challenges, seed ideas or illustrate problems. 53 Students and educators can use machinima for orientation, promotion, and knowledge sharing and later viewing. 54 Machinima will enable anywhere, anytime learning that can be repeated, absorbed, reflected upon and then used in its own context. Machinima also gives the educator and student the ability to use the professional development material whilst learning to use or incorporate SLOODLE. As stated, SLOODLE integrates Second Life and Moodle. This integration enables students who are logged into Moodle and Second Life at the same time to share resources easily. Teaching and learning using SLOODLE can be grouped into the four categories: role-play activities and simulations; group work which includes team building; events, presentations and discussions; and building 3-D objects and developing properties. 55 Kemp, Livingston and Bloomfield outline various ways in which SLOODLE can be integrated into learning: The release of SLOODLE 2.0 for Moodle 2.0, has even more tools available including upgraded features of SLOODLE 1.0. Ways in which SLOODLE could be used include: 56 ‡ ‡

Text chat logs from Second Life are bridged between Second Life and Moodle’s chat room enabling real time synchronous communication between users of each elearning tool. Each blog posting in Moodle automatically displays the URL of the Second Life location (SLURL coordinates). This way, when in Second Life, postings of interesting places to visit can be automatically uploaded to Moodle’s blog to provide students with places to visit, web quests or treasure hunts.

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‡

‡ ‡

‡

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A list of students’ avatars that are nearby can be instantly relayed through Moodle so that the educator can see the real life identity of the student. Students can submit content, including prim buildings, notecards, audio clips and snapshots that they have created in Second Life into a Drop Box for review through Moodle. Moodle will log the submission details and the virtual assignment can be graded using Moodle’s gradebook. Web-intercom, which is a chat room bringing Moodle chat room and Second Life chats together so that students can participate in chats in Second Life using the accessible Moodle chat room. Discussions are archived securely in a Moodle database. Registration booth enabling identity management for Second Life and Moodle which links students’ avatars to their Moodle user accounts. Quizzes with multiple choice questions can be undertaken where answers are stored on Moodle. 3-D objects can be used as props for quizzes and sound effects used for correct and incorrect answers. Quiz tool and 3-D Drop Box enables educators to assess in Second Life and the grade will go into Moodle. Moodle gradebook can be used to review grades quickly and easily. Quizzes can be set or 3-D modelling tasks created in Second Life which is an engaging environment for students to work in. Assignments can be submitted via Second Life and relayed to Moodle. Choice tool enables students to vote in Second Life as well as in Moodle. They can also see the results in either platform. Multi-function SLOODLE Toolbar is used for a range of classroom gestures, such as clapping, raising arm and waving. It enables the user to retrieve a list of the Moodle user names of the avatars around quickly or write notes directly into to the Moodle blog from Second Life. Presenter tool enables presentations in Second Life without having to go through lengthy processes to convert or upload images. It also enables the educator to quickly author Second Life presentations of slides and/or web pages on Moodle. The Presenter tool uses shared media instead of parcel media. Shared-media-based scoreboard enabling manual addition and removal of ‘currencies’ with updated scores. It also

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includes objects to award points. Points can be shown in Moodle. The rezzer uses a shared-media interface enabling saving and loading of positions in ‘scenes’.

Below is an example from an Australian teacher presenting his idea on using Moodle, Second Life and SLOODLE in a teaching context: What would your Moodle page look like if it was 3-D? If it was a house you could walk through? How would that change the way our students view the subject? Their engagement with it? My students are always asking ‘Mr Collis, where on the Year 8 French page is it?’ Imagine if I could reply ‘It's through the new door at the back of the lounge room.’ How would you logically set out your Moodle page if it were a house, not a page? Or if it were a beach? Or a space station? Or a café? Or a cave? Or a scene from Kill Bill? After all, visually we're wired for 3-D space, not 2D space. Moodle begins to look clunky, doesn't it? 57 This is where we integrate Moodle with Second Life and enable the above scenario to take place. How would we teach educators and students to use this? Machinima of ‘how to’ use Second Life enables people to learn in their own time, at their own pace. Through their experiences they feel like it is a face-to-face encounter and these experiences should be shared with more students. Educators have the opportunity to make their learning resources highly visual, immersive and interactive. Virtual worlds are a very engaging way of teaching students and students often comment that it is almost like a face-to-face encounter. For example, many of the students who attend sessions at the University of New England have been located in distant parts of Australia, including remote areas while others come from countries overseas. Learning in a virtual world gives the students a sense of community. They interact with the environment, their peers and the educator in the community that has been established for their learning. The creation of machinima will provide timely training for students and staff on how they can teach and learn in Second Life. These students are so engaged and immersed in their learning that they often indicate that they would like to return the following semester to participate in sessions again. 8. Future Reading about a virtual world does not provide the same experiences as using them. However, viewing machinima of how to use a virtual world can be more immersive and engaging than passively reading about them. Creating machinima

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__________________________________________________________________ as a means for educators and students to undertake professional development enables them to be responsible for their own learning. It enables them to learn in their own time, at their own pace and in their own place. Experiencing the benefit of 3-D immersive virtual worlds through role play, experimentation, excursions, guest lecturers, demonstrations, exhibitions, conferences, meetings, socialisation, and education has led the author to want to share experiences with others in the most efficient manner. In relation to technology, we do not know what the future holds, however, we do need to be embracing the technologies that are on offer at the present time. We need to be engaging students in their learning in the best possible manner. 9. Conclusion A suite of machinima on how to use virtual worlds through Moodle is continually growing and being created and shared with educators to encourage them to incorporate SLOODLE into their teaching and learning materials. For students to become lifelong learners we must ensure they can cope with the uncertainty in their future careers by providing them with immersive and engaging learning materials and experiences. Higher education institutions need to embrace these emerging technologies and use these valuable resources to encourage student enrolments in the student driven market and beyond, because they have something that students will desire in their learning. By providing educators and students with a suite of professional development machinima, institutions can enable an easier and almost seamless transition into teaching and learning in a virtual world.

Notes 1

Vin Massaro, ‘Australia: How Goes the Higher Education Revolution?’ last modified June 2010, viewed on 7 September 2010, http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20100625181602129. 2 Brent Gregory, et al., (2011). How are Australian Higher Education Institutions Contributing to Change through Innovative Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds? In Garry Williams, Natalie Brown, and Ben Cleland (Eds.), Changing Demands, Changing Directions: Proceedings ascilite Hobart 2011. Presented at the ascilite2011, Hobart. 2011. 3 Massaro, Australia: How Goes the Higher Education Revolution? 4 Lindsay Tanner, ‘Universities Must Adapt or Die in the e-Learning World,’ Australian, October 26, 2011. 5 Graham Webb, (2010, June 2). ‘2012 Project’, UNE Flexible and Online. School of Education, UNE. 6 Webb, 2012 Project.

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Brent Gregory, ‘Business Uses of a Virtual World. Virtual Classrooms: Business in Second Life’, last modified 9 June 2009, viewed 6 October 2009, http://www.virtualclassrooms.info/slbusiness.htm. 8 Chris Collins, ‘AVWW 2008 Program: Australasian Virtual Worlds Workshop’, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn Campus and Second Life, viewed on 29 November 2008, http://slenz.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/the-slenz-update-no-24-november-122008/; Helen Farley and Caroline Steel, ‘A Quest for the Holy Grail: Tactile Precision, Natural Movement and Haptic Feedback in 3-D Virtual Spaces’, in Same Places, Different Spaces, 2009, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/farley.pdf; Merle Lemon and Kelly Oriel, ‘Laying Second Life Foundations: Second Chance Learners get First Life Skills’, in Same Places, Different Spaces, 2009, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/lemon.pdf; Michelle Honey, Scott Diener, Kelley Connor, Max Veltman, and David Bodily, ‘Teaching in Virtual Space: An Interactive Session Demonstrating Second Life Simulation for Hemorrhage Management’, in Same Places, Different Spaces, 2009, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/honey.pdf. 9 Nic Mitham, ‘Virtual Worlds: 2010 and Beyond: Key Industry Trends and Market Developments’ (1-27). Cambridge, United Kingdom: A K Zero Worldswide Report, viewed 2008, http://www.kzero.co.uk/research-reports.php; Sue Gregory and Howard Smith, ‘How Virtual Classrooms are Changing the Face of Education: Using Virtual Classrooms in Today’s University Environment’, in International Research in Teacher Education: Current Perspectives, eds. Warren Halloway and John Maurer (Armidale: Kardoorair, 2010), 239-252. 10 Gregory and Smith, ‘How Virtual Classrooms are Changing the Face of Education’. 11 Sue Gregory and Howard Smith, ‘Virtual Worlds: Can Virtual Worlds Promote a Higher Level of Collaboration, Engagement and Deeper Thinking for Students than Traditional Web 2.0 Tools?’ in Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Postgraduate Research Conference. Bridging the Gap between Ideas and Doing Research, Faculty of The Professions: University of New England, 2009, 85-92. 12 Linden Lab, ‘Second Life’. 2008, viewed on 19 July 2008, http://www.secondlife.com. 13 Barney Dalgarno and Mark J. Lee, ‘What are the Learning Affordances of 3-D Virtual Environments?’ British Journal of Educational Technology 41.1 (March 2010): 13. 14 John Lester, ‘Conversation with John Lester aka Pathfinder Linden in Relation to Educational Institutions using Second Life,’ Second Life, 2008, http://www.glsconference.org/2006/pop/lindenp.htm.

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__________________________________________________________________ 15

Terrence Cummings, ‘Education and the Second Life Ecosystem’, Presented at the Virtual World Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) 13 March 2010, VWBPE North Second Life, http://www.vwbpe.org/. 16 Steven Warburton, ‘Second Life in Higher Education: Assessing the Potential for and the Barriers to Deploying Virtual Worlds in Learning and Teaching’. British Journal of Educational Technology 40.3 (2009): 416; Jeremy W. Kemp, David Livingston, and Peter R. Bloom, ‘SLOODLE: Connecting VLE Tools with Emergent Teaching Practice in Second Life’. British Journal of Educational Technology - Wiley InterScience 40.3 (2009): 551. 17 Sue Gregory, et al., ‘Australian Higher Education Institutions Transforming the Future of Teaching and Learning through Virtual Worlds’, in Curriculum, Technology & Transformation for an Unknown Future, Caroline Steel, Mike Keppell, and Phillipa Gerbic (eds), Sydney, 2010, 399-415, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/Ascilite%20conference%20proce edings%202010/Gregory-full.pdf; Gregory, Australian Higher Education Institutions. 18 Kemp, SLOODLE: Connecting VLE Tools. 19 Naomi Dreher and Heinz Dreher, ‘Using Machinima Documentary and Virtual Environments to Reinvigorate Students' Learning in System Development’, in Conference ICL2009, 2009, 4. 20 Webb, 2012 Project. 21 Sonja Alexander and Aleigha Henderson-Rosser, ‘Do-It-Yourself Professional’. ISTE: Learning & Leading with Technology 37.6 (2010): 26-29. 22 Sue Gregory, ‘Virtual Classrooms’ in Virtual Classrooms, 2007, viewed on 9 October 2007, http://www.virtualclassrooms.info. 23 Sue Gregory, ‘Innovative Tutorial Model using Second Life: Through Weekly Tutorials with National and International Guests’, in Mobile Me: Creativity on the Go, Michael Docherty and Darryl Rosin (eds), Brisbane, 2009, 43-49, http://www.auc.edu.au/Create+World+2009; Sue Gregory and Belinda Tynan, ‘Introducing Jass Easterman: My Second Life Learning Space’, in Same Places, Different Spaces, Proceedings ascilite2009 Auckland, (2009), 377-386, Viewed 26 March 2010, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/gregory.pdf; Sue Gregory, Torsten Reiners and Belinda Tynan, ‘Alternative Realities: Immersive Learning for and with Students’, in Distance Learning Technology, Current Instruction, and the Future of Education: Applications of Today, Practices of Tomorrow, ed. H. Song (Texas Southern University, Houston, USA: IGI Global, 2010), 245-271. 24 Sue Gregory and Yvonne Masters, ‘Virtual Classrooms and Playgrounds: Why Would Anyone use Them?’ in Proceedings of the 4th Annual Postgraduate

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__________________________________________________________________ Research Conference (University of New England, 2010a), 120-129. 25 University of New England student quote after her experience of learning in a virtual world. 26 Gartner Inc, ‘Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have a Second Life in the Virtual World by the End of 2011’, Gartner Newsroom, viewed 20 January 2010, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861. 27 Gregory, Australian Higher Education Institutions. 28 Linden Lab, Second Life, viewed 19 July 2008, http://www.secondlife.com. 29 Reaction Grid, ‘Reaction Grid’, Viewed on 20 May 2009, http://reactiongrid.com. 30 Ener Hax, ‘How Good is Reaction Grid Compared to Second Life.’ viewed on 2 January 2010, http://subquark.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/how-good-is-reactiongrid-compared-to-second-life/. 31 Kitely Ltd, ‘Kitely: Virtual Worlds on Demand’, 2011, http://www.kitely.com/#!home. 32 Chris Collins, ‘AVWW 2008 Program: Australasian Virtual Worlds Workshop’. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn Campus and Second Life, viewed on 29 November 2008, http://slenz.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/the-slenz-updateno-24-november-12-2008/. 33 NewsLimited, ‘Second Life Creator Linden Lab Fires 30pc of Staff’ in Business, viewed 10 June 2010, http://www.news.com.au/business/breaking-news/secondlife-creator-linden-lab-fires-30-pc-of-staff/story-e6frfkur-1225877759794. 34 Leena Rao, ‘Linden Lab Lays Off 30 Percent of Staff’ in Tech Crunch, viewed June 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/09/linden-labs-lays-off-30-percent-of-staff/. 35 John Jamison, ‘Take A Deep Breath... ImagiLearning: Creating the Future of Learning: One Definition at a Time’, viewed 11 June 2010, http://imagilearning.com/content/take-deep-breath. 36 Jamison, Take A Deep Breath. 37 James Wagner, ‘Sim Deathwatch: IBM Closing Second Life Exhibition Art Sims Next Month, Continuing Larger SL Withdrawal by Big Blue,’ New World Notes, April 18, 2011, http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/04/ibm-leaving-second-life.html. 38 Jamison, Take A Deep Breath. 39 Matt Robinson, ‘Second Life: Reality Intrudes on Virtual Reality’ in BusinessWeek: Technology, June 2010, Viewed 25 June 2010, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2010/0100625_754814.htm. 40 Gregory, Introducing Jass Easterman. 41 Denise Wood and Lee Hopkins, ‘3-D Virtual Environments: Businesses are Ready But are Our ‘Digital Natives’ Prepared for Changing Landscapes?’, in

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__________________________________________________________________ Hello! Where are you in the Landscape of Educational Technology? 2008, 11361146, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/wood.pdf. 42 Patricia Cranton, Working with Adult Learners (Canada: Wall & Emerson, Inc., 1992). 43 Greg Kearsley, ‘Explorations in Learning & Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database; Constructivist Theory (J. Bruner)’, viewed 8 September 2009, http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html. 44 George M. Bodner, ‘Constructivism: A Theory of Knowledge’, Journal of Chemical Education 63 (1986). 45 Ibid. 46 David. J. Slone, ‘A Methodology for Measuring Usability Evaluation Skills Using the Constructivist Theory and the Second Life Virtual World’, Journal of Usability Studies 4.4 (2009): 178-188. 47 George Siemens, ‘Elearnspace; Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age’, last modified 12 December 2004, viewed 24 April 2009, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm; George Siemens, ‘Connectivism.ca. Connectivisim: Networked Learning’, last modified 2008, viewed 24 April 2009, http://www.connectivism.ca/. 48 Gregory, Australian Higher Education Institutions Transforming the Future. 49 Sue Gregory and Yvonne Masters, ‘Six Hats in Second Life: Enhancing Preservice Teacher Learning in a Virtual World’, in Advancing Learning with ICT: Innovate Collaborate Transform. International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology 2010 (iCTLT), Singapore, 2010b. 50 Gregory, Introducing Jass Easterman. 51 Dreher, Using Machinima; Nona Muldoon and Jennifer Kofoed, ‘Second Life Machinima: Creating New Opportunities for Curriculum and Instruction’, in Siemens and Fulford (eds), 2243-2252. 52 Andrew J. Middleton and Richard Mather, ‘Machinima Interventions: Innovative Approaches to Immersive Virtual World Curriculum Integration’ ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology 16.3 (2008): 207. 53 Middleton, Machinima Interventions. 54 Des Butler and Janice White, ‘A Slice of Second Life: Academics, Support Staff and Students Navigating a Changing Landscape,’ in Proceedings ascilite Melbourne 2008 (presented at the Ascilite, Melbourne, 2008), 128-132, http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/butler-d.pdf. 55 David Livingstone and Jeremy Kemp, ‘Integrating Web-Based and 3-D Learning Environments: Second Life Meets Moodle’. UPGRADE: Technology-Enhanced Learning IX.3 (2008): 13; Kemp, SLOODLE: Connecting VLE Tools, 552; AvatarClassroom.com, ‘Avatar Classroom Tool Suite.’ 56 3HWHU5%ORRPILHOGµ6/22'/(%ORJௗ: About,’ SLOODLE, 2011,

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__________________________________________________________________ https://www.SLOODLE.org/blog/?page_id=2. 57 Steve Collis, ‘HappySteve: SLOODLE’ in Happy Steve: Teachers, Technology, Learning, viewed on 22 October 2009, http://www.happysteve.com/SLOODLE/.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dalgarno, Barney and Mark J. Lee. ‘What are the Learning Affordances of 3-D Virtual Environments?’ British Journal of Educational Technology 41.1 (March 2010): 10-32. Dreher, Naomi and Heinz Dreher. ‘Using Machinima Documentary and Virtual Environments to Reinvigorate Students' Learning in System Development’. Conference ICL2009. 2009. Farley, Helen and Caroline Steel. ‘A Quest for the Holy Grail: Tactile Precision, Natural Movement and Haptic Feedback in 3-D Virtual Spaces’. Same Places, Different Spaces. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/farley.pdf. Gartner Inc. ‘Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users will have a Second Life in the Virtual World by the End of 2011’. Gartner Newsroom. Viewed 20 January 2010. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861. Gregory, Brent. ‘Business uses of a Virtual World’. Virtual Classrooms: Business in Second Life’. Viewed 6 October 2009. http://www.virtualclassrooms.info/slbusiness.htm. Gregory, Brent, Sue Gregory, Denise Wood, Yvonne Masters, Mathew Hillier, Frederick Stokes-Thompson, Anton Bogdanovych, Des Butler, Lyn Hay, Jay Jay Jegathesan., Kim Flintoff, Stefan Schutt, Dale Linegar, Robyn Alderton, Andrew Cram, Ieva Stupans, Lindy McKeown Orwin, Grant Meredith, Debbie McCormick, Francesca Collins, Jenny Grenfell, Jason Zagami, Allan Ellis, Lisa Jacka, John Campbell, Ian Larson, Andrew Fluck, Angela Thomas, Helen Farley, Nona Muldoon, Ali Abbas, Suku Sinnappan, Katrina Neville, Ian Burnett, Ashley Aitken, Simeon Simoff, Sheila Scutter, Xiangyu Wang, Kay Souter, David Ellis, Mandy Salomon, Greg Wadley, Michael Jacobson, Anne Newstead, Garry Hayes, Scott Grant, Alyona Yusupova. ‘How are Australian Higher Education Institutions Contributing to Change through Innovative Teaching and Learning in Virtual Worlds?’, edited by Gary Williams, Natalie Brown, and Ben Cleland, Changing Demands, Changing Directions. Proceedings ascilite Hobart 2011. Presented at the ascilite2011, Hobart. 2011. Gregory, Sue. ‘Virtual Classrooms’. Virtual Classrooms. Viewed on 9 October 2007. http://www.virtualclassrooms.info.

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. ‘Innovative Tutorial Model Using Second Life: Through Weekly Tutorials with National and International Guests’. Mobile Me: Creativity on the Go, edited by Michael Docherty and Darryl Rosin, Brisbane, 43-49, http://www.auc.edu.au/Create+World+2009. Gregory, Sue., Mark J. Lee, Allan Ellis, Brent Gregory, Denise Wood, Mathew Hillier, Matthew Campbell, Jenny Grenfell, Steven Pace, Helen Farley, Angela Thomas, Andrew Cram, Suku Sinnappan, Kerrie Smith, Lyn Hay, Shannon Kennedy-Clark, Ian Warren, Scott Grant, David Craven, Heinz Dreher, Carol Matthews, Deborah Murdoch, Lindy McKeown. ‘Australian Higher Education Institutions Transforming the Future of Teaching and Learning through Virtual Worlds’. Curriculum, Technology & Transformation for an Unknown Future, edited by Caroline Steel, Mike Keppell, and Phillipa Gerbic, 399-415. Sydney, 2010. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/sydney10/Ascilite%20conference%20proce edings%202010/Gregory-full.pdf Gregory, Sue, Torsten Reiners and Belinda Tynan. ‘Alternative Realities: Immersive Learning for and with Students’. Distance Learning Technology, Current Instruction and the Future of Education: Applications of Today, Practices of Tomorrow. Texas SU, Houston, USA: IGI Global, 2010, 245-271. Gregory, Sue and Yvonne Masters. ‘Virtual Classrooms and Playgrounds: Why Would Anyone Use Them?’ Proceedings of the 4th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference. University of New England, 2010a. ———. ‘Six Hats in Second Life: Enhancing Preservice Teacher Learning in a Virtual World’. Advancing Learning with ICT: Innovate Collaborate Transform. International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology 2010 (iCTLT), Singapore, 2010b. Gregory, Sue and Howard Smith. ‘Virtual Worlds: Can Virtual Worlds Promote a Higher Level of Collaboration, Engagement and Deeper Thinking for Students than Traditional Web 2.0 Tools?’ Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Postgraduate Research Conference. Bridging the Gap between Ideas and Doing Research, Faculty of The Professions: University of New England, 2009.

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__________________________________________________________________ ———. ‘How Virtual Classrooms are Changing the Face of Education: Using Virtual Classrooms in Today’s University Environment’. International Research in Teacher Education: Current Perspectives, edited by Warren Halloway and John Maurer, Armidale, 239-252. University of New England, 2010. Gregory, Sue and Belinda Tynan. ‘Introducing Jass Easterman: My Second Life Learning Space’. Same Places, Different Spaces. Proceedings ascilite2009 Auckland, 2009. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/gregory.pdf. Hax, Ener. ‘How Good is Reaction Grid Compared to Second Life.’ Viewed on 2 January 2010. http://subquark.wordpress.com/2010/01/01/how-good-is-reactiongrid-compared-to-second-life/. Honey, Michelle, Scott Diener, Kelley Connor, Max Veltman and David Bodily. ‘Teaching in Virtual Space: An Interactive Session Demonstrating Second Life Simulation for Hemorrhage Management’. Same Places, Different Spaces. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/honey.pdf. Jamison, John. ‘Take A Deep Breath... ImagiLearning: Creating the Future of Learning: One Definition at a Time’. Viewed 11 June 2010. http://imagilearning.com/content/take-deep-breath. Kemp, Jeremy W., Daniel Livingston and Peter R. Bloomfield. ‘SLOODLE: Connecting VLE Tools with Emergent Teaching Practice in Second Life’. British Journal of Educational Technology 40.3 (2009). Kearsley, Greg. ‘Explorations in Learning & Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database; Constructivist Theory (J. Bruner)’. Viewed 8 September 2009. http://tip.psychology.org/bruner.html. Lemon, Merle and Oriel Kelly. ‘Laying Second Life Foundations: Second Chance Learners Get First Life Skills’. Same Places, Different Spaces. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/lemon.pdf. Lester, John. ‘Conversation with John Lester aka Pathfinder Linden in Relation to Educational Institutions Using Second Life.’ Second Life. http://www.glsconference.org/2006/pop/lindenp.htm. Linden Lab, ‘Second Life’. Viewed on 19 July 2008. http://www.secondlife.com.

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__________________________________________________________________ Livingstone, Daniel and Jeremy Kemp. ‘Integrating Web-Based and 3-D Learning Environments: Second Life Meets Moodle’. UPGRADE: Technology-Enhanced Learning IX.3 (2008): 8-14. Massaro, Vin. ‘AUSTRALIA: How Goes the Higher Education Revolution?’ June 2010. Viewed on 7 September 2010. http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20100625181602129. Middleton, Andrew. J. and Richard Mather. ‘Machinima Interventions: Innovative Approaches to Immersive Virtual World Curriculum Integration’. ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology 16.3 (2008): 207-220. Mitham, Nic. ‘Virtual Worlds: 2010 and Beyond: Key Industry Trends and Market Developments’. Cambridge, United Kingdom: A KZero Worldswide Report. Viewed 2008. http://www.kzero.co.uk/research-reports.php. Muldoon, Nona and Jennifer Kofoed. ‘Second Life Machinima: Creating New Possibilities for Learning and Instruction’. Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, (2009) NewsLimited. ‘Second Life Creator Linden Lab Fires 30pc of Staff’. Business. June 2010. Viewed on 10 June 2010. http://www.news.com.au/business/breaking-news/second-life-creator-linden-labfires-30-pc-of-staff/story-e6frfkur-1225877759794. Rao, Leena. ‘Linden Lab Lays Off 30 Percent of Staff’. Tech Crunch. June 2010. Viewed on June 2010. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/09/linden-labs-lays-off-30percent-of-staff/. Robinson, Matt. ‘Second Life: Reality Intrudes on Virtual Reality’. BusinessWeek: Technology. June 2010. Viewed on 25 June 2010. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2010/0100625_754814.htm. Siemens, George. ‘Elearnspace; Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age’. December 2004. Viewed on 24 April 2009. http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm. ———. ‘Connectivism.ca. Connectivisim: Networked Learning’. Last modified 2008. Viewed 24 April 2009. http://www.connectivism.ca/.

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__________________________________________________________________ Slone, Debra. J. ‘A Methodology for Measuring Usability Evaluation Skills Using the Constructivist Theory and the Second Life Virtual World’. Journal of Usability Studies 4.4 (2009): 178-188. Smith, Mark. K. ‘Malcolm Knowles, Informal Adult Education, Self-Direction and Andragogy’. Viewed on 4 January 2010. http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-knowl.htm. Wagner, James. ‘Sim Deathwatch: IBM Closing Second Life Exhibition Art Sims Next Month, Continuing Larger SL Withdrawal by Big Blue.’ New World Notes. April 18, 2011. http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/04/ibm-leaving-second-life.html. Warburton, Steven. ‘Second Life in Higher Education: Assessing the Potential for and the Barriers to Deploying Virtual Worlds in Learning and Teaching’. British Journal of Educational Technology 40.3 (2009): 414-426. Webb, Graham. ‘2012 Project’, UNE Flexible and Online. School of Education. UNE. June 2010. Wood, Denise and Lee Hopkins. ‘3-D Virtual Environments: Businesses are Ready but are Our ‘Digital Natives’ Prepared for Changing Landscapes?’ Hello! Where are You in the Landscape of Educational Technology? http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/wood.pdf. Sue Gregory is a long term adult educator, a Lecturer in ICT Education and Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG). She is Principal Researcher and Grant Holder of the ALTC funded project VirtualPREX which investigates the feasibility and efficacy of pre-service teacher training virtual professional experience. Sue is researching Adult Learning in a virtual world and examines student experiences of engagement, collaboration and immersion. The author would like to acknowledge the School of Education, University of New England, Armidale, Australia, which provided an internal research grant, funding of which permitted the writing of this paper to occur.

The Courtship Hypothesis and Second Life: Explaining Sexual Behaviour in a Virtual World Paul Jerry Abstract The Courtship Hypothesis is a means of explaining sexual deviation (specifically paraphilias) in human males. Working from the position that there is a speciestypical courtship process, social interaction with the intent of sexual contact follows an observable and predictable pattern. Paraphilias can be mapped to deviations from, and distortions or fixations on, specific stages of the courtship process. Evidence for the Courtship Hypothesis is found in studies of male sexual deviation where the so-called ‘courtship disorders’ tend to co-occur more frequently than other paraphillias. Second Life is a virtual world where individuals navigate a virtual reality using an avatar. It is a robust 3-D environment where residents are free to build, create, interact and live. There are few restrictions placed on everyday behaviour by the owner, Linden Labs. A portion of Second Life is devoted to adult virtual sexual activity and some residents of Second Life join with the intent of engaging in this activity. Other users (perhaps the majority, based on Adult-rated land allocation) enter Second Life for other purposes including but not limited to education, business, creativity (art, music), and entertainment. ‘Nonsexual’ users of Second Life sometimes report difficulties with ‘sexual’ users who appear to ignore Real Life norms around appropriate communication and interaction. Courtship theory is proposed as part of an explanatory model for, and a way of defining ‘inappropriate’ sexualisation of virtual interaction. There is a dissociative effect of both being and not being a person when using an avatar. This psychological distance, combined with the potential anonymity of the networked environment, and shifting social norms, may open the door to inappropriate sexualisation. Implications for non-sexual users of Second Life such as educators are discussed. Key Words: Second Life, sex, identity, education, courtship, paraphilia, avatar ***** 1. Introduction As each new medium of human expression emerges, educators, among other groups, turn their attention to the possibilities the new medium presents for the enterprise of learning. Second Life 1 is one example of a medium that educators have found to be fertile ground for creating learning experiences. Given the essentially anarchistic (in a positive sense) nature of this particular virtual world, the possibilities for educators are many. Examples exist of universities creating space in Second Life for everything from general information and access to

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__________________________________________________________________ programming, 2 to the generation of virtual spaces for a specific learning context such as medical simulation 3 and languages. 4 Much attention has focused on the potential of the medium itself and its possibilities for generating learning experiences. However, less attention has been paid to the behaviour of individuals within this environment. Although examples exist of systematic exploration of the psychology and anthropology of the residents of virtual worlds, 5 there still seems to be less information on the behaviour of people in these worlds compared to a discussion of things people in these virtual worlds might be doing. In this contribution I explore a phenomenon related to sexuality, observed using a participant-observation methodology 6 and following an inductive method reasoning which is in fact primarily a clinical model of information gathering. 7 In my own lived experience as a resident in Second Life I have viewed the interactions and experiences of the many people that I have crossed paths with through the lens of a practicing clinical/forensic psychologist as well as universitybased researcher and these viewing positions bias and shape my perspective. From this perspective, I submit several considerations with regard to in-world behaviour and its implications. Specifically, some in-world behaviour related to human courtship appears to fit the current thinking related to atypical sexual behaviour and sexual deviance. This behaviour in-world is more common than found outside of this medium and may occur in part because of the relative anonymity of avatar-mediated virtual immersion. Perhaps most importantly, the occurrence of this behaviour in-world suggests that the membrane that separates virtual and non-virtual human behaviour is more porous – allowing for experience in-world and out-of-world to transfer in either direction. Starting from the exploration of a cross-medium expression of deviant sexuality, this exploration leads to a consideration of the potential for transfer of learning between on-line and off-line modalities. Following a brief explanation of the nature of the medium Second Life, including its implications for the development and presentation of virtual identity, I describe courtship theory and paraphilic sexual behaviour which I then map onto experience in the virtual world. I conclude with two discussions, the first being the ambiguity raised by the expression of sexuality in virtual reality, and its impact on our understanding of what might be considered ‘normal’. I also present some concrete implications for educators in hopes of helping them navigate the interaction between people as they are busy managing the learning environment that they are creating for those people. Finally, a necessary note on language: for the sake of consistency in this narrative, I will use the term virtual world to refer to any medium that presents as a three dimensional (3-D) environment ‘in’ which the end user navigates an avatar as though that avatar was moving through that 3-D space much like a human being navigates through the material world. As well, some of this discussion necessarily

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__________________________________________________________________ needs to point to the different experiences and transferability of experience between the virtual world and the so-called ‘real’ world. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to on-line versus off-line experience as a way of distinguishing the two environments. Obviously, on-line refers to experience in the 3-D virtual world (and not just the use of the Internet as it is commonly referenced) and off-line refers to experience in the material ‘real’ world. Of course, one eventual implication of this work is the necessary blurring of distinction between on-line and off-line experiences. Milgram and Colquhoun suggest that it is appropriate to note that ‘although both purely real environments (RE's) and virtual environments (VE's) certainly do exist as separate entities, they are not to be considered simply as alternatives to each other, but rather as poles lying at opposite ends of a RealityVirtuality (RV) continuum…’. 8 This sentiment is echoed by Castranova who said that the ‘allegedly ‘virtual’ is blending so smoothly into the allegedly ‘real’ as to make the distinction increasingly difficult to see.’ 9 2. Second Life Second Life is a virtual world where individuals navigate a virtual reality using an avatar. It is a robust 3-D environment where residents are free to build, create, interact and live. There are few restrictions placed on everyday behaviour by the owner, Linden Labs. An individual wishing to enter this virtual world first creates an account, chooses a basic avatar which they will use to navigate in-world, and downloads a viewer that allows them access to both their avatar and the virtual world. Once logged in, an individual uses their avatar to navigate a 3-D environment. At this point an individual can explore the environment and visit a multitude of places, some re-creations of real locations, and some are environments derived completely from imagination. The individual can interact with others as they cross paths, attend events including live music (which is, in fact, live musicians broadcasting through their computer and via their in-world avatar), dancing, social chat, role-play in a variety of themed environments, and even engage in sexual activity. Second Life is a persistent state world 10 which means that when a user logs off, the virtual world remains, in some sense, without the user needing to be present. 11 The virtual world does continue to exist in the absence of the logged-out resident, if only on a server in California. 12 Several implications arise from this condition. First, the resident of Second Life will return to a familiar virtual space when they log back in. This return to the predictable makes it easier for the off-line resident to imagine and project themselves into the online in fantasy and imagination. Second, some aspects of the virtual space may change because other avatars have been inworld, in the persistent space, enacting on the world itself. When the resident logs back in, they see the changes to the virtual world that occurred in their absence. This lends a sense of living reality to the virtual space. For example, each morning when I open the front door, I expect to see pretty much the same street with houses

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__________________________________________________________________ and vehicles. However, some vehicles may be different, or parked in different places. This reminds me that there is a reality outside my front door that exists in my absence and is acted on by others, also in my absence. By making this a feature of a virtual world, it mimics this changeable consistency of off-line lived experience in such a way as to enhance the online sense of reality. Because of this feature, Second Life is host to many discreet (and persistent) locations or ‘sims’. At the time of writing, the breakdown of the top 50 Sims in Second Life was 54% moderate, 34% adult, and 12% general. 13 A ranking of the top 50 sims for September 2011 notes that a majority of locations are dedicated to adult orientated activity and some of these have been in this list for many months. 14 3. Foundations of Identity and Self: Real and Virtual The virtual world allows an individual to create virtually (pardon the pun) any identity he or she chooses. The implications of this can be staggering considering the potential to portray oneself in nearly any manner desired, including presentation of gender. 15,16 It is necessary then to engage a framework for understanding self and identity to ground an explanation of identity and virtual experience. Mann 17 proposes that the self is composed of three basic features, bodiness, reflexivity, and time. These three features interact in a dynamic manner generating a sense of selfhood that is both simple (as Mann titles his book) and sufficient to explore a variety of experiences including identity. Bodiness is both a subjective and objective experience of our body as the key thing that ‘delimits [our] experience’. 18 Although somewhat Cartesian in its flavour, Mann makes a point. In the off-line world, we exist in a single physical space. The idiom ‘you can’t be in two places at once’ holds true for the physicality of everyday lived experience (ignoring of course any discussion of quantum theory for which I am not qualified.) Mann expands his discussion to include the sense of bodiness as a core experience. In conjunction with the feature of reflexivity, he suggests that we build our language and experience around the most obvious physical feature of ourselves – the body. We speak of ‘swallowing something whole’ (a body metaphor meaning that we uncritically accept something); we say our ‘hands are tied’ (meaning we cannot do something requested of us); we talk about ‘gut feelings’, ‘pain(s) in the neck’ (or other anatomical location), and ‘dragging our feet’ (meaning we are deliberately working slower than we can on something.) 19 Reflexivity is the ability to self-refer and self-examine, in part by distinguishing between those things that ‘are me’ to the exclusion of those things that ‘are not me’. 20 These are two separate abilities. The first, self-reference, presupposes that an individual has successfully passed a developmental stage where they have established an identity as separate from others. 21 Erikson placed this crucial stage of development at ages 1.5 to 3 years, highlighting its foundational level in the development of the human being. Self-reference is the ability to answer the

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__________________________________________________________________ question ‘what am I?’, distinguishing the ‘me’ from the ‘not me’. Self-examination is the ability to answer the question ‘who am I?’, establishing the qualities that are (to some degree) unique to this ‘me’ that is distinct from the ‘everything else’ that is ‘not me’. Time is our awareness of our experience as bounded by past, present and future. 22 Somewhat humorously, (and remarkably Kantian), Woody Allen noted that ‘Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.’ 23 However, every aspect of our existence is bounded by our experience of time. This is stated in a specific way to avoid the issue of whether time exists and if it does, how it exists – both of which are beyond the scope of this chapter. We experience events as happening in a sequence using language like ‘before, during, after’ and ‘past, present, future.’ We experience events as having duration, although the subjective experience of duration seems to defy a consistency or measurement suggested by the ‘objective’ passage of time as measured by a clock. Examples include the sense that an activity is ‘taking forever’ or that ‘time flies when you’re having fun.’ Presumably the objectively measurable passage of time was constant, but the subjective experience of its passage varied with the activity in question. If identity development is grounded in body, mind, and time as Mann proposes, then it follows that situations or contexts that ignore or distort our habitual experience of any of these three features of the self will result in unique challenges. The advent of virtual worlds and our lived experience in them challenges our sense of identity as constructed and experienced as a result of the interplay between bodiness, reflexivity and time. Yee, Bailenson and Duchenaut invoke the notion of the Proteus Effect which suggests that when an individual is represented by an avatar, their behaviour in a virtual space tends to conform more to what might be expected from the physical representation of the avatar than of what would be expected from their material body. 24 This finding extends to many of the interpersonal nonverbal social norms of eye contact, personal space and so on. 25 Individuals as avatars in a virtual space appear to follow nonverbal social norms and cues. This opens the question of how much an individual, working with the seeming disembodiment of a virtual world, transfers some sense of identity or embodiness, to the avatar? This question currently forms the nucleus of my on-going exploration of this topic. For now, it seems that there is some effort on the part of an individual to develop an egosyntonic (corporeal-syntonic?) avatar. 26 Perhaps the sense of bodiness is so ingrained in identity, that when faced with a virtual representation, the individual seeks to join with the avatar, or bring the avatar into alignment with selfperception. Questions of reflexivity, ‘what am I?’ and ‘who am I?’ become complex. Bridging the boundary between off-line and on-line experience, how does one engage with an avatar and at what point does an individual begin to view their avatar as an aspect of themselves? Childs and Peachey propose a taxonomy of

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__________________________________________________________________ responses to being asked to create an avatar for educational purposes. 27 This range of resistance suggests that developing an on-line aspect of oneself is not a natural or logical extension of bodiness as Mann conceives of it. Simply put, it takes an active reflexive stance to bring an avatar into one’s sense of identity. Residents with whom I interacted during my immersion in Second Life seemed to range in level of immersion with their avatar. Informally, it appears as though a tripartite model applies on the continuum of identity: those that immerse totally and ‘are their avatar’ for the duration of being on-line; those that hold a dual view in mind as they interact – ‘I am me, being my avatar which is also me’; and those that remain completely disconnected as though playing a game and walking through a virtual space as a humanoid avatar is not much different that driving a virtual car in a racing game. It is important to make a note about causality. While it might be interesting to speculate as to whether the experience of immersion is the result of some emergent quality of the virtual worlds themselves, there are several factors that inform immersion and identification with an avatar. Castranova 28 gives an account of the new user that has heuristic appeal. He suggests that very quickly in the process of navigating a virtual world, an individual shifts from saying that something has happened to ‘my avatar’ to saying that something has happened ‘to me.’ Before this happens however, a key point made by Castranova is that there is a steep learning curve – a kind of entry cost to a virtual world. An interested individual needs to have a certain level of skill and persistence in finding, (in some cases buying) software, setting it up, signing on, inventing an avatar, perhaps paying a fee or setting up an account including payment information, and then learning how to navigate the virtual world. One can argue that given the effort necessary to start in a virtual world, an individual who has made this effort is more likely to be willing to be invested in, and identify with his or her avatar. The implication for educators is that introducing virtual worlds as an educational tool to non-invested individuals is more than likely to result in the experience of Childs and Peachey (see chapter elsewhere in this volume). Once an individual manages to incorporate an avatar as part of their identity, the recursive levels of self-awareness grow in complexity. For example, when a person joins Second Life and enacts their avatar in-world, and then, as that avatar, joins a themed role-play community where the (already role-played) avatar assumes a role of its own, we are faced with multiple levels of reflexivity and complex questions of identity. When looking at deviance, it is likely that the distortions of reflexivity will bear the most fruit. The questions ‘who is assaulted’ or ‘who is learning’ become germane when discussing an individual who is also an avatar who is also playing a role. Time in the context of on-line experience appears to move subjectively. As individuals become comfortable with the medium and are freer to immerse without the medium interfering, the subjective experience of the passage of time changes.

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__________________________________________________________________ Individuals who develop relationships in virtual spaces often experience a more rapid intimacy than they normally report off-line. This may be due in part to the anonymity and motivation of the individual. One respondent to my interviewing described Second Life time moving quickly as, ‘meet on Monday, dance on Tuesday, partner on Wednesday, get bored on Thursday, un-partner and part ways on Friday.’ 4. Transitional Space Murray invoked Winnicott’s notions of intra- and inter-personal space as applied to virtual experience. In some sense, every resident of SL who has invested time and energy into the development of an avatar, is at the ‘border between the representational world and the actual world.’ 29 They both identify with and can be detached from their avatar and its relationships. Winnicott discussed these borders or reality as dynamics of projection, introjection, and identification. He termed these dynamics ‘transitional experiences’ and their power ‘comes from the fact that the real thing is the thing that isn't there’. 30 Winnicott proposed that this zone lay between the wholly internal psychological matrix of the mind and the wholly external world of people and objects. 31,32 Interestingly, it is in this zone that Winnicott situated culture and sexual play, 33 and it is in this zone that virtual spaces likely fall. If Winnicott is correct, human beings are naturally organised to make use of virtual worlds. That they already experience a transition zone between external and internal reality, human beings engaged in virtual worlds and the transition to the off-line world are on familiar experiential ground. They are living a concretised version of transitional space. Interestingly, and fodder for future research, Winnicott notes the psychological use of transitional space as a means of bridging the internal psychic structures and the external reality. 34 A closer examination of an individual’s avatar as a psychic structure and its reflection with the reality of the creator may open a discussion of avatar identity based on an ego ideal. Castronova’s 35 version of transitional space is the notion of the magical circle which he references from the work of Huizinga. 36 A magical circle is an imagined space wherein a game takes place. It is, to a large degree, consensual as well as bounded by rules, and is time-limited. For example, a hockey game could be considered a magical circle. Individuals engage, for a period of time, in a specific place, an activity that is bounded by rules and everyone engages with the game as a meaningful but bounded event. When applied to virtual worlds, the magical circle is presented as a kind of membrane (a bubble?) that encapsulates the game experience, bounding it in a kind of ‘magical’ place and time that exists for the participant. Presumably, the reality of the magic circle is limited to the virtual experience except that we observe significant spill-over from these supposedly bounded spaces into the off-line world. Examples include discussing the politics of a Second Life role play sim on an external discussion space like Facebook, which

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__________________________________________________________________ in turn affects the politics internally in the Second Life sim as avatars enact responses in-world, driven by the discussion out-of-world. This porous quality of the magic circle contributes to the notion that any distinction between virtual and non-virtual spaces is erroneous. It further gives credence to Winnicott’s notion of the transitional. At the same time, Castranova, who is also known for his work on the economics of virtual worlds, suggests that economic behaviour within on-line and between on-line and off-line worlds remains rational. 37 In other words, individuals behave in virtual spaces in the same way they behave off-line when evaluating the value of goods. Further, when faced with evaluating the value of a virtual good in an off-line context (e.g., considering buying a virtual item using a ‘real’ marketplace like eBay or Second Life’s Marketplace), an individual still applies off-line rational economic behaviour to the purchase. This notion of virtual space being bounded by a permeable membrane has significant implications for education as well as the enactment of behaviour, both deviant and normative. 5. Courtship Theory The Courtship hypothesis is a means of explaining sexual deviation (specifically paraphilias) in human males. Freund and Blanchard 38 propose that there is a species-typical courtship process, and that social interaction with the intent of sexual contact follows an observable and predictable pattern. This pattern is normally divided into four phases including finding and appraising a potential partner, an affiliative phase that includes verbal and nonverbal cues such as looking smiling and talking, a tactile phase in which physical contact is made, and finally a phase in which sexual intercourse occurs. 39 Distortions in this pattern have been used to explain paraphilias and certain paraphilias are referred to as ‘courtship disorders’ 40 which closely align to distortions in one or more of the four phases of courtship. A paraphilia, as a disorder, is defined as ‘recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviours generally involving 1) non-human objects, 2) the suffering or humiliation of oneself or one's partner, or 3) children or other nonconsenting persons’. 41 These behaviours cause ‘clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning’. 42 Although heavily grounded in the medical model and easily challenged through a cultural or post-modern lens, 43 the key point courtship theorists raise in defence of its theoretical value is the fact that certain ‘courtship paraphilias’ co-occur in clinical populations more than do the rest of the list. 44 Two examples of paraphilias that are germane to the exploration of sexuality in Second Life are voyeurism, and the so-called ‘preferential’ rape pattern. Voyeurism involves observing unsuspecting individuals leading up to or engaged in sexual activity, with the observer often engaged in self- stimulation. 45 The socalled ‘preferential rape’ pattern is where a male seeks out a sexual partner wherein

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__________________________________________________________________ he is able to ‘skip’ the first three phases of courtship and move directly to sexual intercourse. When this is done with a consenting partner, it may be in the context of prostitution. When this is done with a vulnerable or non-consenting partner, it is classed as ‘preferential rape’. 46 At the same time related and beyond the current scope, the question of whether or not rape is possible in a virtual world has long been settled. 47 Simply put, it is, and has been well documented. The hallmarks include the feeling of trauma, the sense of violation, and the negative emotional reaction to returning to the virtual space in which the violation occurred. 6. Normative Courtship in Second Life In Second Life, there are number of venues that are not explicitly sexual in nature but are designed to imitate normal courtship behaviour. One example, ‘Sweetheart’s Jazz’ has built its presence in Second Life as a romantic location to meet potential partners. It also includes an out-of-world Internet presence 48 and bills itself as ‘Created for the purpose to help those find love or be inspired by it.’ 49 An avatar in Second Life who visits Sweetheart’s is ostensibly doing so to engage in a normative courtship process, albeit modified to account for the virtual environment. Female residents that I have interviewed have reported that once the process of finding and connecting with a potential ‘mate’ has occurred (i.e., asking/being asked to dance and moving to the dance floor, and into a private chat session), the conversation takes one of two turns. Either it ceases completely or there is an immediate request for sex. In the case of a lack of conversation, there is the possibility that the male has stopped at the affiliative phase of the courtship process and is simply using the visual image of the couple dancing for his own purposes. Likewise, many female avatars reported that once they were in a private chat while dancing, the courtship conversation did not continue as would be expected given both normative courtship theory and the pattern of conversation that led to the dance. Rather, it turned very quickly to conversation about sex (scatologia) or a request or demand for sex. 7. Sex, Second Life and Identity Given definitions of paraphilias such as scatalogia (viz. ‘telephone scatalogia’ – exposing a surprised victim to sexual language over a phone, 50 not unlike exposing a victim by surprise to sexual text in a chat window), is the expression of sexuality in Second Life rightly categorized as deviant, in and of itself? Taylor suggests not: What I would like to suggest is that the practice of sex in internet spaces is a common aspect of embodiness on-line and that neither the abnormal nor comic ways of discussing the matter go far in describing the nature of sexuality in this medium.’ 51

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__________________________________________________________________ And McRae goes further and says that, While some may well find technologically facilitated eroticism to be a disembodied, alienating and ultimately meaningless experience, others, however, have discovered that it can be as involving, intense and transformative as the best kinds of embodied erotic encounters, and that furthermore, its virtuality enhances rather than detracts from the experience. 52 This serves in contrast to the medical and clinical perspectives and bears further consideration and research. Meanwhile the seeming disembodied nature of virtual experience challenges our normal assumption of physical presence. In the context of sexuality, Skye proposes that disembodiness may facilitate the manifestation of behaviour outside one’s embodied norm, simply because it does not include a body, Instead of traditional courting and the occasional difficulties faced by people in real life relationships, individuals can now escape to the chat room for a sexual quickie or move on to an easier cyber coupling when reality becomes too hard to deal with. 53 Meanwhile, First and Tasman note that, ‘Paraphilic fantasies often rely heavily upon the image of a partner who does not possess ‘personhood’. 54 The individual who remains disconnected from his own avatar and is seeking sexual release in the context of a courtship disordered pattern, may be stimulated by his target avatar who is essentially a partner that does not possess ‘personhood’ because they can be explained away as simple ‘pixels on a screen’. When the couple moves from public to private interaction, and the conversation either stops or becomes overly sexual, has the male avatar shifted to a ‘personless’ paraphilic fantasy at the expense of the female avatar who was lured by the promise of courtship? Invoking Castronova’s use of the magic circle as an explanation of the miscommunications found in courtship dilemmas, consider the following scenario: The male avatar attends a dance sim in Second Life. He asks a female avatar to dance. In the off-line world, the ensuing courtship might involve talk, touching and the continual appraisal of a potential mate. Eventually, whether for one night or forever, these two might consummate their union according to courtship theory – with a steady progression from stage to stage, from finding, viewing, touching and copulating. Meanwhile, clinically, ‘the most socially significant shifts are from erotic imagery to sexual behaviour.’ 55 Instead, the common report of female avatars, more often in sims dedicated to courtship, but also across the grid, is that once

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__________________________________________________________________ initial contact has been made, the next line typed by the male avatar is ‘let’s go have sex.’ It is in this confluence of virtual and ‘real world’ experience, manifesting at Murray’s ‘border between the representational world and the actual world.’ 56 or in Winnicott’s transitional space, or crossing Castronova’s membrane, with a partner that does not possess ‘personhood’, that the result is the manifestation of courtship disorder – in particular scatological and preferential. Second Life is ‘real’ in the sense that the other as avatar is also ‘someone’ and yet at the same time, an avatar is a fetishised object – detached from a reality, itself unreal, ‘un-personed’ – an opening for paraphilic behaviour. It takes a peculiar distortion of the magic circle’s rules of engagement in Second Life to maintain this paraphilic illusion that a victim is both person and image. Recalling Mann’s dimensions of self and identity, we can frame this experience as one that lacks bodiness, or lacks grounding in the off-line reality. We can also see the distortion in time, too much sexual focus occurring too quickly, even for a medium where relationships move faster than off-line. We also see the distortion in reflexivity where the aggressor is lost in a virtual fantasy, engulfed in what the aggressor believes to be the defined rules of the magic circle, albeit distorted in favour of sexual pathology. Certainly, an individual caught in this fantasy makes some effort to sustain it because a fantasy only lasts as long at the reflective light of reason does not shine on it. 8. Implications for Educators Given the apparent presence of a full range of behaviour in Second Life, it makes sense that educators consider the social implications of the virtual environment. While one would not expect to have to explain social norms around sexuality in a face-to-face classroom, there does seem to be something about the disconnection of identity, the one-click access to anything, and the notion that individuals acting from a paraphillic stance seek the instant conversion from any given courtship phase to orgasm. Further, the distortion of common grounding elements of identity including bodiness, time and reflexivity in individuals who may not have integrated their avatar identity wholly with themselves, suggests that the rules of the magic circle in which education in the virtual world may occur, will require clarity and explication at the start of such an activity. Castronova’s adoption of the magic circle concept in regard to economic behaviour, and in particular, his finding that off-line rationality influences on-line behaviour and vice versa, opens the discussion of how other human behaviour can manifest bi-directionally between on-line and off-line. The movement back and forth in this transitional space suggests that the distortion of play and sexuality known to exist in courtship disordered offenders finds a place on-line as much as off-line. Although speaking about television, a virtual commonality by the mid-1970’s in North America and the U.K., an updated consideration of Baggaley and Duck’s

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__________________________________________________________________ comments apply to this emerging medium: ‘We conclude that the ‘transparency of the medium', as often upheld, is a myth put about by those who do not appreciate its psychological subtleties.’ 57 They also state that, ‘...education about the medium is as fundamental as education through it...’ 58 It appears that education about the nature of the medium of a virtual world as well as explicit behavioural expectations for avatars in an educational context may be appropriate and necessary. Finally, and in the spirit of Baggaley and Duck’s observations, this chapter represents an approach to education in virtual worlds that is in the minority. Much of the work on virtual worlds has been an attempt to answer the general questions ‘what can we do with this new tool, and how can we teach in new and interesting ways?’ Less often asked in the educational context is the question, ‘how do people behave in virtual worlds that are being used for educational purposes?’ I propose that this latter question warrants continued discussion and exploration.

Notes 1

Philip Rosedale, Second Life (Linden Research, Inc., San Francisco, CA). David Anand et al., ‘Using 3D Virtual Worlds: Engaging Learners and Providing Social Support’, Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research (Athabasca: Athabasca University, 2008), Viewed on 1 February 2011, http://hdl.handle.net/2149/1488. 3 Douglas Danforth, et al., ‘Development of Virtual Patient Simulations for Medical Education’, Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2 (2009): 4-11. 4 Languagelab.com, Viewed on 23 January 2011, http://www.languagelab.com/. 5 Tom Boellstorff Coming of Age in Second Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 6 Paula Sauuko, Doing Research in Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2003). 7 Paul Jerry, The Experience of Intersubjectivity in Virtual Learning: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. Canadian Association of Distance Education Annual Conference, June 2005. 8 Paul Milgram and Herman Colquhoun, ‘A Taxonomy of Real and Virtual World Display Integration’, in Mixed Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds, ed. Yoh Tamura (Tokyo: Springer Verlag, 1999), 2. 9 Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 148. 10 Castranova, ‘Synthetic Worlds’, 80. 11 Calling forth the possibility that virtual worlds follow a Berkeleyian notion of existence, with, in the case of Second Life, Linden Labs acting as the ‘God’ that ensures that ‘the tree will continue.’ See Knox v. Anonymous, Quad Quotes, Viewed on 7 November, 2011, http://quotes.yourdictionary.com/quad. 12 Linden Labs, Contact, Viewed on 7 November 2011, http://lindenlab.com/contact. 2

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Hamlet Au, New World Notes, Viewed on 5 January 2011, http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/demographics/. 14 Hamlet Au, New World Notes, Top 50 Second Life Sims, September 2011: Amid Sexy Chat and Porn, Gerontology Education Training. Viewed on 5 October 2011, http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2011/10/top-50-second-life-sims-september-2011.html. 15 Amy Skye, ‘Cyberspace: A New Era in Sexuality?’ Women’s Sexuality/ Suite101.com, Viewed on 1 February 2011, http://www.suite101.com. 16 Jerry Aline Flieger, Is Oedipus online? Siting Freud after Freud (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 17 David Mann, A Simple Theory of the Self (New York: Norton, 1994). 18 Ibid.,, 34-35. 19 Englishclub.com. 90 Idioms Based on Body, Viewed on 30 October 2011, http://www.englishclub.com/ref/Idioms/Body/index.htm. 20 Mann, A Simple Theory of the Self, 30. 21 Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (New York: Norton Books, 1968), 107. 22 Mann, A Simple Theory of the Self, 35. 23 Woody Allen, BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2011.,Viewed on 30 October 2011, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/woodyallen108110.html. 24 Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, ‘The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-representation on Online and Offline Behavior’, Communication Research 36 (2009): 285-312. 25 Nick Yee et al., ‘The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments’, CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 115-121. 26 Mark Hamilton and Kristine L. Nowak. ‘Advancing a Model of Avatar Evaluation and Selection’ PsychNology Journal 8 (2010): 33-65, Viewed 30 October 2011, EBSCOhost. 27 Mark Childs and Anna Peachey, ‘Love It or Hate It: Students’ Responses to the Experience of Virtual Worlds’, Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds: Opening an Undiscovered Country, eds. Paul Jerry and Linda Lindsey (Oxford, UK: InterDisciplinary Press, 2011), 81-91. 28 Castranova, Synthetic Worlds, 29-44. 29 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 103. 30 Ibid., 100. 31 Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971/2005). 32 Thomas Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind. Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1993). 33 Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971.

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__________________________________________________________________ 34

Eric Rayner, The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis (London: Free Association Press, 1991), 61. 35 Castronova, Synthetic Worlds. 36 Ibid. 37 Edward Castronova, ‘A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science’ (CESifo Working Paper Series No. 2355, 2008), Viewed on 30 October 2011, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1173642. 38 Kurt Freund and Ray Blanchard, ‘The Concept of Courtship Disorder.’ Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 12 (1986): 79-92. 39 Kurt Freund and Robert Watson, ‘Mapping the Boundaries of Courtship Disorder’, The Journal of Sex Research 27 (1990): 589-606. 40 Freund and Blanchard, ‘The Concept of Courtship Disorder’. 41 American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Revised 4th ed., Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 2000), 522-523. 42 Ibid., 526. 43 Dinesh Bhugra, Dmitri Popelyuk and Isabel McMullen, ‘Paraphilias across Cultures: Contexts and Controversies’, Journal of Sex Research 47 (2010): 242256. 44 Kurt Freund, ‘Courtship Disorder: Is the Hypothesis Valid?’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 528 (1988): 172-182. 45 Michael Lavin, ‘Voyeurism: Psychopathology and Theory’, Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment (2nd ed.), eds. Richard Laws and William O’Donohue (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008). 46 Robert Prentky and Raymond Knight, ‘Identifying Critical Dimensions for Discriminating Among Rapists’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 59 (1991): 643-661. 47 Julian Dibble, ‘A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society’, First published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993, Viewed 7 November 2011, http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html. 48 Sweethearts Jazz Internet site, Viewed 31 January 2011, http://sweetheartsjazz.com/. 49 Sweethearts Jazz Internet site, About Us, Viewed 31 January 2011, http://sweetheartsjazz.com/morp/index.php?option=com_contentandview=articlean did=32:premium-communityandcatid=13:rokcontentrotator-itemsandItemid=27. 50 Paul Schewe, ‘Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified: Assessment and Treatment’, Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment, eds. Richard Laws and William O’Donohue (New York: The Guilford Press, 1997), 424.

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T. L. Taylor, ‘Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds’, The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments, ed. Ralph Schroeder (London: Springer-Verlag, 2002), 50. 52 Shannon McRae, ‘Flesh Made Word: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body’, Internet Culture, ed. David Porter (New York: Routledge, 1996), 75. 53 Amy Skye, ‘Cyberspace: A New Era in Sexuality?’ Women’s Sexuality/ Suite101.com, Viewed on 1 February 2011, http://www.suite101.com. 54 Michael First and Allan Tasman, DSM-IV-TR Mental Disorders: Diagnosis, Etiology, and Treatment (New Jersey: J. Wiley and Sons, 2004), 1086. 55 Ibid. 56 Murray, ‘Hamlet and the Holodeck’. 57 John Baggaley and Steve Duck, Dynamics of Television (Westmead, UK: Saxon House, 1976), 7. 58 Ibid., 131.

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Revised 4th ed). Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 2000. Au, Hamlet, ‘New World Notes’. Accessed January 29, 2011. http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/demographics/. Baggaley, John and Steve Duck. Dynamics of Television. Westmead, UK: Saxon House, 1976. Bartle, Richard. Designing Virtual Worlds. Indiana: New Riders Publishing, 2004. Bhugra, Dinesh, Dmitri Popelyuk and Isabel McMullen. ‘Paraphilias across Cultures: Contexts and Controversies’. Journal of Sex Research 47 (2010): 242256. Boellstorff, Tom. Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Castronova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Castronova, Edward. ‘A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science’. (CESifo Working Paper Series No. 2355, 2008). Accessed October 30, 2011. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1173642.

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__________________________________________________________________ Childs, Mark and Peachey, Anna. ‘Love It or Hate It: Students’ Responses to the Experience of Virtual Worlds’. Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds: Opening an Undiscovered Country, edited by Paul Jerry and Linda Lindsey, 81-91. Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011. Danforth, Douglas, R. Procter, M. Chen, R. Johnson and Robert Heller. ‘Development of Virtual Patient Simulations for Medical Education’. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2 (2009): 4-11. Dibble, Julian. ‘A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society’. First published in The Village Voice, December 23, 1993. Accessed November 7, 2011. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle_vv.html. First, Michael and Allan Tasman. DSM-IV-TR Mental Disorders: Diagnosis, Etiology, and Treatment. New Jersey: J. Wiley and Sons, 2004. Flieger, Jerry Aline. Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Freund, Kurt. ‘Courtship Disorder: Is the Hypothesis Valid? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 528 (1988): 172-182. Kurt Freund and Robert Watson, ‘Mapping the Boundaries of Courtship Disorder’. The Journal of Sex Research 27 (1990): 589-606. Hamilton, Mark A., and Kristine L. Nowak. ‘Advancing a Model of Avatar Evaluation and Selection.’ PsychNology Journal 8.1 (April 2010): 33-65. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost. Accessed October 30, 2011. Jerry, Paul and Brenda Bryson. ‘Developing a Professional Identity in an Online Learning Environment.’ Consultation Proceedings: 9th Annual Building Tomorrow Today, edited by L. J. Cleland, 49-54. Alberta Regional Consultation for Career Development, 2003. Jerry, Paul. ‘The Experience of Intersubjectivity in Virtual Learning: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives.’ Proceedings of the Canadian Association of Distance Education, Canadian Association for Distance Education, 2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lavin, Michael. ‘Voyeurism: Psychopathology and Theory’. Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment (2nd ed.), edited by Richard Laws and William O’Donohue, 305-319. New York: The Guilford Press, 2008. Mann, David. A Simple Theory of the Self. New York: Norton, 1994. McRae, Shannon. ‘Flesh Made Word: Sex, Text and the Virtual Body’. Internet Culture, edited by David Porter, 75. New York: Routledge, 1996. Milgram, Paul and Herman Colquhoun. ‘A Taxonomy of Real and Virtual World Display Integration’. Mixed Reality: Merging Real and Virtual Worlds, edited by YOH Tamura, 1-26. Tokyo: Springer Verlag, 1999. Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Ogden, Thomas. The Matrix of the Mind. Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue. New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1993. Prentky, Robert and Knight, Raymond. ‘Identifying Critical Dimensions for Discriminating Among Rapists’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59 (1991): 643-661. Sauuko, Paula. Doing Research in Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2003. Schewe, Paul. ‘Paraphilia Not Otherwise Specified: Assessment and Treatment’. Sexual Deviance: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment, edited by Richard Laws and William O’Donohue, 424. New York: The Guilford Press, 1997. Rayner, Eric. The Independent Mind in British Psychoanalysis. London: Free Association Press, 1991. Skye, Amy. ‘Cyberspace: A New Era in Sexuality?’ Accessed January 21, 2011. http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/6325/61969. Taylor, T. L. ‘Living Digitally: Embodiment in Virtual Worlds’. The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments, edited by Ralph Schroeder, Chapter 3. London: Springer-Verlag, 2002. Winnicott, Donald. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1971/2005.

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__________________________________________________________________ Wood, John. The Virtual Embodied: Presence/Practice/Technology. New York: Routledge, 1998. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson. ‘The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-representation on Online and Offline Behavior’. Communication Research 36 (2009): 285-312. Yee, Nick, Jeremy Bailenson, Mark Urbanek, Francis Chang and Dan Merget. ‘The Unbearable Likeness of Being Digital: The Persistence of Nonverbal Social Norms in Online Virtual Environments’. CyberPsychology and Behavior 10 (2007): 115-121. Paul Jerry is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Centre for Applied Psychology, Athabasca University. His research interests include clinical training from a psychoanalytic perspective, regulation of professional psychology, and the use of counselling skills to manage virtual education experiences. He is a Past President of the College of Alberta Psychologists and is a Registered Psychologist maintaining a clinical practice in rural Canada. He has been a resident of Second Life since August 2009.

Experience as an Essential Aspect of Teaching and Learning in a Virtual World Tomáš Bouda Abstract The chapter presents main issues which are necessary to deal with during implementation of educational activities within a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE). The first area highlighted is the core essence of a new paradigm of teaching and learning, which correlates with the theory of constructivism and the Social- and cognitive-connectedness schemata (SCCS) proposed by Sontag. Secondly, the author discusses the essential aspects of MUVEs, which enhance communication and collaboration activities within such environment and bring positive aspects to education activities. Next, the chapter provides an overview of the instructional design of 3D learning experience (3DLE) by Kapp and O`Driscol. Finally, the author introduces the project VIAKISK (Virtual Academic Campus of Library and Information Studies) that was situated in virtual world Second Life and then moved to Open Simulator. The author describes the process of moving a virtual island into another destination and discusses implications of this process. Key Words: 3D learning experience, 3D virtual learning environment, education, Multi-user virtual environment, immersive world learning, inworld, Second Life, Social- and cognitive-connectedness schemata, sims, teaching, VIAKISK, virtual environment. ***** 1. Introduction Gartner research indicates that Virtual Worlds (VWs) are becoming mainstream within the next five to ten years. This prediction is made with respect to the Hype cycle, which shows actual position of Virtual Worlds in a phase of disillusion. 1 There has been a lot of buzz about VWs in academia these days. We are able to visit many interesting sims in a social virtual world of Second Life (SL) and participate in various education activities inworld. Nowadays we can see an independent movement of educators, who change corporate VWs for an open source solution represented by Open Simulator. Of course, there are a lot of other virtual spaces/environments/immersive world environments, which can be used for educational purposes. There is much research and numerous papers published as well on this topic. This chapter discusses, in section two, the rationale for educators’ interest in using VWs in educational activities. Instructional design of 3D learning experience is presented in section three. There is an overview of the author’s diploma thesis research on how Second Life (SL) is used by teachers and students in section five.

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__________________________________________________________________ Section five additionally describes project VIAKISK, the educational sim in SL, which is managed by Division of Information and Library Studies (Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University Brno, Czech republic) from 2009 until the time of writing. 2. More Experience Means More Knowledge The world of the new century shows us that students need a completely new type of education and learning processes. For instance, ‘The Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ proposes several competencies which need to be adopted by students in order to become competitive. There are needs of critical thinking and making judgments, solving complex, multidisciplinary open-ended problems or ability to communicate and collaborate with others. 2 These competencies require new approaches of teaching and learning. Constructivism is one of these new approaches, and states that learners construct their new knowledge based on their past experience using mental structures and an interpretation of objects and events. Sontag proposes the theory of social- and cognitive-connectedness schemata (SCCS), which illustrates how important is to set up social contacts for students. These contacts enhance knowledge construction and sharing. Sontag also involved a game element. Her research shows that an instructional design based on SCCS theory ‘can help to narrow the gap between lower and higher performing students and significantly increase the learning transfer abilities of students’. 3 Constructivism and the SCCS theory enable us to develop new instructional designs which respect experience as a core principle of education. Examples of such instructional design are projectbased learning, situated learning or problem-based learning. Considering new environments such as multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and virtual worlds as educational platforms, educators have powerful tools to improve and enhance students’ experience through project-based learning. In this chapter, a distinction is made between MUVEs and virtual worlds, with both considered to be examples of 3D virtual learning environments (3D VLEs). Dade et al. define MUVEs as environments which ‘enable multiple simultaneous participants to access virtual contexts, to interact with digital artifacts, to represent themselves through ‘avatars,’ to communicate with other participants and with computer-based agents, and activities of various types’. 4 In terms of definitions of virtual worlds, Bells states that, a virtual world is ‘a synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers’. 5 Students’ experience is enriched by unique characteristics of 3D VLEs. Delgarno and Lee define representation fidelity and learner interaction 6 as the two most important characteristics of 3D VLEs. Representational fidelity is represented by fast rendering of the environment, smooth motion of avatars and objects, as well as detailed representation of avatars. ‘Learner interaction’ is the collection of the tools for navigation, location, orientations, communication and interaction between two or more avatars and avatars and objects. If those two characteristics are at

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__________________________________________________________________ some appropriate level, the experience is stronger and richer. The experience is supported by the ability to construct identity and have a sense of presence and copresence, which all provide a positive effect on the education process. The construction of identity is important because people need to be unique and able to show their specialization. It is important also for differentiation of communities and their responsibilities. Sense of presence, or immersion, is the feeling of participation in activities conducted within 3D VLEs. Co-presence expresses feelings of being together on one place. It is the ability to communicate, collaborate and interact independently. We could expect correlation between quality of environment (its graphical user interface and tools) and quality of user’s experience. It could be said that the more refined the quality of the environment, the better and richer is the user’s experience and this therefore causes students to be more motivated, engaged and open to share and communicate together within 3D VLEs. 3. So what could We Build? The previous chapter indicated that experience is the most important function of learning. 3D VLEs are appropriate tool for educational activities, which could increase the experience due to environment’s unique characteristics. Kapp and O'Driscoll’s instructional design of 3D learning experiences (3DLEs), can be used as an educator’s guide for designing a 3D VLE: 3DLEs must be designed to create engaging episodic interactions that lead the learner along an optimal flow state of challenge and reward as they rapidly – but often not consciously – assimilate new learning along the way. The learning that occurs within a 3DLE surfaces at the moment when the lack of knowledge or capability of the participant intersects with the need to have that knowledge or capability to overcome a challenge or complete a specific task. The learning experience is engineered so that teachable moments surface at every turn. 7 The following paragraphs describe the whole 3DLE architecture. The design should be built with respect to following principles, which are divided between grounding and experiential principals. Grounding principles are that the learning experience should be: 1. instructionally grounded. This means a 3DLE must serve the required educational objectives and there must be an assurance that a 3DLE is the best way to reach those objectives.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. reflectively synthesized. This is that all conducted educational activities should be reflected on at a personal and a group level. Experiential principles are to ensure that every educational activity is participant-centered, contextually-situated, discovery-driven, action-oriented, consequentially-experienced and collaboratively-motivated. Kapp and O'Driscoll rank these principles to four macrostructures, which are: x Agency (student’s ability to operate the avatar; should provide sense of self) x Exploration (students’ ability to navigate; should provide sense of space and pervasiveness of practice), x Experience (students’ ability to participate in activities, communicate and interact; should provide enrichment of experience), x Connectedness (ability to interact and collaborate to build new knowledge; should provide power of presence, cessation of distance and capability to co-create). Archetypes are built on these principles and they can be understood as appropriate educational activities; these are building avatar persona, role-play, scavenger hunt, guided tour, operational application, conceptual orienteering, critical accident, co-creation, small group work, group forum and social networking. These activities are explored in more depth below: Avatar persona is an activity which is necessary to go through because student needs to personalize his or her avatars and thus build his or her identity. S/he can develop any type of persona (including a fictional one). Role-play activity supports situated learning. It helps to situate students in various kinds of roles which they may never experience in a real life. These roles are changeable and enrich the students’ experience. The core principle is that students must solve a problem, which they have never faced before, enabling them to build on prior knowledge. The benefit of a scavenger hunt activity is in the provision of relevant information and knowledge of education outcomes. Data and study materials, or educational objects, are hidden within the 3D VLE. The student’s task is to locate them and connect them into the formation of new knowledge. There is the possibility to set up teams and include game elements. A guided tour is similar to a scavenger hunt; this allows students to get relevant locations and text information. The students must visit every location and study the provided information. Such guided tours can be conducted not only in specific

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__________________________________________________________________ locations, but students may also explore the human form such as the heart from inside and experience blood flow for instance. Operational application within a 3D VLE are activities in which students can experience a real object and its behavior in specific conditions. For instance, students learn how to use special tools, drive a car or correctly pilot an airplane application. Conceptual orienteering situates students in specific roles, where they must discover and extract the main attributes of a given concept. Students then learn by comparing these attributes to other concepts. For instance, students can describe driving under the influence of alcohol and use this experience in real situations. Conceptual orienteering activities could be also used for making predictions based on visualized research data, which can be seen in different locations within a 3D VLE. Critical accident activity requires students’ recall of knowledge. Students are situated within critical accidents and their task is to solve the problem as soon as possible. For instance, there could be a chemical terrorist attack, which requires coordination of a whole rescue system (fire-fighters, police and other rescue crews) or a situation during a medical operation such as a patient’s sudden heart attack. The point is that such activity cannot be conducted in a real world due to selfevident financial or safety barriers. Co-creation is about designing a new product, object or design application. These activities should be conducted in teams, where each student brings his or her ideas and collaborates with others. For instance, students can build a new car, design a building or just design a shop window. The advantage of using 3D VLE is in it being a fast and safe environment. Small groupwork activity is where students work in groups and discuss an educational objective or topic using creative techniques like brainstorming. These groups could be geographically dispersed. Group forum is used in the case of the existence of geographically and cultural dispersed groups. The learning is similar to traditional class. During Social networking activity students learn informally from each other in a familiar environment with directed questions. Such activity could be a round table meeting where every student can say everything. There is possibility to engage an expert with a group of students so they can unconsciously absorb new knowledge. 8 4. How is SL Used by Educators and Students? This portion of the chapter presents basic finding of the author’s master thesis, which was written during 2010. 9 The main point was to verify the hypothesis that the social virtual world of Second Life is an environment which influences educational activities positively. The study included a literature review of relevant research, (including methodology, interpretation and discussion) pertinent to

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__________________________________________________________________ educational activities in social virtual world of Second Life. Nine relevant studies were found. Finally, the findings were compared with research by Inman, Wright and Hartman, 10 who have conducted a similar prior study. In terms of the hypothesis the findings are not conclusive; both positive and negative aspects of education were found within the studies of the virtual world of Second Life. The positive aspects appear when educational activities require socialization among students or are not possible to conduct in the real world. Positive aspects increase within a well-structured and contextualized environment and when activities inworld are connected with a specific learning management system. In these cases, students’ motivation to learn increases. Student teams also apply more creative methods in addressing problems. Negative aspects are strongly connected to technology and the environment, where moving, navigating and operating can be significantly difficult. In terms of the methodology used in the various studies reviewed, qualitative research is represented more than quantitative and mixed method of research. Questionnaires and interviews are the most common data collection method. The focus of the research is mainly higher education. Research shows that the education activities conducted are most often constructivist activities like role-play, project learning, group learning or simulations. These activities are often related to specific subjects. With regard to specific findings, these include the potential problems of using Second Life as an education tool. There are technical problems, which are represented by high requirements mostly with regard to connectivity. There are also problems with navigation, the locating of needed information and many elements which might interfere with students’ concentration and cause demotivation to learn and discover. In Second Life, which is an open immersive world environment, the potential also exists for students to be influence by inappropriate non-educational objects or behavior. There are also potential positive aspects, which can be summarized as the following: x Second Life can be used as a learning tool for activities such as role-play, project learning or group learning. x Second Life also overcomes geographic, cultural or religion barriers and thus supports socialization, communication and collaboration among students and their project teams worldwide. x Second Life has a potential to enhance distance learning to a greater extent. The research also recommends what educators should do when integrating Second Life into their courses. There is a need of a technical training and staff

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__________________________________________________________________ support for new users of Second Life. The environment should be structural and contextually designed and should protect students against inappropriate behavior of other avatars unrelated to educational use. 5. What did We Build? VIAKISK (Virtual academic campus of library and information studies) is an education island within the social virtual immersive world Second Life, which started as a student project and now is maintained by the Division of Information and Library Studies (Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University Brno, Czech republic). The project VIAKISK has been running since 2009 until today. In 2011 we made a decision to move our activities to open-source virtual world Open Simulator. The architecture of the island is designed in order to support students’ orientation and navigation. We chose a network of six small islands, which are connected through bridges with one central landing place. We built the following places: conference room, projects room, partners’ island, social arena, library island and sandbox (Image 1).

Image 1: Architecture of VIAKISK Island. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. The project team prepared many activities for students and the public during 2009, 2010 and 2011, which I put into the context of the model of 3DLE by Kapp and O`Driscoll. For instance, we organized Viatours, which relate to guided tour.

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__________________________________________________________________ We also built an inter-university team containing four members in 2010. Their task was to develop an education interactive object (Image 2), which relates to cocreation activity. Another team of students was created in 2011. Their task was similar to before. They had to build interactive education object and make a context-based machinima. Machinima is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence. 11 The project was remarkably successful. Students developed objects based on the scavenger hunt archetype. They developed a place with information panels about mobile technologies. There was much information about games, interactions and futures of mobile smart phones and tablets. Their machinima is published on vimeo. 12 We also streamed a real subject into Second Life (Image 3). Finally, we held regular meetings called Roundtable meetings and we discussed hot topics from the field of library and information science. This activity could be classified as social networking.

Image 2: Interactive education object made by student team. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author.

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__________________________________________________________________ We use VIAKISK for a wide range of debates among students and experts from various fields. We focus especially on Library and Information Science field, Education or the new domain of emerging technologies. Such debates could be seen as a social network archetype. We participated in roundtable discussion together with students and invited experts and discussed given topics. There were three events. Firstly, we had the roundtable meeting called How is Second Life used for Education?, where Maryanne Maisano (USA) and Sheila Webber (GB) were our guests. Both guests are professionals in education within Second Life. After the discussion we also visited locations which are maintained by Maryanne and Sheila within Second Life and were informed more closely about what they do as teachers within the immersive virtual world. The second event was called The Library in a Virtual World. We invited expert from a one Czech library, who has built a virtual library catalogue within Second Life. We also entertained questions about a virtual library and its possible relevance and value to users and community. The third roundtable meeting could be seen as a ‘learned discourse’. This method is based on a discussion between people with a similar background, who work within the same field or discipline. The discourse ranged from general to more specific. We invited heads of educational institutions from the library and information science field. The point of the roundtable called Virtual Cooperation was to find out ways which could potentially lead to better communication among mentioned institutions. There were four leaders from universities and several students respectively. In 2010 Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) sharply increased prices both for education and the non-profit sector. With this in mind, we began to think of ways to support a back-up plan for the island and a move to Open Simulator. 6. How did We Move Island VIAKISK to Open-Source? As mentioned before, there was a problem with our project budget. Second Life and its pricing policy became unviable, which led us to the decision to relocate in order to save our project. We did some research and identified Open Simulator as the most suitable technology for us. In this part of the project we faced several problems. There was an issue with finding a place, where the VIAKISK island (region in Open Simulator) could be placed. Such a place is called a grid: Grid is the level that organizes the regions and their positions in the world, and handles things that need to exist across regions, such as a user's inventory. You can think of it as similar to the world map. 13

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__________________________________________________________________ The second problem was to back up all of the objects and move them to the new destination, if the possibility existed to do this. Lastly, but certainly not least, we had to convince students and our other users to move with us.

Image 3: Real event streamed to Second Life. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. 6.1 Our Own Server or Hosting Company? In fact there are two main approaches in how to choose a technology. Open Simulator is open-source, so there is a possibility to run software on your own server. The second option is to pay hosting. We chose the second option, despite the fact that we run our own server. The reasons are as follows. We are not professionals in programming and maintaining server side applications. Project VIAKISK is mainly run by volunteers who do not have enough time to maintain difficult solutions. Open Simulator needs continuous monitoring if it is installed on one’s own server. Lastly we wanted to focus on content, not software solutions, which invariably meant to hold events and work with students and visitors as much as possible. Maintaining software would be too big a task for us. For these reasons we decided to find a hosting company for our project. Before thinking about researching hosting companies, we needed to consider where to place VIAKISK. There are many Open Simulator grids run by different companies. There are open and closed grids, thematic-based grids for entertainment, education or business. And also there are differences in technical issues. For instance, Jibe 14 is Open Simulator running on cloud technology, but the solution does not offer enough simultaneous avatars logged in. Our preferences were to have a company with positive references and high feedback, 80+ simultaneous users, voice and hypergrid enabled. Hypergrid was really important

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__________________________________________________________________ for us because it ‘allows you to link your open-sim to other open-sims on the Internet, and that supports seamless agent transfers among those open-sims’. 15 The transfer of objects and avatars is guarantee of continuous contact with other institutions situated on different installed Open Simulators. We wanted other education institutions on the grid too. And of course, price played significant role in choosing a grid as well. Taking into consideration all of the preferences and expectations, we contacted Dreamland Metaverse 16 hosting company, which provides regions and grids based on Open Simulator. At first we asked if they provide hosting for ReactionGrid, 17 which is strongly focused on education institutions and learning and teaching. Their response was negative, but they provided us opportunity to host our VIAKISK region on New Gender Grid (Grid), 18 which was smaller but met our requirements as well. The manager of the Dreamland Metaverse also works as a free developer of Open Simulator, so we were confident that all of the potential future problems could be solved simply. We also developed a good relationship with NGrid owner, who works as educator and has a student team, which develop and maintain the entire NGrid. Up until that time we paid US$1080 instead of US$2340 for a year. 6.2 Moving Content and Object to NGrid When we purchased the new region on NGrid, we came upon the second step in the whole moving process. There was a problem, how to move all of our equipment, objects and content from VIAKISK in Second Life to VIAKISK on NGrid. For this purpose we were understandably running both islands simultaneously for one mouth. Basically, there are two options for how to move content to Open Simulator. Firstly there are tools, which are able to pack up the whole island in Second Life and unpack it in Open Simulator. We decided on an alternative. We saved all objects into our inventory and proceeded to export it into an OAR file and using the Imprudence viewer to import it into our NGrid avatars' inventory. During this process, we found out that we did not own all the copyrights assigned to objects a problem caused by our previous builder, not assigning those rights to us. We were forced to rebuild some objects and this process made the whole project longer. 6.3 Problems with Moving Several problems had arisen during our first visits on new VIAKISK. Those who plan to set up a region on Open Simulator need to be aware of several issues which could cause traffic complications and negatively influence the user experience. Firstly, there is the need to create a new avatar account. Specifically NGrid provides only three options for avatar choice. When one considers the low availability of new clothes and body shapes, the amount of variation in avatar design is very low, which can lead to situations in which, for example, there may

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__________________________________________________________________ be five or more identical avatars on one event. These difficulties with editing avatars appearance lead to a poor user experience. Objects can be found on different grids, but this requires users to be familiar with hypergrid, since the condition for teleporting is to know the hypergrid address. If the user does not know the address, then he or she is not able to change their clothes or to find any objects. The second problem we found was that new avatars appeared as white or pink clouds. After consulting with the managers of NGrid and with hosting company concerning the problem, it appeared that this was due to a bug in the system. This can be solved by changing or reloading the avatar’s appearance and saving the new status. The third problem we faced appeared when we wanted to set up one common landing place where visitors appear when they visit VIAKISK for the first time. It is not possible to select a specific entry point for new users, which we would have preferred since research shows that an environment which is not prepared properly for first visit discourages users from a second visit. Instead of providing inworld information for new users, we directed users to information provided in a guide already published on the web, but this solution remains problematic. Within Second Life, we often used shared media, which enable adding a webbased content (a web page for instance) on every surface of objects. Shared media is a relatively easy method to use to fill the environment with rich content. Unfortunately, shared media are not supported by Open Simulator, so there is quite a problem with posting basic information and instructions. For instance, our first student project, which is based on shared media, could not have been conducted in Open Simulator. We were not able to import Sloodle (Simulation Linked Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) objects as well. Sloodle contains several objects which enable communication between the learning management system Moodle and virtual worlds. Sloodle objects provide the opportunity to make presentations easier, track students’ scores and much more. For instance, we used to track students’ conversation and verify their real names within Second Life. The problems and issues described above are understandably difficult to solve. The technically-based issues are caused by external circumstances which are not possible to deal with. Examples of these are the problem with Open Simulator version, which does not support Sloodle and shared media and we are in discussion with the managers of NGrid and from Dreamland metaverse concerning these. Different types of issues come from our lack of knowledge of the environment. In summary, it could be said, that we made several mistakes when selecting a grid. Based on the aforementioned difficulties, we should not have set up the island on NGrid, which requires far too much experience. On the other hand NGrid brings us special challenges and new opportunities. However, the main issue remains as follows: moving VIAKISK to different world requires users to learn new processes, visitors need to set up a new avatar,

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__________________________________________________________________ download a different client and install it, then have to manually add NGrid to the list of preset grids. Last but not least they have to turn on voice (which involves downloading it and enable firewall) and deal with the landing issue. All these issues downgrade the level of accessibility and usability, which is the central problem of using Open Simulator and Ngrid. 7. What Kind of Activities Took Place on the New VIAKISK? We moved island VIAKISK onto NGrid in July 2011 and it was opened for students and public in September that year. We tried to solve some issues, which are described above. Our strategy was to make new VIAKISK as accessible as possible. We also prepared a support web page called Virtual Library 19 which includes both a brief and a detailed guide for a first visit to VIAKISK. Visitors can also find all the information about VIAKISK and our events held there. We also post videos from every event on the web. The web page therefore fulfils the function of a gateway to VIAKISK. So far we have held two events, which are the first of their kind. There was an opening event called Info-question, where we presented a brief introduction to the new environment and prepared a small game. We developed a tool (Image 4), where users could express their opinion on given statements. This was a scale made from colored sections in which the user could choose if they strongly agree/agree/disagree or strongly disagree with given statements. Such opinions were expressed by placing their avatar into a particular section. The game was successfully received by users because the whole process of giving statements was particularly interactive, requiring users to use their knowledge and formulate their opinions.

Image 4: Vouting tool developed by Libor Juhanak, member of project team. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author.

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__________________________________________________________________ Poetry reading was the second event held on new VIAKISK. We invited a wellknown Czech poet, who read and presented his work. This also was a success, because of the inclusion of an interesting guest and because this was the first time this type of activity had taken place on VIAKISK (Image 5).

Image 5: Poem reading on new VIAKISK. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. Future events are also being planned. Our vision is to prepare students’ meeting using the TED concept, consisting of short participants presentations in which the focus of presentations is not restricted. We will also continue with a live-stream with several blocks of experts. 8. Conclusions and Discussion Experience is an essential aspect of teaching and learning within a 3D virtual environment, specifically in the social virtual immersive world Second Life. In my opinion, the most important concept is to realize that a 3D virtual learning environment is not appropriate tool for holding classical classroom activities. The learning curve proves to be too difficult, without exploiting the added value of the environment, and therefore does not make sense, causing the students’ experience to be negative. The added value lies in activities which are not possible to conduct in real life because of their high financial burden or security requirements. Such activities are role-play, project learning or simulations. It is necessary to structure and contextualize the environment for each education activity independently and provide safe conditions. Teachers should implement technical training prior and provide tutorials and guides. A 3D virtual learning environment is a virtually adequate tool for educational activities and a 3D learning experience requires relevant instructional design.

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__________________________________________________________________ On the other hand, the students’ experience often decreases with technical issues and with the inappropriate use of 3D virtual environment. Objectively, much more research must be conducted in a field of information science, psychology, sociology and pedagogy. Also to use a 3D virtual learning environment with great success requires having appropriate technology provided for low price, which necessitates a browser-based virtual environment, ease of movement (traveling/teleporting) between different virtual worlds and guaranteed content security. As a main issue for the future, however, is usability. There is a strong correlation between the level of usability and the user experience. If a selected virtual world is not user-friendly and easy to understand for new visitors, it will bring no added value, simply because users do not have a chance to feel part of ongoing educational processes. In my opinion, such problems should be addressed by future research in this area. Developers of virtual world should use usercentered design for creating and programming graphical user interface and should test and evaluate existing virtual worlds and respond to users’ feedback and dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, if this issue stays without its proper due attention, there will never be an environment created that meets educational, business and entertainment needs.

Notes 1

Christy Perrey, ‘Gartner’s 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1.800 Technologies’, Gartner Newsroom, Oct. 2010, Viewed 2011, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1447613. 2 ‘21st Century Skills Education and Competitiveness Guide’, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Tuscon, 2008, Fab. 2011, http://www.p21.org/documents/21st_century_skills_education_and_competitivenes s_guide.pdf, p. 9-10. 3 Marie Sontag, ‘A Learning Theory for 21st-Century Students’, Innovate: Journal of Online Education 5.4 (May 2009): 5. 4 Chris Dede et al., ‘Design-Based Research Strategies for Studying Situated Learning in a Multi-User Virtual Environment’, Proceedings of the 6th international Conference on Learning Sciences, Santa Monica, California, International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2004, 1. 5 Mark W. Bell, ‘Toward a Definition of ‘Virtual Worlds’, Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future 1 (2008): 2, http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/283/237. 6 Barney Delgarno and Mark J. W. Lee, ‘What are the Learning Affordances of 3D Virtual Environments?’, British Journal of Educational Technology 41.1 (2010): 12.

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__________________________________________________________________ 7

Karl M. Kapp and Tony O`Driscoll, Learning in 3D : Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration (San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer, 2010), 70. 8 Ibid., 69-117. 9 Tomáš Bouda, ‘Educational Activities in a 3D Virtual Learning Environment (MUVE) Focusing on VIAKISK Project (Virtual Academic Campus of Library and Information Wtudies) within a Social Virtual World Second Life’, Master thesis, Brno, 6XSHUYLVRU'DQLHOětKD (2011), 100. 10 Chris Inman, Vivian H. Wright and Julia A. Hartman, ‘Use of Second Life in K12 and Higher Education: A Review of Research’, Journal of Interactive Online Learning 9.1 (2010). 11 ‘The Machinima FAQ’, last modified 2005, Viewed 14 October 2011, http://www.machinima.org/machinima-faq.html. 12 Jana Kvašnová, Martin Balhar and Pavel Prudký, VIAKISK: 1DXþná stezka o mobilních technologiích [video], Viewed September 2011, http://vimeo.com/24515024. 13 OpenSimulator, ‘OpenSimulator: FAQ’, last modified 24 September 2011, Viewed 24 September 2011, http://opensimulator.org/wiki/FAQ. 14 ReactionGrid, ‘Jibe Harmony Firewalled Virtual Server’, last modified 2011, Viewed 24 September 2011, http://reactiongrid.myshopify.com/products/jibe-harmony. 15 OpenSimulator, ‘OpenSimulator: FAQ’ 16 ‘Dreamland Metaverse’, last modified 2011, Viewed 24 September 2011, http://new.dreamlandmetaverse.com/. 17 ‘ReactionGrid’, last modified 2011, Vieved 24 September 2011, http://reactiongrid.com/. 18 ‘New Gender Grid’, last modified 2011, Viewed September 2011, http://ngrid.org. 19 ‘Virtualni.knihovna.cz’, last modified October 2011, Viewed 24 September 2011, http://virtualni.knihovna.cz/.

Bibliography ‘21st Century Skills Education and Competitiveness Guide’. Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Tuscon, 2008. http://www.p21.org/documents/21st_century_skills_education_and_competitivenes s_guide.pdf. Bell, Mark W. ‘Toward a Definition of “Virtual Worlds”’. Virtual Worlds Research: Past, Present & Future 1.1 (2008): 1-5. http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/article/view/283/237.

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__________________________________________________________________ Bouda, Tomáš. ‘Educational Activities in a 3D Virtual Learning Environment (MUVE) Focusing on VIAKISK Project (Virtual Academic Campus of Library and Information Studies) within a Social Virtual World Second Life’. Master thesis, %UQR6XSHUYLVRU3K'U'DQLHOětKD3K', 100. http://is.muni.cz/th/180601/ff_m/diplomka_-ecna_podoba.pdf?zpet=%2Fvyhleda vani%2F%3Fsearch%3Dbouda%20%26start%3D1>. Dede, Chris, Brian Nelson, Diane J. Ketelhut, Jody Clarke and Cassie Bowman. ‘Design-Based Research Strategies for Studying Situated Learning in a Multi-User Virtual Environment’. Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Learning Sciences, International Society of the Learning Sciences, Santa Monica, California, 2004. Delgarno, Barney and Mark J. W. Lee. ‘What are the Learning Affordances of 3-D Virtual Environments?’ British Journal of Educational Technology 41.1 (2010): 10-32. Dreamland Metaverse. Last modified 2011. Viewed 24 September 2011. http://new.dreamlandmetaverse.com/. Kapp, Karl M. and Tony O`Driscoll. Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer, 2010, 390. Kvašnová, Jana, Martin Balhar and Pavel Prudký. VIAKISK – 1DXþná stezka o mobilních technologiích [video]. Viewed September 2011. http://vimeo.com/24515024. New Gender Grid. Last modified 2011. Viewed September 2011. http://ngrid.org. OpenSImulator. ‘OpenSimulator: FAQ’. Last modified 24 September 2011. Viewed 24 September 2011. http://opensimulator.org/wiki/FAQ. Perrey, Christy. ‘Gartner’s 2010 Hype Cycle Special Report Evaluates Maturity of 1,800 Technologies’, Gartner Newsroom, Oct. 2010. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1447613. ‘ReactionGrid’. Last modified 2011. Vieved 24 September 2011. http://reactiongrid.com/. Sontag, Marie. ‘A Learning Theory for 21st-Century Students’. Innovate: Journal of Online Education 5.4 (2009).

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__________________________________________________________________ Tomas Bouda is a Ph.D student at the Charles University in Prague (CZE) – Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship. He works in the project PARTSIP and as a supervisor of the virtual island VIAKISK (Virtual academic campus of library and information studies). He is interested in technological, educational and management innovation.

The Virtualopolis Archipelago: Creatively Interconnecting Work-based Virtual Scenarios Karen Le Rossignol Abstract One of the key elements of a quality student experience in higher education, outlined in the 2008 Bradley Report on the review of Australian higher education, is access to well-designed and engaging courses that lead to good vocational outcomes. 1 The Virtualopolis project concerns the development of a virtual city or platform which can encompass a community or vocational context for learning resources, linking these to engaging course delivery across disciplines and faculties. It is a virtual community with great potential to scaffold the imaginative immersion of the modern net generation learner. It was designed to incorporate virtual scenarios which were already in use, such as the country town of Bilby and the Pacific-style island of Newlandia, and has expanded to provide a virtual city of Virtualopolis across faculties and disciplines. One of the key strengths of this form of virtual environment is its capacity to focus on graduate attributes across disciplines. Virtualopolis provides access and a virtual city context to an interactive teamwork scenario, to develop attributes related to working with others, interrelating virtual business entities across all faculties. The teamwork scenario has multiple applications, with capacity to be a hurdle requirement, assessment item or training activity depending on the needs of the faculty’s Work-integrated Learning (WIL) policy. By developing the online virtual framework or platform of Virtualopolis, work-integrated team assessment can be used as skills preparation for experiential learning units such as internships, professional experience and workplace-based projects university-wide. It also provides the opportunity to repeatedly reuse the virtual city context for resources to support other courses. The Virtualopolis city and its interactive team scenario will be transferable for future cross-faculty and interdisciplinary virtual developments. Plans are already made for content areas as diverse as community health, nursing, creative arts, international relations and management. Key Words: Creative problem-solving in virtual scenarios, work-integrated learning, experiential netgen learner, transformative connectivist learning. ***** 1. Introduction An archipelago is a chain or cluster of islands. Using an archipelago as a design concept suggests the importance of designing learning which can be clustered and has a flexibly interrelated or interdisciplinary set of outcomes. Archipelago design conceptualises a string of associated communities of online learning, providing

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__________________________________________________________________ interactivity and immersion for the participants, and a social community of collaborative knowledge. This chapter explores the concept of archipelago design of virtual work-based scenarios and its relevance to the twenty-first-century learner, who is part of the experiential, digitally literate, connected and socially collaborative net generation. According to Laurillard: Teaching is essentially a rhetorical activity, seeking to persuade students to change the way they experience the world through an understanding of the insights of others. It has to create the environment that enables students to embrace the twin poles of experiential and formal knowledge. 2 Using an associational or archipelago approach to learning design can integrate experiential learning and formal knowledge within a student’s experience of education. Commentators such as Dearing 3 stress the importance for the educationalist to provide learners with lifelong flexibility of learning. As Laurillard describes it, an appropriate learning design is the ‘…difference between a curriculum which teaches what is known and one that teaches how to come to know…’. 4 The Virtualopolis project uses associational and non-linear narrative storytelling within laterally linked experiential communities, to provide an imaginative engagement and immersion in this world or community. The engagement comes from moving fluidly between real situations and virtual characterisations or story/narrative. The higher education sector is developing degree programs which incorporate learning through professional practice, internships and on-the-job learning. The purpose of these work-integrated learning opportunities has been to transfer and transform formal knowledge and skills into relevant work-related contexts. This approach develops graduate attributes which will enable multiple jobs, movement within and across sectors and a commitment to lifelong learning to enable that flexibility. The Virtualopolis project mimics or parallels the contexts of workoriented problems to solve. The Virtualopolis educational tool is a virtual city with characters or personas, businesses and suburbs creatively layered within it. Any scenarios within that virtual city are contextualised to the spaces, places and people who are imaginatively brought to life by a graphical interface and multimedia storytelling. It provides a sense of space, objects and rules, although these are challenged by an associational or non-linear approach to investigating some elements of that world, as encouraged by the facilitator or tutor. The virtual world is an online community, which, within an educational context, provides an experience which can be reasoned about as if it were in the real world, enabling representations of realworld situations for consideration and problem-solving.

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__________________________________________________________________ One of the key aims of the Virtualopolis project design is to encourage creativity and innovative thinking through problem-solving. Starko says of the role of creativity: It is easy to consider the essential role of creativity in bringing joy and meaning to the human condition – without creativity we have no art, no literature, no science, no innovation, no problem solving, no progress. 5 Learners need to have opportunities to think outside the box, in order to develop divergent thinking skills. 6 As a way of integrating creative thinking/problemsolving within Virtualopolis, Howard Gardner’s domains of multiple intelligences integrate creative approaches by resourcing the learning in domain-specific ways such as kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical, musical visual spatial or naturalistic. 7 According to these domains, Gardner’s creative individual is a person who regularly problem-solves, can define new questions, and design products or outcomes. 8 The challenge for Virtualopolis is to provide enough domain-specific means of problem-solving within a virtual world. One overarching strategy is to provide enough time for students to generate and select ideas. This is where immersion, and the amount of time they spend interconnected with the world, become vital. The key elements of success for this form of educational design are Janet Murray’s ‘immersion’, ‘agency’, and ‘transformation’. 9 As she further describes, the virtual world environment provides a participatory narrative, and immersion requires the active creation of belief in the parameters of that world’s narrative. 10 In the Virtualopolis project, this has been structured through collective participation in roles and storylines, resulting in products or outcomes which are both workoriented and creatively imagined. Agency is structured into Virtualopolis through a journey arc or narrative which builds in problem-solving to achieve workcontextualised outcomes. Transformation works within the fluid environment of a kaleidoscopic narrative, 11 so rather than working within a linear structure or thinking patterns, the mosaic pattern of the Virtualopolis archipelago design encourages divergent and creative thinking and problem-solving skills. 2. Context Lyotard argues that in the postmodern learning society, Knowledge will no longer be transmitted en bloc, once and for all, to young people before their entry into the work force: rather it is and will be served “a la carte” to adults who are either working or expect to be, for the purpose of improving their skills

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__________________________________________________________________ and chances of promotion, but also to help them acquire information, languages, and language games… 12

Figure 1: Integrating narratives – the Virtualopolis project. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. Transformation in learning is also potentially about transforming the learning space, or the knowledge space, as an academic framework. Rasche writes of transformation of the postmodern university, or hyperuniversity, in the postmodern age, as stressful, involving movement of the current learning space from a history of hierarchy into something more fluid. 13 Lyotard states postmodern knowledge indicates an emphasis on ‘performativity’, as opposed to ‘narrative’ dissemination or delivery of knowledge. 14 As technologies continue to evolve, opportunities to offer students learning that is both situated and authentic are not always enthusiastically grasped by academics. Albion and McKeown report that: for virtual worlds to be widely adopted in higher education it is desirable to have approaches to design and development that are responsive to needs and limited in their resource requirements. Ideally it should be possible for academics without technical expertise to adapt virtual worlds to support their teaching needs. 15

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__________________________________________________________________ Educational technologies should encourage connected, socially adept networks and collaborations in workplace contexts, enabling higher education providers to reposition learning into that ‘performative’ transformed learning space. The Virtualopolis project has grown into a situated learning experience with inter- and multi-disciplinary environments, blending the factually based workplace scenarios into the virtual environment. The purpose of these environments is to integrate the knowledge gained from experience within particular situations. The knowledge of learners is enriched when applied to authentic activities. 16 Their understanding of its application to the problem, context, and solution arises from experience. As Brown states, ‘This sort of problem solving is carried out in conjunction with the environment and is quite distinct from processing solely inside heads that many teaching practices implicitly endorse.’ 17 With digital convergence, the learner’s world or social framework is affecting how they approach their learning. Other factors are: employment pressure (for the learn-and-earn student) and the speed with which knowledge can be accessed and acquired. Siemens indicates the sense for the learner is that knowledge is now measured in months and years, where previously it was a matter of decades. 18 Gonzalez, quoted in Siemens, indicates that the ‘half-life of knowledge’ is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete, with the amount of knowledge doubling every 18 months. 19 This has led to learners having both the flexibility and the challenge of moving into potentially unrelated fields. Formal education is now augmented by experiential learning and volunteerism, and the development of skills through communities of practice or personal networks. The student is learning where to find the knowledge required, rather than focusing purely on the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of the knowledge base. The ability to synthesise and recognize patterns and connections is a valuable skill within an experiential or workplace learning environment. The principles of connectivism relate to developing learning processes for connecting specialized nodes or information sources, encouraging learning and knowledge in a diversity of opinions and developing the capacity to know more rather than focusing on what is known. 20 The nurturing and maintaining of connections will facilitate the ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts, with accurate, up-todate and timely knowledge. This correlates strongly with the needs of the millennial learner and the higher education course developer to develop capacity and opportunity to connect in lateral and layered ways. Boud, et al. talk of engagement: Learning builds on and flows from experience: no matter what external prompts to learning there might be – teachers, materials, interesting opportunities – learning can only occur if the experience of the learner is engaged… 21

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__________________________________________________________________ The engaged learner also values work-based learning. Trigwell and Reid provide a description of work-based learning as, a range of educational practices which involves students learning in authentic work settings. The curriculum is significantly influenced by issues and challenges which emerge from the exigencies of work rather than predetermined academic content driven requirements. 22 There needs to be relevance within the virtual environment that directly transfers the experiential learning to workplace learning. Action learning may enable this through group tasks and problem-solving approaches, providing strategies which then capture in a dynamic and collaborative way what has been learned. 23 Kolb defines experiential learning as ‘… the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience’. 24 According to Silberman, experiential learning incorporates a direct involvement at emotional and intellectual levels, using projects or work-based activities that parallel workplace experiences. 25 The development of this transformative experience can require immersive and imaginative virtual environments which align the learning more closely with day-to-day workplace experiences, particularly in areas such as interpersonal skills and communications. A contextual learning space developed using the principles of connectivity and experiential learning can provide socialisation, exploration, and conversations that reflect on the learning. It is reflection on that connectivity, in non-linear ways, which leads to effective experiential learning. The Net Generation (or netgen) learner is also very strongly connected and experiential through social networks such as MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Social networks also provide a potential immersive collaboration in creating and disseminating knowledge. The millennial learner will focus more on experiences as the learning process, rather than the acquisition of information. 26 The Virtualopolis project has been based on some assumptions about the netgen learner. Prensky describes the netgen style as focusing on active learning approaches, using multitasking (or multiple exploratory investigations) rather than linear instruction. Because of this multiplicity of entries to the virtual environment the connections need to be clear and relevant, using resources which blend graphics that have a gaming or fantasy playfulness. 27 Situated experiential learning needs to build in the transfer of knowledge gained in one situation to another, leading to improved performance in a real-world setting. Immersion in real-world settings incorporates mediation (use of an expert guide) to develop reflection, and to identify the importance of transfer. Charles Dede builds on Prensky’s definition of netgen learning styles by describing 21st century learners as neomillennial – fluent in multiple media and simulation-based

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__________________________________________________________________ virtual settings, with their learning communal and situated in experience. 28 He advocates a balance between: x experiential learning, guided mentoring and collective reflection; x developing nonlinear and associational links in resources; x co-design of experiences which match individual needs and preferences. These elements are a part of Virtualopolis, where learners combine processing and reflecting on the experiences with synthesis of the information. Dede has proposed that the neomillennial learner is moving to a media-based learning style or capacity, with media neutralizing learning differences. This was incorporated in the design of the virtual scenarios for professional writing described below, utilising media for social connectivity across potential barriers of learning styles and cultural differences. It also provides the designer with additional research-based pointers to the importance of non-linear construction and navigation in the virtual communities and worlds, communally negotiated and personalized for the netgen learner. Driscoll defines learning as ‘…a persisting change in human performance or performance potential…[which] must come about as a result of the learner’s experiences and interaction with the world.’ 29 Learning and work-related activities are not separate, and technology is altering the way learners think. Thus the resource of virtual learning environments requires a capacity to adapt quickly, and flexibility in building information networks. Virtual scenarios can also provide orums for creativity in problem solving, revealing interconnected and communityoriented ways of thinking outside the box to find solutions. That was the basis for the virtual scenarios of Bilby and Newlandia. The extension to these scenarios is the virtual city of Virtualopolis which encourages and facilitates creative interactions across the separate scenarios. 3. Virtual Scenarios for Professional Writing: Bilby and Newlandia The scenarios of Bilby and Newlandia were the starting points in developing Virtualopolis as a framework, and they now sit within that virtual city. At the time of development (about seven years ago) they were transferred from print-based scenarios to provide a more engaging platform and media presence for the netgen or millennial learner. They were based on experiential or action learning principles, within an imaginative and creative environment. As Margaret Haughey has indicated, learning is about ‘making connections – both within our brain and among ideas – through experiences with others and with the help of learning materials.’ 30 Within both Bilby and Newlandia, those connections were designed to

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__________________________________________________________________ be associational and non-linear, with an emphasis on multiple media and a challenge to explore and develop a community of experience with other learners. The virtual environments of Bilby and Newlandia are resource-rich and full of potential narratives. These scenarios are associational or kaleidoscopic in navigation. They store information in workplace-related sites within the virtual world, thus developing participants’ skills in summary and synthesis, to research the contexts of their stories. They support active and collaborative learning, incorporate real-world problems, and reflect on actions through mentoring by expert practitioners. E-learning tools require real job cases to teach job-specific problem-solving, as well as thinking skills. 31 These scenarios incorporate a games-oriented element which sits alongside a professional or workplace-oriented approach. This encourages a more creative mindset and potential for non-linear connections. The learning objectives should be clearly indicated to participants so that expectations of outcomes are aligned for both tutors and students. There is a danger in providing open-ended virtual simulations; the absence of strong links to learning aims and graduate attributes can be frustrating. Participants will feel safer in developing creative responses when the world has a parallel to reality, even as they move between the real and the virtual. The complexity of the virtual environment requires some anchoring to workplace realities. It should foster a believable networked community which is also a context for social learning outside that world and transferable to a community of practice. The potential interconnectivity of different scenarios (and discipline areas) encourages more free thinking and creative processing to make unique connections between prior knowledge and unsolved problems. 32 Bilby and Newlandia were developed within a website framework – a resource with capacity for imaginative rather than kinaesthetic multimedia interactivity. This offered a contrasting but comparable approach to multi-user virtual environments such as Second Life. The expert facilitator or tutor used the combination of the environment and the writing tasks to guide the participants towards imaginative immersion. This was best achieved through a blend of face-toface engagement and social media communications technologies. The assessments were separate from the virtual worlds of Bilby and Newlandia, and acted as catalysts for the appropriate writing responses which could be adjusted depending on the audience and purpose stipulated. The design was character-based, with photographs and audio interviews indicating the personalities of leaders of the groups who advocated social change within that virtual environment. The learners were encouraged to develop their own characters within the environment. Newlandia was used in a postgraduate coursework unit in a Communications degree, with face-to-face and online groups. Student numbers average 70 per year, approximately 60% of whom study in online/off-campus mode. The on-campus delivery incorporates local and foreign students The large online and international contingents provided one of the catalysts for developing a context all students

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__________________________________________________________________ could use in their writing – a level playing field of immersion. The scenario employs a Pacific-style island called Newlandia. Business and environmental organizations attempt to solve the island’s ecotourism and water problems. The learners have several writing tasks, including letters, media releases, news stories and reports. The aim is for the learner to have the skill to change styles and formats for each task, and define carefully the audience and purpose. Students work in one of the two organisations, and discuss approaches collaboratively, before developing individual responses to advocate their position. Newlandia was the resource, providing stimulus material in a range of realistically imagined virtual locations, with the assessment tasks external to (and a catalyst for) the exploration of Newlandia. Students reported that the scenario enabled an imaginative approach and was not bogged down in theory. It maintained engagement, and students found the issues easier to research. One learner indicated that it was a very practical unit which enhanced the learner’s skillset and gave solid training to take directly into the workforce. Newlandia not only emulated a real life situation very well, it gave the learning a playful aspect and enabled creative approaches. Learners found the most useful elements of the subject were the Newlandia experience and having assessments that were relevant to real-life scenarios. The fantasy island was seen as a fun learning tool. An undergraduate scenario used the framework of Newlandia and redesigned it as an Australian country town, Bilby. This is a scenario to support a professional writing unit which is a transition or first-year unit. It is offered across three campuses and off campus, and has approximately 600 students per year. Students who study this unit come from a range of degrees: arts, media and communication, professional and creative writing, public relations, education, health and behavioural science/sports management, business and law. Bilby is used to bring to life the tasks of report writing, news items/interview profiles, letters of persuasion, speech writing, writing for the web, media releases and developing applications for jobs. Bilby becomes the focus of research as students become advocates for one of three lobby groups – Bilby Business Association, Bilby Historic Society, and Bilby Landcare. They become participants in the town and write from that point of view, so their audience and purpose is clearly stipulated. Bilby is full of stories – the current point of dispute is that the town has grown too fast and needs a new hospital. Other stories are seeded into the scenario, for example ecotourism issues, the location of wind farms, a new leisure centre, and health/wellbeing. Each week’s catalyst to develop a writing task is a ‘breaking news’ segment. As part of the scenario, these writing tasks could be uploaded as a Shire Council media release, or as a podcast for Bilby’s local community radio station.

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__________________________________________________________________ Student responses indicated support for this style of learning. Feedback included: x arguing out the Bilby community issues with tutorial groups was enjoyable x students were interested and wanting to learn using the resources on the website x variations in articles/writing styles and helpful notes incorporated in the Bilby website engaged students x learners were energized by the combination of group work and use of the Bilby website. The environment was perceived as very supportive, and the website as resourcerich. These factors helped make learning interesting. Areas highlighted as strong elements of the subject overall included learning to write successfully and for different purposes, and writing creatively in the Bilby scenario. 4. Virtualopolis Virtual Teams Scenario This project had two aims. The first was to link pockets of innovation from different faculties to share knowledge, build capacities, and be available across the university. The second was to use shared expertise to develop a prototype interactive scenario focused on developing workplace team skills. This scenario was then trialled in all four faculties of the university. The Virtualopolis project was supported by the university because it was developing an online response to student needs in preparing for the workplace. It was also a university-wide initiative, potentially bringing together isolated groups interested in innovative resource development. Each of the faculties engaged in the testing of the virtual world – Arts and Education, Science and Technology, Business and Law, and Health – had its own agenda in terms of work-integrated learning or professional development requirements linked to graduate attributes. Other divisions engaged in the project included the Division of Student Life, which also runs short skills sessions to prepare students for the workplace. Virtualopolis grew from the development of the teams scenario, and was designed with the capacity for exponential growth depending on virtual resources available. The virtual teams scenario is already being adopted as a workplaceintegrated learning tool in two Virtualopolis businesses. This ensures easier access and a broader contextualising for diverse learner groups. Virtualopolis has also incorporated Bilby and Newlandia, enabling learners to access their individual business entities within Virtualopolis across courses and faculties. There are plans to integrate within Virtualopolis:

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__________________________________________________________________ x a virtual art gallery on a Second Life island owned by the university x a maternity hospital and asthma unit with live simulations within a health precinct x a cultural precinct with performing and creative arts global links via real-time videostreaming x a socially disadvantaged suburb (to be named Burlongvale) with a community health centre x the Pacific island-style Newlandia with its social advocacy issues just a virtual cruise away x the country town of Bilby as an regional educational precinct up the main highway.

Figure 2: Resources for selecting candidates. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. Each of these virtual resources exists, so this project will provide context to students of many workplace environments. To demonstrate the Virtualopolis model’s potential to apply across faculties, this project developed the capacities of two virtual business entities to assess students working in teams. The business entities were adapted to contain business units for all faculties. United Enterprises was a project consultancy business with marketing and IT divisions. Kaleidoscope Consulting was conceived as a virtual six-storey building housing a creative industries consultancy organisation, creative

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__________________________________________________________________ incubator studios for new ventures in creative enterprise, and other leased businesses including the Allied Health Nursing Agency.

Figure 3: Entry to the various businesses. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. The stated purpose of the project was to develop an online teamworkassessment tool in the virtual business context. Group-work is a required skill of the full range of industry organisations represented by this trial, for example nursing and IT, communications and marketing. Teamwork assessment is notoriously difficult to efficiently integrate into online study. Initially, the project identified key subjects and/or students who were involved in experiential learning such as professional practice or internships. The advisory research group decided to extend the trial groups to interns in communications, honours students in information technology projects, undergraduate nursing students, and both undergraduate and postgraduate business students including internationals. In faculty-specific groups of four or five, students carried out a preparatory investigation of the resources in their business world scenario (including both online and streamed video work files). They then had a virtual team meeting to select a shortlist of five from the ten candidates applying for a position in their team. There was an assessment questionnaire to complete. This asked for a teamagreed rationale for selection, and an individual reflection on the process of working with others. Finally, the students individually completed an online survey

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__________________________________________________________________ about the process of using the virtual scenario. The total teamwork project (including the meeting and assessment) was completed within three hours. The interactions of the students in the teams were also observed. 5. Outcomes and Conclusions The observational and survey results of the study indicate that the learning for the students has been twofold. Firstly, there is reflection on the process of working in teams, and the groups’ methods used to reach decisions. Secondly, individuals confirmed there was applied learning from the process of selecting the shortlisted candidates and viewing their job applications. However, one of the most significant findings concerned the engagement in the virtual world by the students across the faculties. Although they differed in their ease of navigation, they ‘bought in’ to the concept of a business world. This was largely because of the focus (during development) on visual and digital literacies. It was also because of a narrative consistency which met their workplace-oriented expectations. The students were aware that each faculty was approaching this assessment with a different scenario and documentation for candidates, but with generic university-wide assessment tools. Part of the learning for the project team was experiencing the difference across faculties in team approaches. The Business and Law students were keen to complete the task and rushed through the instructions. The Arts and Education interns went into greater depth of reflection in some areas and missed covering some key aspects. The Health team wanted to validate each step as they completed it and confirm they had it accurate and correct, while the IT students were impatient with the technology and went to their own mobile technologies for online discussion. The scenario sustained the interest and reflection of all the student groups, particularly in relation to how they found out about presenting themselves in job applications and similar situations. One of the most satisfying outcomes is that the virtual city of Virtualopolis is now operational across the university, with its interrelated businesses and access to other towns and islands supporting approximately ten subjects. This virtual world has the additional value of increasing staff access to a cost-effective model for their own scenarios. Additional business entities or towns can be constructed within Virtualopolis with minimal additional costs. Virtualopolis and the interactive team scenario have been showcased at local, national, and international presentations, to encourage feedback on the design and environment. The pilot study’s results in particular informed reflection strategies for the current internship participants. One of the most important findings of the research was that Virtualopolis provides low barriers to engagement. This has been a guiding design issue, as has the capacity to develop a community of learners, who provide support and informal mentorship for both learning technologies and social processes. Jenkins is quoted in Sheridan and Rowsell’s discussion of design literacies as indicating that participatory cultures in Web 2.0 require a range of responses. 33

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__________________________________________________________________ When teaching students to apply knowledge, analyse situations, and use appropriate tools, techniques, and practices appropriate to a range of industry contexts, it would be advantageous to have them practise in the real world. However, this is not always possible. Virtualopolis provides a learning context where students can gain valuable experience in the virtual business organisations. Within the fictitious organisation, students are able to practise their team-work, communication, and interpersonal skills. They solve problems, and learn experientially what it means to be in specific workplace situations. Virtualopolis provides a transformative forum for creative problem-solving and divergent thinking which will extend the capacities of learner’s capacity to develop transferable and flexible workplace engagement. As a demonstration of universally relevant team skills, it is also valuable as a virtual exercise across all faculties. Virtualopolis is also available in the public domain, so that industry people can review the contextual area and add to the potential to make it ‘real’ through their input. This is already happening, with studios for students and graduates commencing their creative freelance businesses on the sixth floor of Kaleidoscope Consulting. Industry mentors provide advice through this virtual network. Demonstrations across the university are breaking down silos of innovation, allowing a broader audience to imaginatively recreate their resources. Virtualopolis innovatively addresses an increasing need for industry learning opportunities across all disciplines. Students are exposed to real-life scenarios through activities and project work while being asked to perform as workplace professionals. Participating students not only acquire knowledge but, even more significantly, learn within an organisational context thus ensuring they are able to apply this knowledge. They are also able to see, conceptualise, and appreciate the transferability of those skills to other virtual businesses and contexts within Virtualopolis. There are already eight businesses and towns or suburbs existing or in development: Bilby Newlandia Kaleidoscope Consulting United Enterprises Ultra Square business centre with banks and publishing house x Bendaby health precinct with a maternity hospital and medical clinic x Virtualopolis cultural precinct with opportunities for international conferences and synchronously streamed video performances x x x x x

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__________________________________________________________________ x the suburb of socially disadvantaged Burlongvale developing to illustrate community health issues within a Health Science degree. With the netgen learner’s digital literacy and social-networking capacity, a virtual, multimodal representation of work practices has the capacity for stronger engagement and transferability to the workplaces targeted by the learners.

Notes 1

Denise Bradley, Peter Noonan, Helen Nugent and Bill Scales, Review of Australian Higher Education Final Report (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008), Viewed 6 November 2011, http://www.deewr.gov.au/HigherEducation/Review/Documents/PDF/Higher%20E ducation%20Review_one%20document_02.pdf, 79. 2 Diana Laurillard, Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd ed. (London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer 2002a), 23. 3 Ron Dearing, Higher Education in the Learning Society: Summary Report (London: National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education), Viewed 6 November 2011, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/. 4 Diana Laurillard, ‘Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society’, in Educause Review (Boulder, Colorado: EDUCAUSE, 2002b), 20. 5 Alane Starko, Creativity in the Classroom (White Plains NY: Longman Publishers, 1995), vii. 6 Michael L. Slavkin. Authentic Learning: How Learning about the Brain can Shape the Development of Students (Toronto: ScarecrowEducation, 2004). 7 Howard Gardner, Creative Minds (New York: Basic Books, 1993). 8 Stephanie A. Clemons, ‘Encouraging Creativity in Online Courses’, in International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 2.1 (2005): Viewed 6 November 2011, http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/index.htm. 9 Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck (New York: The Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 1997). 10 Ibid., 155. 11 Ibid., 155. 12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, in Carl A. Raschke, The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (London: RoutledgeFalmer 2003), 77. 13 Carl Raschke, The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University (London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003).

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__________________________________________________________________ 14

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Digital Revolution, 77. Peter Albion and Lindy McKeown, The Seamless Integration of Web3D Technologies with University Curricula to Engage the Changing Student Cohort ALTC Report CG7-488 (Strawberry Hills, NSW: Australian Teaching and Teaching Council 2010), Viewed 6 November 2011, http://eprints.usq.edu.au/7153/1/Albion_McKeown_PV.pdf, 2. 16 John S. Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid, ‘Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning’, in Educational Researcher 18.1 (1989): 35. 17 Ibid. 18 George Siemens, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age (elearn 2004), Viewed on 6 November 2011, http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm. 19 Carlos Gonzalez, ‘The Role of Blended Learning in the World of Technology’, in Siemens, Connectivism. 20 Siemens, Connectivism. 21 David Boud, Rosemary Cohen and David Walker, in Colin M. Beard and John P. Wilson, Experiential Learning 2nd ed. (London: Kogan Page 1993), 19. 22 Keith Trigwell and Anna Reid, ‘Introduction: Workbased Learning and the Students’ Perspective’, Higher Education Research and Development 17.2 (1998): 142. 23 Michael Marquardt, ‘Action Learning: Resolving Real Problems in Real Time’, in The Handbook of Experiential Learning, ed. Mel Silberman (Hoboken N.J. USA: Pfeiffer, 2007). 24 David Kolb, Experiential Learning (Paramus N.J. USA: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 1983), 41. 25 Mel Silberman ed., The Handbook of Experiential Learning (Hoboken N.J. USA: Pfeiffer, 2007), 41. 26 Diana G. Oblinger, ‘The Next Generation Learner’ in Proceedings of Students, Technology and Learning, 2008 EDUCAUSE Conference July 14-15 2008, Viewed 6 November 2011 http://net.educause.edu/aascu08. 27 Marc Prensky, ‘Learning Preferences’, in Charles Dziuban and Patsy Moskal, ‘Assessing Student Success’ at 2008 Conference Students, Technology and Learning: Strategies for Success, July 14-15 2008, AASCU/EDUCAUSE/ University of Central Florida, viewed 6 November 2011, http://net.educause.edu/aascu08. 28 Charles Dede, ‘Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Shifts in Students’ Learning Style will Prompt a Shift to Active Construction of Knowledge through Mediated Immersion’, in Educause Quarterly 28.1 (2005): 7-12. 29 Marcy P. Driscoll, Psychology of Learning for Instruction (Nedham Heights, MA, USA Allyn & Bacon, 2000), 11. 15

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Margaret Haughey, Supporting Learning through Technology at National Learning Infrastructure Initiative 2003 Annual Meeting Plenary Session (Boulder, Colorado: Educause, 2003), viewed 6 November 2011, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/html/nlii_ar_2003/supportlearning.asp. 31 Ruth C. Clark and Richard E. Mayer, E-Learning and the Science of Instruction (San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2008) . 32 Slavkin, Authentic Learning. 33 Henry Jenkins, quoted in Mary P. Sheridan and Jennifer Rowsell, Design Literacies: Learning and Innovation in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2010), 46.

Bibliography Albion, Peter and Lindy McKeown, The Seamless Integration of Web3D Technologies with University Curricula to Engage the Changing Student Cohort ALTC Report CG7-488. Strawberry Hills, NSW: Australian Teaching and Teaching Council 2010. Viewed 6 November 2011. http://eprints.usq.edu.au/7153/1/Albion_McKeown_PV.pdf. Beard, Colin M. and John P. Wilson. Experiential Learning 2nd ed. London: Kogan Page, 1993. Bradley, Denise, Peter Noonan, Helen Nugent and Bill Scales. Review of Australian Higher Education Final Report. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2008. Viewed 6 November 2011. http://www.deewr.gov.au/HigherEducation/Review/Documents/PDF/Higher%20E ducation%20Review_one%20document_02.pdf. Brown, John S., Allan Collins and Paul Duguid. ‘Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning’. In Educational Researcher 18.1 (1989). Clark, Ruth C. and Richard E. Mayer. E-learning and the Science of Instruction. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2008. Clemons, Stephanie A. ‘Encouraging Creativity in Online Courses’. In International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning 2.1 (2005): Viewed 6 November 2011. http://www.itdl.org/journal/jan_05/index.htm.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dearing, Ron. Higher Education in the Learning Society: Summary Report. London: National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education. Viewed 6 November 2011. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe/. Dede, Charles. ‘Planning for Neomillennial Learning Styles: Shifts in Students’ Learning Style will Prompt a Shift to Active Construction of Knowledge through Mediated Immersion’. In Educause Quarterly 28.1 (2005). Driscoll, Marcy P. Psychology of Learning for Instruction. Nedham Heights, MA, USA Allyn & Bacon, 2000. Gardner, Howard. Creative Minds. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Haughey, Margaret. ‘Supporting Learning through Technology’. National Learning Infrastructure Initiative 2003 Annual Meeting Plenary Session. Boulder, Colorado: Educause, 2003. Viewed 6 November 2011. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/html/nlii_ar_2003/supportlearning.asp. Kolb, David. Experiential Learning. Paramus, NJ: Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 1983. Laurillard, Diana. Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd ed. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer 2002a. ———. ‘Rethinking Teaching for the Knowledge Society’. Educause Review. Boulder, Colorado: EDUCAUSE 2002b. Lyotard, Jean-Francois in Carl A. Raschke. The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. Marquardt, Michael. ‘Action Learning: Resolving Real Problems in Real Time’. The Handbook of Experiential Learning, edited by Mel Silberman. Hoboken, NJ: Pfeiffer, 2007. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck. New York: The Free Press/Simon and Schuster, 1997.

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__________________________________________________________________ Oblinger, Diana G. ‘The Next Generation Learner’. Proceedings of Students, Technology and Learning, 2008 EDUCAUSE Conference. Viewed 6 November 2011. http://net.educause.edu/aascu08. Raschke, Carl. The Digital Revolution and the Coming of the Postmodern University. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003. Siemens, George. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age. elearn 2004. Viewed on 6 November 2011. http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm. Silberman, Mel. The Handbook of Experiential Learning. Hoboken N.J. USA: Pfeiffer, 2007. Slavkin, Michael L. Authentic Learning: How Learning about the Brain can Shape the Development of Students. Toronto: ScarecrowEducation, 2004. Starko, Alane. Creativity in the Classroom. White Plains NY: Longman Publishers, 1995. Trigwell, Keith and Anna Reid. ‘Introduction: Workbased Learning and the Students’ Perspective’. Higher Education Research and Development 17.2 (1998). Karen Le Rossignol is a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Using her creative practice as a professional writer and editor as part of her research interest in narrative and creative nonfiction, Karen’s current research focuses on the netgen learner and the virtual worlds which she has built to engage them in work-integrated learning.

Virtual Hybridity: Multiracial Identity in Second Life Explored Dean Anthony Fabi Gui Abstract This study considers the role of multiracial identity in Second Life, and how users represent themselves and their avatars in this virtual environment and for what purposes. Multiracial representations are difficult to find in this context – namely, users with avatars and in-world groups that identify as having multiple heritages, and whose purpose is to promote ‘hybrid’ culture. Multiracial agents abound in 2D e-platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube for a variety of reasons including social networking and education. However, 3D virtual platforms like Second Life should present additionally unique opportunities for race communities to construct multimodal discourses as a result of both synchronous and asynchronous text-based and voice communications. Yet the absence of a more pronounced community of multiracial individuals poses some interesting areas for research. Through the use of a Google Docs survey, delivered as a link to potential participants through multiple gateways, as well as real-time avatar interaction, this study considers for what reasons multiracial users frequent the Second Life landscape – for entertainment, cybersex, socialising, political activism, group membership? Preliminary results suggest that while most multiracial users consciously create avatars that also reflect human mixed-race characteristics, recognition of this identity does not extend beyond outward appearances. The results are important in establishing whether or not a virtual world like Second Life is an active site of engagement for multiracial discourse and rhetoric. Key Words: Multiracial, hybrid, identity, site of engagement, Second Life. ***** 1. Introduction Second Life is a virtual world visited mostly by thirty (plus) year olds and is considered to be a content-building platform. 1 It is a part of a series of other virtual platforms which tend to be frequented by teens and adolescents – like Utherverse and Twinity – for reasons that include social and intimate engagement, business opportunities, role-playing and education. Yet, anecdotal evidence shows that Second Life is often referred to as a MMORPG like World of Warcraft. 2 Additionally, Second Life has been the focus of various social and ethnographic researches involving, for example, those with autism learning how to socially interact in virtual worlds before transferring those experiences to real life. 3 Moreover, many communities frequent this virtual canvas – supernatural, BDSM, gay and lesbian, writers, Britney Spears fans, DJs and many others. Racial groups also make up the Second Life community: The Peacemakers, Anti-Racial Army,

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__________________________________________________________________ and NAACP-SL, for instance. Some focus on racial equality, while others engage in sexual fantasy and role-playing. However, one community in particular – the multiracial or ‘mixed’ community – is rigorous in its quests to seek recognition and offers some interesting and untapped areas for research. While much research has been conducted regarding race in the areas of psychology and medicine, 4 little has been investigated in ethnography, 5 linguistics 6 or social interaction. 7 In fact, even less attention has been given to the relationships between the multiracial community and both virtual world platforms and electronic social platforms, especially considering the numerous multiracial groups and individuals represented in Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. A cursory word search for ‘multiracial’ on Facebook brings up one hundred hits – requests for additional search results reveal many more multiracial groups and individuals. Multiracial adolescents tend to have a harder time developing and maintaining friendship networks, 8 so it is interesting that while these adolescents exercise social skills in electronic platforms they are under-represented in virtual platforms where opportunities to interact in a safe and anonymous environment abound. 9 There are many untapped areas of research in this domain but this author is primarily interested in why multiracial users use Second Life and whether or not Second Life is an active site of engagement for multiracial discourse and rhetoric. 10 While this study does not focus on group identity, it is necessary to note that group membership is one mechanism examined to establish how multiracial Second Life users interact with the virtual landscape. It should also be mentioned that as of the conducting of this study, only one multiracial group still exists in Second Life: ‘Eurasian Nation.’ No hypotheses are suggested in this study; however, through the distribution of a Google Docs survey via a web link and the data harvested from it, implications will be suggested indicating potential conflicts or agreement with the literature reviewed. This is an important area of research as it adds to the existing pool of information on race and race identification in virtual worlds, focusing on a specialized area to which researchers have only given cursory attention. 2. Literature Review Multiracial Identity Quillian and Redd consider the multiracial population and its racial friendship network hypothesising: 1) that multiracial adolescents have smaller friendship networks because they are often socially rejected by single-race peers, 2) that multiracial adolescents have racially more diverse networks than single-race persons, and 3) that multiracial adolescents often bridge the social relationships of members of their single-race heritage backgrounds. 11 Gathering data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a large schoolbased study of students in grades 7-12 the study discovered that multiracial

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__________________________________________________________________ adolescents have levels of popularity that are about the same as their non-white single-race peers, concluding there is not strong evidence supporting the idea that multiracial persons are rejected to the point of becoming socially isolated; and that multiracial adolescents have more racially diverse friendship networks than most single-race students, with levels of diversity similar to Hispanic and Native American students, who have the most diverse friendship networks. Multiracial adolescents of black-white backgrounds are especially likely to bridge their multiracial heritage groups, compared to the prevalence of bridging among other single-race and multiracial adolescents. A bridge is a multiracial adolescent who has friends with both of their single-race friendship groups. Results from this study indicated that multiracial students are not significantly less popular than singlerace non-white students. Unlike most single-race persons in America, the racial identification of persons of multiracial descent is not a given. Persons of multiracial descent may identify themselves as a member of one of their singlerace heritage backgrounds or as multiracial. Indeed, studies find that the racial identification of persons of multiracial descent often shifts over time and that responses are sensitive to the context in which identification occurs. Results with individual and school controls thus support the prediction that multiracial individuals will tend to have more diverse friendship networks than most of their single-race peers, with levels of friendship diversity about equal to the single-race groups who have the most diverse friendship networks (Native Americans and Hispanics). Persons who share a friend are more likely to become friends themselves – an effect called ‘transitivity’ in network studies – multiracial persons are likely to foster cross-race friendships between persons in their social network. The idea of transitivity and bridging is not realized in this present study as there were no opportunities to engage with any multiracial avatars in active in-world situations. 12 Centrality is a vital component in Charmaraman and Grossman’s study, citing the importance of race and ethnicity to the perception of stability in an individual’s identity. Three public high schools participated in this study – one notably with a 2% multiracial student population (albeit the school being primarily White, affluent and suburban). Respondents were asked about their race using the multiple-choice checkboxes taken directly from the 2000 Census form as one method of data collection; and were also asked to report the race and ethnicity of each biological parent and whether they considered themselves multiracial (identification with two or more racial/ethnic categories). Responses were partially coded by country or region of origin. While this present study does not include country / region of origin in its survey, in hindsight it might have provided some additional interesting data for consideration in terms of whether or not multiracial discourse is more global in a virtual world platform as opposed to being dominated by one region or another (as seems evident in first life multiracial issues pursued in America). However, in some survey responses, participants incidentally mention

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__________________________________________________________________ place of origin. In Charmaraman and Grossman’s study Positive Regard surfaces as a significant theme amongst respondents’ expressions of pride and appreciation toward one’s racial or ethnic background. In particular, respondents articulated positive feelings or identification with one’s race or culture, positive representation of one’s background to others or a desire to be accurately identified as affiliated with one’s group (or groups), and valuing one’s cultural history and traditions, and a sense of belonging to a cultural community. Multiracial students specifically noted: ‘It is very important because to know me you have to know my background where my ancestors are from’ (Jamaican/African American participant); and ‘I love the different things I learn about my family and heritage and the customs that come with my ethnicities’ (Puerto Rican/Cuban/Irish participant). The reader will note here the importance of being able to reflect upon one’s race and of acclamation by others in order to feel a sense of internal balance and community acceptance. Shih & Sanchez discuss the increasing number of interracial marriages and subsequent multiracial offspring in the America since the repeal in 1967 of miscegenation laws prohibiting racial mixing. 13 With the population of multiracial children having reached close to ten million in 2000, however, multiracial families have been contending with hardships such as a lack of social recognition, disapproval from extended family, exclusion from neighborhood and community discrimination, and social isolation. Additionally, the fact that multiracial individuals cannot be subscribed to a single identity label, racial identity development processes can often become complicated and disillusioning. Theories of multiracial identity (variant, problem and equivalent) all reflect a stage through which multiracial individuals feel great tension and conflict about their racial identity. At this stage, multiracial individuals may feel forced to choose from among their different component identities although the final stage gives way to acceptance, appreciation, integration, and validation of all parts of their multiracial identity. Yet, during the process of racial identity development, certain tensions may be encountered which hinder progress: finding racially similar role models to guide them in understanding their racial identity; society’s difficulty in dealing with multiracials who challenge rigid notions of racial categories contributes to the perpetual invisibility of the multiracial community; and multiracial children are frequently exposed to conflicting messages from their parents and from the community. For example, within the interracial family, the multiracial child might see that people from different racial backgrounds can live together peacefully. Moreover, many parents of interracial families deemphasize the importance of race. However, out in the community, multiracial children learn about intergroup conflict, racial prejudice, racism, and discrimination. They see that race is a very salient and real factor in shaping people’s experiences in the world. Subsequently, qualitative survey results of both clinical and nonclinical samples for depression

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__________________________________________________________________ evince signs of depression amongst multiracial adolescents including delinquency, drug use, alcohol use, smoking, and adolescent sexual activity. Two-Dimensional and Three-Dimensional Environments English has become easier to learn, as indicated by Sarica and Cavus, with the availability of many sources (such as internet-capable mobile phones) to support the learning experience, particularly in education. 14 Advances in information technology and new developments in learning science provide opportunities to create well-designed, learner-centred, interactive, affordable, efficient, flexible elearning environments – possibly an alternative way to study English. Web based technologies and powerful internet connections provide various new possibilities and latest trends for teachers and learners. Yet while Sarica and Cavus pinpoint the ‘latest trends in e-learning’ – m-devices, blogging, emails, online quizzes and tests, instant messenger, and Skype – virtual world learning is not recognized as a viable platform for education. On the other hand, Forte & Kurillo discuss the importance of integrating the real and virtual in order to create an immersive experience for technology users referencing the ineffectiveness of video conferencing systems which can only provide two-dimensional images. 15 Immersive virtual environments have addressed these issues by employing avatars – human representations designed as a simplified version of the user’s physical features, while its movements (and emotions) are controlled either through scripted animation or through a more enhanced input via tracking of the user in the real world using motion capture. However, limitations of the model restrict movement and realism of the virtual landscape and user experience. The metaverse is a social embodiment of community allowing active users to share cyberspace for mutual three-dimensional communication and interaction. Archaeology, in particular, has some relevant examples in Second Life, mainly for training and education. The Okapi Island, for example, is a three-dimensional virtual world dedicated to the archaeological site of Catal Hoyouk, where students and professors engage in communication (chatting, talking, writing) during training and educational activities. Additionally, Gomez-Diago states that collaborating with an avatar in a virtual environment enhances user ability for group work – specifically, brainstorming activities. 16 Created by Gómez-Diago and Mochizuki, ‘Brainflowing’ is a Second Life brainstorming tool which not only documents actual brainstorming in this virtual realm via a virtual blackboard which avatars place text files into, but also transfers this user-generated content back to the physical realm. No visible barriers seem to exist amongst the participants in the context of the activity. In the metaverse, hierarchy of participants seems minimized and viewpoint accessible to all via camera zooming capabilities, unlike physical spaces where placement of participants may impact interaction.

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__________________________________________________________________ Sites of Engagement Second Life, according to Biever, behaves like a safe space for those suffering from autism where expressions, gestures and body contact can often lead to fear or tension. 17 But in Second Life ‘expression on the whole tends to be exaggerated and downy,’ eliminating the need for interpretation, where the Internet becomes a creative environment for virtual worlds, blogging and posting videos on YouTube. In 2005, this led to the building of Second Life ‘Brigadoon’ island by Harvard neurology researcher John Lester – a platform designed for people with autism to ‘practice their social and cooperative skills in a consequence-free place.’ Norris and Jones consider moments in time and points in space where mediated actions happen allowing for durable social practices, social identities and social groups to be constructed. 18 These ‘sites of engagement’ occur in computer mediated interactions among members of different communities that form around different nexus of practice. Ethnographic research evinces that interactions through computers behave as extensions of off-line practices and communications rather than being separate from them. Five types of spaces are thus identified for these practices to germinate: physical space – in which computers are operated; virtual – created by interfaces being used to communicate; relational – state of talk between participants; screen space – actual monitor usage and layout; and third spaces – places inhabited by no participant and so are barren until differing elements come together and evolve into some kind of new identity. Finally, sites of engagement are a cornucopia of societal and personal ‘histories, of schemes, scripts and plans, of social identities, of architectural or software design, and of the various discourses we participate in with their patterns of fixing social relationships of power and of marginalising certain kinds of identities and practices.’ Race in Virtual Worlds Messinger et al study how Second Life residents perceive and utilize the environment, additionally considering the relationship between avatar appearance and behaviour and user appearance and behaviour. 19 Most participants in their study indicated that their avatars consisted of a mix of similar and unrecognizable features of their physical (or first life) appearance. Furthermore, repeated virtual interaction between avatars creates culture, building upon the foundation of virtual worlds which are characterized by anonymity, distinctive rewards, punishments, modes of learning and potentialities. The authors concur that research into tensions between real and virtual identities has not matched its potential. Lortie and Guitton examine World of Warcraft (WoW) as an example of a socially-active virtual environment, analyzing the social behaviour of avatars as inter-connected to their appearance. 20 The two allegiances of the virtual world gather races with highly contrasted visual appeal: human-like appearances (the Alliance) and non-human, more exotic monster-like appearances (the Horde) – immersion in virtual environments depends more on visually-triggered social

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__________________________________________________________________ dynamics (role-play) than on optimal use of the interface (game-play). Sharing a similar avatar in a virtual setting may act as a basis for group formation, but only if avatars embody a reasonable degree of anthropomorphism. The authors claim that examining influence of appearance on social structuring may have been more difficult to evince in virtual spaces like Second Life where avatar appearance is easily manipulated. Finally, human users would display a weaker connection with their avatars if the avatars took on less human-like qualities. Hybridity as Evolution Nature, according to Grove is a product of human interactions with the external world, a socio-natural hybrid or cyborg produced through the labour process. 21 Here, the author introduces the idea of ‘metabolisms’ – defined through social relations of production, environmental transformation brought about through the labour process, in which human capacities and non-human potentialities are combined in the production of new environmental forms. Environmental change is therefore always bound up in the production, reproduction, and tension of uneven social relations – and these relations exist through environmental transformations that require their reproduction to sustain socially-produced urban ecologies. Amoamo expounds upon Homi Bhabha’s contribution to cultural theoretical thought on historical and temporal forms of ethnicity under the postcolonial movement. 22 Bhabha posits that a "hybrid" discourse has evolved out of postcolonialism, and this hybridity takes meaning only by negotiating tensions and identity in a third space – and that third space can be any environment, but the two go hand-in-hand. One cannot be without the other. For instance, post-colonial discourse in Hong Kong becomes hybrid only because it manifests in Hong Kong; and Hong Kong is a third space only because of the post-colonial discourse that it helps negotiate as a result of the unique history Hong Kong has had with British colonial rule. Bhabha’s highly problematic notions of hybridity, ambiguity and interstitial culture show how tourism can become an important location for cultural production and evolved sense of belonging especially for both marginalized and indigenous Maori peoples. Bhabha’s insights stress the redundancy of fixed locations where new identities and affinities are restlessly forming through transcendent ethnicities or third space cultures. This restlessness forces tourism studies to reconceptualise essentialised categorizations and thus to regard and debate culture in terms of the possible situations, responses, outcomes and consequences of hybridization. Greenholtz and Kim debate the potential of cultural hybrids, people who have grown up with multiple cultural contexts, identities and experiences, to provide leadership and insight in intercultural communication. 23 The authors argue that despite the current shift towards a more positive light, cultural hybridism continues to manifest either negatively as encapsulated marginality or positively as constructive marginality. The irony of cultural hybridism is that despite the

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__________________________________________________________________ perception of fitting seamlessly into any cultural context, or a perceived intercultural competence, cultural hybrids articulate their discomfort in associating with others who have not shouldered similar lived experiences. 3. Methodology The link to a Google Docs survey (see Appendix 1) with both dichotomous and open-ended questions was sent to various listservs and groups both virtually and electronically. Outreach was conducted through listservs such as SLED (Educators in Second Life), SLUniverse (a community-based website), Second Life forums (the official Second Life server), and email communications to students and educators who have engaged in virtual educational activities. Soliciting participation in-world proved to be significantly more challenging. One technique involved the author’s avatar having face-to-face or chat window discussions with Second Life residents who then passed on the survey link to relevant parties. Another approach involved contacting residents via group membership, requiring knowledge of protocol specific to a particular group: first, groups needed to be joined – enrolment was either open or moderator approval was requested; when membership was granted and executed a further request was sent to a group moderator or owner asking to distribute the survey link to the group – sometimes this was granted, other times not; and in some instances conditions needed to be met first, such as promising to actively participate in group events, or returning the favour when requested. Groups with various foci were approached, including those on education, fantasy, supernatural and the few that identified as multiracial. The survey was active for several months, and whose who participated during the former months were offered one hundred Linden dollars (Second Life currency) if they met the initial deadline. Data was sorted manually. 4. Results Forty-five submissions were recorded; however, two of those were blank and one participant was not multiracial. A total of forty-two responses were examined. As a side interest, when each multiracial combination was separated, thirty-five distinct races were represented: a majority (80%) were from Europe, while the remainder were indigenous Indians from North America (10%), Japanese (5%) and Mexican (5%). An additional twenty-nine combination-splits contained nonspecific racial categories (such as ‘black’ and ‘Canadian’) and non-racial categories (such as ‘Jewish’). Twenty-seven (75%) users indicated their avatars were also represented in Second Life in some kind of multiracial or hybrid form; fourteen (15%) indicated their avatar was mono-racial or non-hybrid; and one (5%) indicated uncertainty (the avatar was a pale goth female who could have represented a vampire). Of the avatars that took on a mixed form, eighteen (60%) still were characterized by human race qualities including the naming of an actual race group, a body part or

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__________________________________________________________________ skin hue. Non-specified representations (30%) included avatars that sometimes appeared in human form, and sometimes morphed into other forms. Table 1 categorises these forms. Table 1: Avatar representation with multiracial or hybrid qualities

1

Non-specified

1

TOTAL

2

Mythical creature

4

Supernatural

Animal

2

Anthropological creature

9

Half human

Human body part

Human racial group 9

10

28

N = Number of responses

In terms of why multiracial or hybrid avatars traverse the Second Life landscape, socialising was mentioned twenty-five times (25%). Entertainment (15%), Education (12%), Creating content (11%) and Exploration (10%) were mentioned the next highest number of times. Table 2 shows the eleven groups distinguishing the various activities multiracial or hybrid avatars engage with in Second Life. Table 2: Reasons why multiracial or hybrid avatars visit Second Life

1

TOTAL

2

Culture

3

Experimentation

3

Consumerism

7

Communication

7

Support

10

Business

11

Exploration

12

Creating

15

Education

Entertainment

Socialisation 25

96

N = Number of times each activity is mentioned

For the most part (with the possible exception of the Socialisation domain), activities mentioned ten or more times tended to be passive tasks (such as listening to music, under the Entertainment domain), benefitted the single avatar (such as taking classes, under the Education domain) or could be performed alone (such as exploring different worlds, under the Exploration domain). Those activities mentioned fewer times mostly required avatar-to-avatar interface (with the

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__________________________________________________________________ possible exception of the Consumerism – in Second Life is it possible to do one’s shopping without ever having to interact with a live sales person or cashier – and Culture domains) or benefitted all parties involved. Group membership included twenty-six domains (with one non-specified domain). It can be observed that group membership does not necessarily correlate with individual avatar activity although survey participants were permitted to note as many groups as they wished of which they were members. Education (25%), Consumerism (18%) and Entertainment (18%) domains rank highest in terms of number of groups mentioned; whereas Businesses, Griefing (Second Life terminology for ‘harassment’), General, Health and Regional (2.5% total) domains rank lowest in numbers of groups mentioned. Finally, tables 4 and 5 observe, respectively, how often users visit Second Life and whether or not reasons for those visits are satiated. Most users visit Second Life daily (75%) and most users are satisfied with how Second Life considers their needs (75%). 5. Findings and Discussion Evolution of Cultures in Third Spaces Research participants do visit Second Life daily although they do not outwardly identify as multiracial through group inclusion as is evident from Table 3: there are only a few human-centred groups that explicitly classify themselves as being multiracial (such as Eurasian Nation and Exotic Mixture – the latter is now defunct), yet none are mentioned by participants. It should also be noted that no mono-racial groups are represented in the data either. Regarding non-human hybrid groups, participants specifically mention ‘blood doll’ (willing human food sources for vampires), ‘zombie’ (the walking dead), ‘furry’ (anthropomorphic animals) (see Image 1), and ‘neko’ (humans with cat-like features) (see Image 2). Results contradict the literature reviewed in this article: 24 25 while there are fewer respondents who retain non-human hybrid avatars, membership in several nonhuman hybrid groups are evident including ‘furry groups,’ ‘Bloodlines’ (a gaming community of vampires, werewolves and hybrids), and ‘Tiny Empire’ (a community of little avatars). Additionally, even though one participant articulated that ‘pure racial forms are boring,’ the distance which seems evident between users and their human-centred avatars challenges the implication that there ought to be less variance observed in this state. Two possibilities are considered: 1) that multiracial avatars do not find self-worth or sense of identity through group membership, but rather find it through individual interaction; and 2) that non-human hybrid avatars have transcended the virtual realm more successfully than their mono-racial human counterparts, thus exhibiting Homi Bhabha’s idea of a restlessly forming culture in a third space, 26 or the perfect body found in utopias. 27

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__________________________________________________________________ Table 3: Group membership of multiracial and hybrid avatars Education Consumerism Entertainment Creating Spiritual Philosophical Sciences Humanitarian Media Technology Adult Real estate Creature Social Arts Support Events Sports Gaming Nature Businesses Griefing General Health Regional TOTAL Non-specified

52 25 23 11 11 9 9 8 8 5 5 4 4 4 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 197 12

N = Number of groups mentioned

Affordances of Virtual Worlds Most participants are satisfied with Second Life in terms of the socialization, entertainment and educational opportunities it offers; it enables ‘a life-long dream to come true: teaching’ and being something that could never be possible ‘in real life: a magazine editor.’ Yet, the affordances of virtual worlds are not realized as ideas of hybridity are still very human-centred (as evinced in Table 1). And in this regard participants feel ‘frustrated with avatar customization’ and find they are ‘not good at making [an] avatar appear as wished.’ However, these comments at least suggest that users actively engage with their avatars – although the challenge

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__________________________________________________________________ of avatar customization can be lessened through purchasing higher quality and better detailed (‘prim’) avatar skins and shapes. As of the writing of this article, while is it difficult to find groups that identify as multiracial, there are certain businesses that construct skins and shapes that lend to the idea of ‘mixed.’ When conducting a word search, ‘exotic’ most closely matches this concept. Table 4: Frequency of visits to Second Life by multiracial users Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly Occasionally TOTAL N = Number of visits

30 6 4 1 1 42

Table 5: Indication of satisfaction during visits to Second Life Satisfied? Yes No Not sure

32 6 4

TOTAL

42

N = Number of responses

Virtual shops that sell avatar skins or shapes usually will not explicitly state that a photographed avatar model is mixed or exotic. However, they will provide a selection of different hues from which to choose instead. In this regard, the multiracial form is represented through a series of contrasting elements: stereotypical features from one racial group superimposed on top of various skin hues; atypical eye colour or shading; and non-conventional hairstyles or hair colour. The author’s own avatar, Hartwig Valerian (see Image 3) is a combination of purchased skins, shapes and hairstyle to reflect the contemporary multiracial human: somewhat Asian features superimposed on top of a lighter, freckled skin however, that he has chosen a lighter skin tone to represent his idea of a Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, German and Portuguese racial mix – in an attempt to reflect the author’s own racial mix (but, admittedly, not his own skin tone, which may be somewhat darker). Predictors of Avatar-Self-Landscape relationships One possible overarching statement that could be crafted based off the highest ranked domains in all tabled data could be Second Life meets the needs of multiracial users who are represented through human-centred multiracial avatars with equally varied physical characteristics, interacting daily with the virtual landscape in order to socialize and engage with the educational community.

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__________________________________________________________________

Image 2: Furry. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author.

Image 2: Neko. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author.

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__________________________________________________________________

Image 3: Multiracial human. © 2011. Image courtesy of the author. This assumption is echoed in Dunn and Guadagno’s study examining the sociological and physiological representations of human beings based on avatar creation. 28 Avatars chosen by players of Neverwinter Nights 2 (an online game), for the most part, epitomized the human body. Those with lower self-esteem preferred avatars with lighter skin combinations; and men who were more open to new experiences tended to favour avatars with variation in skin hue. However, sometimes during the process of role-playing, users open to new experiences become immersed in the role-play, and their avatars inevitably become true extensions of themselves; and so the opportunity to transcend to a previously unattainable state is overshadowed. While in this present study participants did indicate avatar representation in ‘dark’ characteristics, there was an equal representation of avatars with combination appearances such as ‘oriental’ skins with European features or even ‘light’ skin with ‘Han dynasty hair and purple eyes.’ It should also be noted that multiracial users (3%) also participated in Dunn and Guadagno’s survey.

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__________________________________________________________________ 6. Concluding Remarks This chapter investigated how multiracial clients of virtual worlds represent themselves through avatar forms in Second Life and whether or not racial awareness was present in the virtual environment. Additionally, data was harvested to determine possible correlations to frequency of visits, reasons for visits, group membership and level of satisfaction when visiting Second Life. Results identified three distinct areas of exploration: 1) an evolution of cultures forming what Homi BhaBha describes as hybridity, through which identity and discourses are engineered resulting from the tensions and relationships transpired by interacting with the surrounding landscape, or third spaces; 2) the challenges of locating virtual businesses via word search which specialize in multiracial skins and forms, resulting in avatars teleporting to random stores, bulldozing through numerous frames of models in different hues and stereotypical features in order to find a satisfactory combination; and 3) the sociological and physiological makeup of the multiracial clients who represented themselves through both darker hues and combinations of body features, hair colour and style, and skin tone. While issues of race representation in virtual worlds have been considered and conducted within the research community, this is still a relatively unchartered area of investigation. Multiracial representation in virtual worlds has been given even less attention; however, when analyzing this study’s data with those of studies on mono-racial representation in virtual worlds, it is evident that there are both similarities and marked differences between the various findings: 1) multiracial users with human-centred multiracial avatars did not evince awareness of their multiracial state as clearly as multiracial users with non-human hybrid avatars (even though there was a significantly larger representation of the former); 2) there was not enough data harvested to conclude if either multiracial or hybrid avatars were interacting with virtual spaces as third spaces intended for transcendence of earth-bound notions of fixed identities; and 3) multiracial users traverse the virtual landscape primarily for socialization, entertainment and education. Even though the results from this study relatively parallel results and findings from studies focusing on mono-racial identity in virtual worlds, one observation unique to this study seems evident: that multiracial users do not use Second Life as a site of engagement for multiracial discourse and rhetoric, at least not through group membership. This could insinuate that multiracial clients of virtual worlds feel that racial lines are binding and do not wish to bring those perceived constraints into the virtual realm; on the other hand, this could also suggest that these multiracial individuals are not yet cognizant of the potential that the liminal state could bring to ‘terraforming’ Second Life into a virtual landscape of interevolutionary possibilities. Collecting data for this study proved challenging: potential research participants debated the use of the term multiracial and its validity in investigating what some observed as being more suitable for multiethnic enquiry; additional concerns reflected sentiments that all humans – to some degree

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__________________________________________________________________ – are multiracial. Overcoming these challenges could permit more vigorous enquiry in future studies into how multiracial avatars actually interact with the virtual environment.

Notes 1

KZER Worldswide, Virtual Worlds by Sector Q4 2009 (KZER worldswide: 2009), last modified 2009, Viewed 1 February 2010, http://www.kzero.co.uk. 2 Kenneth Pierce, World of Warcraft: The Educational Tool (El Paso, TX: DigitalCommons@UTEP, 2007), Viewed 13 November 2010, http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=kennet h_pierce. 3 Celeste Biever, ‘Let’s Meet Tomorrow in Second Life’, New Scientist 194.2610 (2007): 26-27. 4 Valentina Ivezaj, et al., ‘The Relationship between Binge Eating and Weight Status on Depression, Anxiety, and Body Image among a Diverse College Sample: A Focus on Bi/Multiracial Women’, Eating Behaviors 11 (2010): 18-24. 5 Robert W. Fairlie, ‘Can the “One-Drop Rule” Tell Us Anything about Racial Discrimination? New Evidence from the Multiple Race Question on the 2000 Census’, Labour Economics 16 (2009): 451-460. 6 David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 7 Lincoln Quillian and Rozlyn Redd, ‘The Friendship Networks of Multiracial Adolescents’, Social Science Research 38 (2009): 279-295. 8 Ibid. 9 Biever, ‘Let’s Meet’, 26-27. 10 Rodney H. Jones, ‘Sites of Engagement as Sites of Attention: Time, Space and Culture in Electronic Discourse’, in Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, eds. Sigrid Norris and Rodney H. Jones (Oxon: Routledge, 2005), 141-154. 11 Quillian and Redd, ‘Friendship Networks’, 279-295. 12 Linda Charmaraman and Jennifer L. Grossman, ‘Importance of Race and Ethnicity: An Exploration of Asian, Black, Latino and Multiracial Adolescent Identity’, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16.2 (2010): 144-151. 13 Margaret Shih and Diana T. Sanchez, ‘Perspectives and Research on the Positive and Negative Implications of Having Multiple Racial Identities’, Psychological Bulletin 131.4 (2005): 569-591. 14 Gulcin N. Sarica and Nadire Cavus, ‘New Trends in 21st Century English Learning’, Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 1 (2009): 439-445. 15 Maurizio Forte and Gregorij Kurillo, ‘Cyber-Archaeology and Metaverse Collaborative Systems’, Metaverse Creativity 1.1 (2010): 7-19.

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__________________________________________________________________ 16

Gloria Gomez-Diago, ‘Brainflowing, Virtual / Physical Space and the Flow of Communication: An Explanatory Approach to the Metaverse through a Tool Designed for Brainstorming’, Metaverse Creativity 1.1 (2010): 51-67. 17 Biever, ‘Let’s Meet’, 26-27. 18 Jones, ‘Sites of Engagement’, 141-154. 19 Paul R. Messinger, et al., ‘Virtual Worlds: Past, Present, and Future, New Directions in Social Computing’, Decision Support Systems 47 (2009): 204-228. 20 Catherine L. Lortie and Matthieu J. Guitton, ‘Social Organization in Virtual Settings Depends on Proximity to Human Visual Aspect’, Computers in Human Behavior 27 (2011): 1258-1261. 21 Kevin Grove, ‘Rethinking the Nature of Urban Environmental Politics: Security, Subjectivity, and the Non-Human’, Geoforum 40 (2009): 207-216. 22 Maria Amoamo, ‘Tourism and Hybridity: Re-Visiting Bhabha’s Third Space’, Annals of Tourism Research 38.4 (2011): 1254-1273. 23 Joe Greenholtz and Jean Kim, ‘The Cultural Hybridity of Lena: A Multi-Method Case Study of a Third Culture Kid’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations 33 (2009): 391-398. 24 Lortie and Guitton, ‘Social Organization’, 1258-1261. 25 Greenholtz and Kim, ‘Cultural Hybridity’, 391-398. 26 Amoamo, ‘Tourism and Hybridity’, 1254-1273. 27 Philip Abbott, ‘Should Utopians Have Perfect Bodies?’ Futures 42 (2010): 874881. 28 Robert A. Dunn and Rosanna E. Guadagno, ‘My Avatar and Me: Gender and Personality Predictors of Avatar-Self Discrepancy’, Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012): 97-106.

Bibliography Abbott, Philip. ‘Should Utopians Have Perfect Bodies?’ Futures 42 (2010): 874881. Amoamo, Maria. ‘Tourism and Hybridity: Re-Visiting Bhabha’s Third Space’. Annals of Tourism Research 38.4 (2011): 1254-1273. Biever, Celeste. ‘Let’s Meet Tomorrow in Second Life’. New Scientist 194.2610 (2007): 26-27. Charmaraman, Linda and Jennifer L. Grossman. ‘Importance of Race and Ethnicity: An Exploration of Asian, Black, Latino and Multiracial Adolescent Identity’. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16.2 (2010): 144-151.

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__________________________________________________________________ Crystal, David. English as a Global Language (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dunn, Robert A., and Rosanna E. Guadagno. ‘My Avatar and Me: Gender and Personality Predictors of Avatar-Self Discrepancy’. Computers in Human Behavior 28 (2012): 97-106. Fairlie, Robert W. ‘Can the “One-Drop Rule” Tell Us Anything about Racial Discrimination? New Evidence from the Multiple Race Question on the 2000 Census’. Labour Economics 16 (2009): 451-460. Fleckenstein, Kristie S. ‘Faceless Students, Virtual Places: Emergence and Communal Accountability in Online Classrooms’. Computers and Composition 22 (2005): 149-176. Forte, Maurizio, and Gregorij Kurillo. ‘Cyber-Archaeology and Metaverse Collaborative Systems’. Metaverse Creativity 1.1 (2010): 7-19. Gomez-Diago, Gloria. ‘Brainflowing, Virtual / Physical Space and the Flow of Communication: An Explanatory Approach to the Metaverse through a Tool Designed for Brainstorming’. Metaverse Creativity 1.1 (2010): 51-67. Greenholtz, Joe, and Jean Kim. ‘The Cultural Hybridity of Lena: A Multi-Method Case Study of a Third Culture Kid’. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 33 (2009): 391-398. Grove, Kevin. ‘Rethinking the Nature of Urban Environmental Politics: Security, Subjectivity, and the Non-Human’. Geoforum 40 (2009): 207-216. Hayles, N. K. ‘How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics’. Literature and Information (1999): 291. Ivezaj, Valentina, Karen K. Saules, Flora Hoodin, Kevin Alschuler, Nancy E. Angelella, Amy S. Collings, David Saunders-Scott, and Ashley A. Wiedemann. ‘The Relationship between Binge Eating and Weight Status on Depression, Anxiety, and Body Image among a Diverse College Sample: A Focus on Bi/Multiracial Women’. Eating Behaviors 11 (2010): 18-24. Jamaludin, Azilawati, San C. Yam, and Caroline M. N. Ho. ‘Fostering Argumentative Knowledge Construction through Enactive Role Play in Second Life’. Computers and Education 53.2 (2009): 317-329.

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__________________________________________________________________ Jones, Rodney H. ‘Sites of Engagement as Sites of Attention: Time, Space and Culture in Electronic Discourse’, In Discourse in Action: Introducing Mediated Discourse Analysis, eds. Sigrid Norris and Rodney H. Jones, 141-154. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. KZER Worldswide. Virtual Worlds by Sector Q4 2009. Last modified 2009. Viewed 1 February 2010. http://www.kzero.co.uk. Lortie, Catherine L. and Matthieu J. Guitton. ‘Social Organization in Virtual Settings Depends on Proximity to Human Visual Aspect’. Computers in Human Behavior 27 (2011): 1258-1261. Messinger, Paul R., Eleni Stroulia, Kelly Lyons, Michael Bone, Run H. Niu, Kristen Smirnov, and Stephen Perelgut. ‘Virtual Worlds: Past, Present, and Future: New Directions in Social Computing’. Decision Support Systems 47 (2009): 204228. Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. Partala, Timo. ‘Psychological Needs and Virtual Worlds: Case Second Life’. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 69 (2011): 787-800. Pierce, Kenneth. ‘World of Warcraft: The Educational Tool’. El Paso, TX: DigitalCommons@UTEP, 2007. Viewed 13 November 2010. http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=kennet h_pierce. Quillian, Lincoln and Rozlyn Redd, ‘The Friendship Networks of Multiracial Adolescents’. Social Science Research 38 (2009): 279-295. Sarica, Gulcin N. and Nadire Cavus. ‘New Trends in 21st Century English Learning’. Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 1 (2009): 439-445. Shih, Margaret and Diana T. Sanchez. ‘Perspectives and Research on the Positive and Negative Implications of Having Multiple Racial Identities’. Psychological Bulletin 131.4 (2005): 569-591. Yanik, Lerna K. ‘Constructing Turkish “Exceptionalism”: Discourses of Liminality and Hybridity in Post-Cold War Turkish Foreign Policy’. Political Geography 30 (2011): 80-89.

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Appendices Appendix 1: Multiracial Identity in Second Life survey Note: This survey is conducted by Dean A. F. Gui (Second Life avatar, Hartwig Valerian), English Language Centre Language Instructor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for research into multiracial identity in virtual worlds. Your participation is voluntary and identity kept anonymous. The only prerequisite is that you have an avatar in Second Life (http://secondlife.com) and that you consider yourself as someone from a multiracial (more than one racial bloodline) background. Additional enquiries may be sent, via note card, directly to Hartwig Valerian in Second Life, or emailed to [email protected]. The research follows the Code of Ethics for Research Involving Human Subjects mandated by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and underpinned by the Declaration of Helsinki; further information can be obtained by contacting the Research Office at [email protected]. Thank you and I look forward to your feedback. 1.

What is your multiracial background? (Please list as many as you know)

2.

Is your Second Life avatar also of multiracial descent? (If not multiracial, does your avatar appear in another type of "mixed" or "hybrid" form?)

3.

How often do you visit Second Life?

4.

Why do you visit Second Life? (Please list no more than three top reasons)

5.

What groups do you belong to in Second Life? (You may list as many as you like – and if possible, please provide a brief profile if each, and how you have participated in each)

6.

Are your expectations satisfied from your visits to Second Life? (Why or why not?)

Consent to participate: By signing below, you agree to participate in this study and allow the use of such data to be used in this and any subsequent studies. Your participation in the project is voluntary. You acknowledge that you have the right to question any part of the procedure and can withdraw at any time without penalty of any kind.

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__________________________________________________________________ Dean Anthony Fabi Gui is a Language Instructor for The English Language Centre at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU). In addition to engaging with research in education via virtual worlds, multiracial identity, and youth empowerment through creative language use, he also spends time writing poetry.

The Future of Virtual Worlds Mark Childs Abstract The effectiveness of the experience of learning in virtual worlds is particularly dependent on the nature of the technology. This chapter reviews the previous chapters with respect to what they reveal this close inter-relationship and how the pedagogies they describe are supported and limited by the functionality of virtual worlds. The chapter also reflects on earlier predictions about virtual worlds, and identifies some of the current technological trends that will influence the future of virtual worlds, and hence the future of experiential learning in virtual worlds. Finally, the chapter attempts to create its own prediction of a virtual world learning scenario that synthesises the various elements of the technologies in evidence today. Key Words: Virtual worlds, futurology, augmented reality, mobile technology. ***** 1. The Role of Technology in Experiential Learning Experience mediated via technology always comprises two aspects, those of immediacy and hypermediacy. 1 Immediacy is the direct experience of the online activity that is taking place via the technology (for example, videoconferencing, gaming or experiencing a virtual world). Technology constantly aims towards providing more complete immediacy; the sensation that we are so completely absorbed by the activity, or the technology is so transparent, or we are so accustomed to the technology that we are not conscious of the experience being mediated by technology, is held to be the best condition for communication and participation. Dobson, however, notes that ‘total immediacy is never possible because a trace of the media remains’ and it is this perception of the technology intruding onto the consciousness when engaging with a technology-mediated activity that he labels ‘hypermediacy’. The unavoidable reality that the technology will always have an impact on our experiences, sometimes to a great extent, means that, in any discussion of the quality of experiential learning, a consideration of the technology underpinning those experiences plays some part. A discussion of the future of learning in virtual worlds therefore has to start with a consideration of the potential technology. As a conclusion therefore, for this collection of chapters on Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds we will report on current and suggested developments in the technology of virtual worlds, and suggest what impact this may have on learning. Before that, however, the current state of the interrelationship between technology and learning is reviewed, as exemplified by the research presented in the previous chapters of this book.

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__________________________________________________________________ 2. The Current State of Technology and Learning in Virtual Worlds The technology of virtual worlds influences the work of many of the contributors to this book in the potential it provides for two elements in particular; the creation and performance of the learners’ avatars and the ease (or difficulty) and range of communication features. The courtship that Paul Jerry describes in chapter seven, and the expressions of ethnicity as described by Dean Gui in chapter 10, are only possible because the design of the platform gives people the level of functionality to support those activities, and to do so in a sufficiently immersive way. The depth and complexity of the interactions that support the leadership qualities investigated by Melissa Johnson Farrar are only possible because of the range and immersive nature of the communication functions that virtual worlds (in this case World of Warcraft) possess. However, it is not just the range of functionality that is crucial, but also the reliability and ease of use of the technology plays its part in the user experience. Many of the issues that Mark Childs and Anna Peachey describe in chapter two are exacerbated by failings in the technology, leading to a situation where the hypermediacy elements overwhelm the immediacy elements for many students. The technological basis of learning is paid particular attention to in three chapters within the book. One of these is that by Sue Gregory. In this chapter, the use of the System-Linked Object-Oriented Learning Environment, or SLOODLE, within Second Life is examined. Learning Management Systems are an integral part of learning within most higher education institutions; combining the most popular of these, Moodle, with the most popular of virtual worlds, Second Life, therefore has the potential to combine the most powerful elements of both as teaching and learning tools. Virtual worlds bring the benefit of enabling students to feel immersed and to communicate with each other at a distance as embodied actors synchronously. LMSes enable resources to be shared and learning materials to be stored and displayed. They are also effective at supporting asynchronous communication. A facility to blend the two, and move almost seamlessly from one to the other would prove to be the best of both if not for one barrier that Gregory draws attention to. This is the development required to be effective at using both. Gregory and her colleagues employ a third technology, that of machinima, in order to address this. Tomàš Bouda outlines the range of activities with which virtual worlds can be employed to support learning, and each of these activities correspond to, or rely upon, a different feature of the technology of virtual worlds, including avatar design and animation, three-dimensional movement, camera control, group and one-to-one messaging, creation and co-creation of objects and a single interface to merge of all of these different functionalities. The implication of Bouda’s chapter is also that the link between virtual world design and learning is intricate and mutually dependent, learning cannot exist without the necessary features, and virtual world developers have to consider all the user requirements if the platform

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__________________________________________________________________ is to be used effectively. Spyros Vosinakis, Panayiotis Koutsabasis, Panagiotis Zaharias and Marios Belk look specifically at the degree to which the functionality of OpenSim and the requirements of problem-based learning correspond. Their conclusions are that virtual worlds are an ideal platform for supporting constructivist learning as they enable 1) a sense of presence within the world 2) direct manipulation and persistence 3) embodiment as avatars 4) expression and communication via metaphors and 5) real-time simulation and 3-D interaction. The implication of the work by Vosinakis et al is that pedagogy and technology are inextricably linked; for them both to work effectively the alignment between the two must be very close. The close link between pedagogy and technology displayed by this research is a clear indication of the high degree to which the future of learning in virtual worlds will be dependent on the way in which the virtual worlds themselves evolve. In the following sections, this evolution will be considered, as well as the impact this will have on education. As an indication of how speculative predictions can be, and the difficulties entailed in anticipating how technology will evolve, the following section looks at previous predictions about virtual worlds, and how to some extent, how these predictions about the future helped define our present. 3. The History of the Future of Virtual Worlds Predicting the future of virtual world technology has an uneven track record. In Snow Crash, 2 Neal Stephenson postulated a world in which people connected to a shared virtual reality called the ‘metaverse’ and adopted avatars in order to interact with each other. The technology resembles the virtual worlds of the early part of the 21st century, but the true quality of the prediction in the novel is in its anticipation of how social conventions evolve within the virtual world. Status within this world is not based on status within the physical world, or wealth, but on the person’s dedication to mastering the techniques of the metaverse, chiefly the design of the avatar. Stephenson also predicted the role that bots would play in these environments (here called ‘daemons’) and the types of environment (public spaces, nightclubs such as The Black Sun and so on). The avatars rezz in private within the world, then go out to communicate and socialise in these night clubs, but do not do so randomly in the street. The highest sophistication for users is considered to be achieving a degree of realism that matches the physical. Stephenson also predicts the social division of landowner and homeless person that are observed in Second Life. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. ... They could strike up a conversation ... But they probably won’t talk to each other any more than they would do in Reality. 3

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__________________________________________________________________ Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment... You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.... Most hacker types don’t go in for garish avatars, because they know it takes a lot more sophistication to render a realistic human face than a talking penis. 4 You can’t just materialize anywhere in the Metaverse ..It would break the metaphor. Materializing out of nowhere (or vanishing back into Reality) is considered to be a private function best done in the confines of your own House. ... If you are some peon who does not own a House ... then you materialize in a port. 5 It doesn’t pay to have a nice avatar on the Street ... But the Black Sun is a much classier piece of software... Only so many people can be here at once.... Everything is solid and opaque and realistic. And the clientele has a lot of class – no talking penises in here. The avatars look like real people. For the most part, so do the daemons. 6 In his Bridge Trilogy, 7 William Gibson also envisaged a virtual world. In this virtual world, again status is conferred by the avatar one creates, though these are often much more fantastical. Residents of these virtual worlds also create spaces collaboratively, and for some of the characters these have more meaning in their lives than the physical world around them. The people within the virtual world in Gibson’s novels interact not only with each other but with artificial intelligences called idoru. Novels such as these resemble in many ways the virtual worlds that are currently the focus of the studies represented here. Indeed, the language used to describe them is drawn from Snow Crash and other works of fiction. Reading these 20 years after their creation the degree of prescience displayed is remarkable; the predictions of the uses to which they are put and the impact on the users’ lives ring very true. Where they are most at odds with the present state of virtual worlds is in their description of the technology; the environments in the novels are far more immersive, and from their descriptions seem almost indistinguishable from the physical world. Alongside technological advances, the rate of adoption of virtual worlds is also very difficult to predict. In 2007, Gartner predicted that by the end of 2011, 80% of internet users would have a virtual life. 8 Although their list of issues that need to be addressed by users, concerning rules of behaviour rules and impact on reputation, are accurate, the rate of take-up has been far slower. In fact, the number of

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__________________________________________________________________ residents of Second Life (defined by the number of different accounts accessed during the previous three months), currently the leading social virtual world has, of May 2012, fallen from a peak of 1.4 million to approximately 1.0 million. The following viewpoints about the possible future of virtual worlds are highly speculative, and are unlikely to be as prescient as the quotes from Snow Crash above. However, it is hoped that future researchers citing this work will employ judicious editing to, retrospectively, make the predictions seem equally as incredible. In order to maximise the potential for an accurate prediction, several possible directions for the evolution of virtual worlds are considered, each depending on the predominance of a different type of technology being adopted. Five of the currently leading trends in technology have been examined, and their possible impact on experiential learning in virtual worlds has been considered. These five technological trends are the growth of many separate grids, integration with web browsers, incorporation of games consoles, the move to the use of mobile technology and the development of augmented reality. 4. Possible Futures of Education in Virtual Worlds The metaverse lives. Of the chapters in this book, it is interesting to observe the current technologies used as a platform for the activities described. Four chapters use Second Life (Gregory, Childs and Peachey, Jerry and Gui), one uses OpenSim (Vosinakis et al), one World of Warcraft (Farrar), one uses a 2D multimedia website (Le Rossignol) and one began with Second Life and then, due to the price increases imposed by Linden Lab, moved to OpenSim (Bouda). From this (admittedly small) sample, it appears that Second Life is still the strongest contender for a platform to host virtual world activity, but that educators are more becoming more likely to consider alternative, though similar, platforms, with OpenSim leading the way. Educators’ dissatisfaction with, and the expense of, Second Life is beginning to cause fragmentation of the virtual world community. Whereas before it was almost guaranteed that educators would share a single grid, increasingly they are becoming spread across a range of different platforms. One saving grace of this diaspora is that many of the most popular of these virtual worlds use the same viewer. Whether one uses the Second Life viewer, Imprudence, Phoenix or Firestorm or any of a number of others, once a user has learned to interact with the world using that particular interface, then it is of little difficulty to switch to another one. This is particularly important with virtual world as a technology (more so than, for example, with a word-processing package, or an online forum); since what is required for an effective learning opportunity is immediacy of experience rather than hypermediacy; any changes in the interface are extremely disruptive, since this makes the technology more visible and reduces the transparent nature of the interaction.

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__________________________________________________________________ However, although they are operated in the same manner, the grids remain separate. The step that will reintegrate this fragmented community, and enable educators to once again easily share and visit their educational resources will be the successful employment of hypergridding. Hypergridding is the connecting of these separate virtual worlds to create a collection of linked worlds, an example of Stephenson’s metaverse. Once it becomes possible to move not only avatars, but also their inventories, from world to world, then these separate grids will perform as a single platform; so, for example, objects purchased from within Second Life (which has a thriving creators’ market) could be employed within OpenSim (which gives institutions greater control over privacy and ownership of the space). This would greatly expand the choices, and the flexibility of using virtual worlds for educators, and to a large extent enable far more effective collaboration. Simple and effective hypergridding is close to deployment, but, as of writing in 2012, has not been realised. A virtual world in your browser. In her chapter, Sue Gregory refers to Lively, which was a virtual world developed by Google that ran as an application from within a web page (http://www.lively.com/). There are numerous legitimate reasons for using standard web browsers for access. The first of these is that the processing power, particularly of a graphics card, required to run a virtual world viewer is beyond the capacity of the technology available to many people, and particularly of institutions. Secondly, the bureaucratic hurdles many practitioners face when requiring additional software to be downloaded and installed preclude the use of virtual worlds in many institutions, suffering as they do from the obstructive policies of their IT departments. Finally, enabling virtual worlds to be viewable from within a web browser means that the practice of accessing virtual worlds can be easily integrated into the majority of people’s normal internet usage, and so potentially widen the demographic of users. The initial effort required to begin using them in an educational situation would consequently be reduced. It would be reasonable to anticipate that these factors would lead to the usage of virtual worlds becoming much more widespread. Making virtual worlds viewable through the web should have been very successful, in effect though, Lively only lasted for the second half of 2008. Newer virtual worlds, such as Kitely, although trying to widen the demographic of potential users by offering other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter for access, have returned to the use of the viewer-based technology rather than be browser-based. The reasons for the failure of Lively are still being discussed. The direct experience of those contributing to this chapter, however, is that reducing the functionality of the virtual world in order to enable it to work within a browser removed the elements that made a virtual world worth pursuing. The sense of immersion was reduced, the opportunities to create and interact with virtual artefacts within the world were lessened, and consequently the rapid adoption by the marketplace, needed for the survival of any social medium, did not materialise.

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__________________________________________________________________ Lively disappeared before many people realised it had been launched, and new web-based viewers have not emerged to take its place. Move to games consoles. A move in the other direction, to more sophisticated technologies, is the repositioning of virtual worlds to run on games consoles such as the Playstation 3, or the Xbox 360. Games consoles have very sophisticated graphics processors, and the quality of the rendering of games is much higher than is available using most PCs. Many Massive Multiplayer Online Games are already available on games consoles, and shared virtual worlds such as Minecraft, previously running on PCs have made the transition to this technology. In the Minecraft case this has proved immensely popular. 9 The advantages of running virtual worlds on games consoles is due not to just the more sophisticated graphics available, but also the control devices. Many people find games controllers a more intuitive mechanism to control the movement of an avatar than keys on a keyboard. However, text chat and a drag and drop functionality are less well integrated. The next generation of games controllers offer even more interactivity as they allow detect physical interaction by the users, through the use of cameras and motion detectors. Devices such as the Xbox 360 Kinect controller have already been used to animate avatars. There are two ways in which this can be done, either avatars can be animated inworld through physical actions triggering pre-set animations, (for example, the act of raising your hand triggers a hand-raising animation) or, as in the work of Fumi Iseki and a team at Tokyo University, 10 the animations are used to animate avatars in realtime, but in a local viewer only. Because avatars are animated inworld using preloaded animation files, there is no way with current technology to map motion capture to inworld movements of avatars in realtime. This opens up the potential to a new, closer relationship between user and avatar. As Jelena Guga notes, 11 this will be the next step change in the developing degrees of immersion that have been enabled by the changes in technology. Although the sense of immersion may be increased, requiring the user to be physically active may also, simultaneously, make the user more aware of their physical body while interacting inworld, so their sense of embodiment may actually be reduced. As noted in the chapter by Childs and Peachey earlier, the individual experience of virtual worlds varies enormously, and a likely discovery will be that whether physical operation of an avatar increases or reduces the sense of engagement inworld will be different depending on the person. Another consideration is that a one-to-one correspondence between physical action and resulting motion of the avatar is, as Stelarc points out, 12 possibly the least interesting way in which to use motion recognition to animate avatars. In his performances, Stelarc uses his body to create inworld performances, but his gestures cause his avatar to fly, float, operate cyborg attachments and so on. From a learning point of view, a move to games consoles could have advantages and disadvantages. The move would overcome some of the objections

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__________________________________________________________________ to virtual worlds with regard to the low resolution graphics, and technical issues such as slow rendering times and lag, however, they could marginalise activity even further, since few computer suites in universities have games consoles, and it cannot be guaranteed that all users will have access to them. Developing motion controlled interfaces would address some of the issues that some users find; that operating within a virtual world is too sedentary an experience. Offering the opportunity to operate avatars through physical motion may appeal to these users, though indications are that these users actually find the virtual nature of these experiences intrinsically problematic, equating the virtual with inauthentic. However, the use of a motion recognition system will have interesting opportunities for performance. Gone to mobiles every one. As noted above, the rate of take-up of virtual worlds anticipated by Gartner in 2007 has not been realised. Some predictions also state that the rate of development of the high end graphics technology required for virtual worlds will be slowed by the adoption of mobile technology. Essid notes that the tablet PCs owned by students cannot run the viewers required for Second Life, and these are now the predominant technology with which students access online learning. In addition, many apps provide innovative and offline education, such as the use of Google Sky, Zenith or Sky Safari for learning astronomy. In these apps, the learner holds up their tablet PC and through global positioning and inbuilt sensors that detect orientation, the tablet displays the position of stars, planets and Messier objects as they appear in the sky in the direction in which the tablet is pointed. This provides learning that is interactive, kinaesthetic, and in situ. Essid’s prediction is that the predominant use of mobile technology as the new wave of learning will stall the uptake of virtual worlds. As Essid states in his blog post on the subject: One does not wish to be on the wrong side of history, and I think SL evangelists are clearly on the wrong side, unless they are early in their careers and have a Plan B for research and teaching. 13 Essid is mistaken in thinking that there is no future in virtual worlds; the weight of evidence is overwhelming that these are not only effective platforms for learning, but for some pedagogical aims they are the most effective. For them to be abandoned completely would be such a retrograde step that it is unlikely to happen, however, the move to widespread adoption of mobile technology will lengthen the time before they become mainstream. Augmented reality. One function of many mobile devices is that they can combine the camera images with an overlay of additional information. In the same way that a global position and orientation can be used to calculate the position of stars as seen from a particular viewpoint, these can also be used to determine at

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__________________________________________________________________ which geographical location the tablet is being pointed. These data can then be combined with a database of information to create an overlay of text to explain, for example, the historical background of a building, or the direction and distance of the nearest Underground station or Irish pub. Locations can be digitally tagged, either with additional information (such as in a learning exercise with students adding their own content to locations), artwork, or even graffiti. 14 As with the astronomy apps described above, this provides learning in situ, and provides a kinaesthetic element to the activity. The potential of combining geotagged images onto the physical world is indicated by augmented reality games such as Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary. 15 In this, images of ghosts are located at particular physical world co-ordinates, which can be seen with a dedicated iphone app that overlays these images onto a camera image. Players can create sanctuaries, or cast spells, at locations which then influence the experience of other players. The game therefore becomes a massive multiplayer roleplay game played in a blending of the physical and a virtual world. Greater precision than that enabled by global positioning can be provided through Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, the technology for recognising which will soon be available on mobile technology. 16 By placing an RFID tag in clothing, or furniture, or on a person, information about that object or person (i.e. metadata) are then always available, whenever a device is pointed at them. For example, products could be linked directly to their user manual; simply hold your tablet PC over your oven and pop-up boxes appear over the knobs decoding the icons, or attend a conference and each person there could have information linked to them, such as name, institution and research interests, which is revealed by holding up your phone and tapping their image on the screen. Several museums and exhibitions already have augmented reality exhibits; when a room is looked at through an AR viewer, the physical objects in the room are overlain with animations or animated characters, bringing the static displays to life. 17 A further enhancement of augmented reality is achieved by enabling the animated characters to address the attendee directly, with their gaze following the attendee around the room, as they are tracked through the use of an RFID bracelet. 18 The characters can address many attendees simultaneously since, from the perspective of each, the character is looking at them individually, a transformed social interaction known as non-zero sum mutual gaze. 19 These interactions can be made more seamless by plans to create AR projections within glasses. 20 Rather than clicking on a screen, input can be through the detection of hand movements 21 or, for the mobility-impaired, deliberate blinking. 22 If this is possible with pre-recorded characters, then it is only a short leap to enabling this to take place with avatars or bots in realtime, by layering the virtual world image onto the physical as it is created. This activity resembles the mixed reality performances created by Joff Chafer and Ian Upton; originally these performances used images from a virtual world projected onto a gauze, so that they

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__________________________________________________________________ could share the stage with physical world actors, and more recently Chafer and Upton have used 3D imaging to bring the virtual world images out from the screen and into a physical space. 23 Capturing the images of avatars in the virtual world, and geotagging them, would enable people with the appropriate AR viewer to see avatars moving and communicating all around them. As the sophistication of bots develop, then the use of them as companion agents, guiding learners through virtual learning scenarios, could be brought into the physical world as guides and mentors seen only by the learner through their AR viewer. With ways of imaging the avatars through something as immersive as AR glasses, physical world participants and avatars could interact on an equal footing. For learning and teaching, the advantages of blending the functionality and flexibility of the virtual and the real are enormous. For the learners who see virtual learning as inauthentic, relating the virtual world learning directly to the physical may overcome many of their objections. The integration of an object and its metadata as well as data providing context for that object (called paradata) is easily done in a virtual world; AR in combination with RFID tagging enables this feature to be deployed in the physical world too, since information, ideas and artefacts can be intrinsically and easily linked. User generated content, which again is simply created and shared in the virtual, can also be introduced to the physical. Participation at a distance, on an equivalent footing with participation face-to-face, could be achieved by the appearance of avatars in the physical environment and RFID tagging the physically-present participants and objects. 5. Conclusion: The Best of Both Worlds Arriving at a single conclusion is difficult, since any of these technologies and, almost inevitably, some unforeseen technology, could have a dominant influence on the future of virtual worlds, and hence on the role of experiential learning in virtual worlds. In the short term, the directions seem reduced to two major considerations; on the one hand, the simplicity and ubiquity of devices, and as diametrically-opposed characteristic, the sophistication and degree of immersiveness of the technology. The use of mobile devices offers the highest degree of accessibility, and the widest possible demographic, but the functionality of these with respect to virtual worlds is limited. Virtual worlds in a browser offer slightly more functionality, but fewer users than mobiles, but still more than use the current range of viewers. These routes may make online interaction more commonplace, and bring it into the classroom with fewer barriers, but the sense of this interaction being a direct emotional, immersive, transforming experience (the theme of this entire book, after all) is limited. Games consoles offer more sophistication, and motion-detection interfaces may make interaction more seamless, but these may place this beyond the scope of many institutions and offer greater barriers to adoption by learners (and, to an even larger extent, educators). Augmented reality offers almost unlimited opportunities for imagination and

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__________________________________________________________________ creativity to bring the best of the physical and the virtual together, but at the moment, the hand-held devices used for these interactions limit that sense of immersion. Longer term, however, a prediction that will almost certainly hold true is that as the mobile devices develop greater and greater processing power, (if Moore’s Law holds true, doubling every 18 months) interaction through them will become ever more seamless. Once AR glasses, or even contact lenses, become commonplace, then we truly will have the blending of the best of both worlds, perhaps to the extent that we no longer see them as two separate worlds. To serve as a coda to this exploration, and while in no way possessing the prescient power or writing talent of a Stephenson or Gibson, the following scenario is presented as an attempt to predict a teaching scenario 20 years hence in the same manner as Snow Crash anticipated 20 years ago. As the teacher enters, she notes that some of the physical world students are already here. They’ve sat around the edge of the room that will become the learning space, some on chairs, some on the floor. About half the seats are empty. She puts on her glasses and sees that some of the virtual students have arrived too, and are filling the gaps the other students have left. Most of the avatar students are almost indistinguishable from physical students, but some have chosen to adopt other forms. She sees the vampire fad has come back again and three avatars and one physical vampire have clustered in a group in a corner. In the teleport corner the Deep One appears. She’s asked it to cut its size to human to fit more easily into the room and she sees it’s done so. It’s the only dress rule she insists on; that and no talking penises. With the arrival of the last of the students, she blinks twice in succession to call up her TAs. They’ve been personalised to look like the seven dwarfs from the Disney cartoon, and she is still wondering if this would constitute copyright infringement now that the film is public domain. However, she finds the names a useful mnemonic for the separate groups that have been set up so has decided to keep them. Once she sets the students their group tasks she’s planned to spend a bit of extra time with the Dopey group this time round. She introduces the tasks to the students. It’s to create interactive 3D forms representing various endocrine systems. She is still a bit unsure of some of the students’ names, but a quick gesture

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__________________________________________________________________ with her hand and their nametags appear above their heads. Another flick and she can see which assignments they haven’t completed yet. She sees most of the Sneezy group are lagging behind and two are still on long term sick leave. The teacher revises the previous sessions, making sure she particularly motivates the group who don’t seem fully awake yet, and then sets them to work. The students move into their groups and begin talking to each other, planning out the model they want to create and then building the objects in the air between them. Each object is invisible to her and the other groups, but she has the access permissions to flip between them She walks over to the Bashful group; comprised of two physical and two avatar students. They still aren’t communicating effectively and she plans on a team building exercise first. She interrupts the Bashful TA in the middle of his explanation of the role of adrenaline, and suggests they switch to their virtual classroom. She goes with them. The physical classroom disappears and now is replaced by a virtual representation of a campfire in a forest. She sits the group down around it and passes them a ball and tells them the rules to the game. As she switches to physical mode again she sees the two physical students, the avatars and the bot passing it between them. Back in the room, most of the groups seem to be progressing well, though the Doc group are nearly finished and may soon need to be set some follow-up activity. She calls up her to-do list in front of her. There may be time to get some marking done .... Acknowledgments: Thanks to Jelena Guga and Paul Jerry for reviewing this chapter.

Notes 1

Stephen Dobson, ‘Remediation: Understanding New Media, Revisiting a Classic’, Seminar.net: International Journal of Media, Technology and Lifelong Learning 5.2 (2009). 2 Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (UK: Penguin, 1992). 3 Ibid., 33. 4 Ibid., 34. 5 Ibid., 34. 6 Ibid., 51.

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William Gibson, Virtual Light (UK: Penguin, 1993); William Gibson, Idoru (UK: Penguin, 1996); William Gibson, All Tomorrow's Parties (UK: Penguin, 1999). 8 Gartner, ‘Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A Second Life in the Virtual World by the End of 2011’, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861. 9 Matthew Hawkins, ‘Minecraft on Xbox Live a Smash Success’, MSNBC, Viewed 12 May 2012, http://www.ingame.msnbc.msn.com/technology/ingame/minecraft-xbox-livesmash-success-766955. 10 Second Lie, ‘Kinect Hack Brings Real Time Animation To Second Life’, Viewed November 2011, http://second-lie.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/kinect-hack-brings-real-time-animation. html. 11 Jelena Guga, ‘Redefining Embodiment through Hyperterminality’, Virtual Futures 2.0, University of Warwick, 18-19 June 2011. 12 Stelarc, Keynote, ‘From Black Box to Second Life: Theatre and Performance in Virtual Worlds’, University of Hull, Scarborough, 20 May 2011. 13 Joseph Essid, ‘Mobile: Shiny? Yes, Hyped? Yes, Fad? No’, 3 May, 2010, http://iggyo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/mobile-shiny-yes-hyped-yes-fad-no.html.a 14 New Scientist, Augmented Reality Offers a New Layer of Intrigue, 25 May 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428652.600-augmented-reality-offers-anew-layer-of-intrigue.html. 15 ‘Ogmento Reality Reinvented, Paranormal Activity: Sanctuary’, 22 May 2012, http://www.ogmento.com/games/paranormal-activity-sanctuary. 16 Marketing Vox, ‘Married to RFID, What Can AR Do for Marketers?’, 4 March 2010, http://www.marketingvox.com/married-to-rfid-what-can-ar-do-for-marketers046365/. 17 Canterbury Museum, ‘Augmented Reality Technology Brings Artefacts to Life’, 28 September 2009, http://www.canterburymuseum.com/news/13/augmented-reality-technologybrings-artefacts-to-life. 18 Alan Smith, ‘In South Korea, Kinect and RFID Power an Augmented Reality Theme Park’, Springwise, 20 February 2012, http://www.springwise.com/entertainment/south-korea-kinect-rfid-poweraugmented-reality-theme-park/. 19 Jeremy N. Bailenson, Andrew N. Beall and Matthew Turk, ‘Transformed Social Interaction’, Presence 13.4 (2004): 428-441. 20 Sara Reardon, ‘Google Hints at New AR Glasses in Video’, New Scientist, 4 April 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/04/google-hintsat-new-ar-glasses.html.

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Catherine de Lange, ‘What Life in Augmented Reality could Look Like’, New Scientist, 24 May 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2012/05/whatlife-in-augmented-reality-will-be-like.html. 22 Eduardo Iáñez, Andrés Úbeda, José Azorín and Carlos Pérez, ‘Assistive Robot Application Based on a RFID Control Architecture and a Wireless EOG Interface’, Science Direct, 21 May 2012, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921889012000620. 23 Joff Chafer and Ian Upton, ‘Insert / Extract: Mixed Reality Research Workshop’, November 2011, http://vimeo.com/32502129.

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__________________________________________________________________ Gibson, William. All Tomorrow’s Parties. UK: Penguin, 1999. Guga, Jelena. ‘Redefining Embodiment through Hyperterminality’. Virtual Futures 2.0. University of Warwick, 18-19 June 2011. Hawkins, Matthew. ‘Minecraft on Xbox Live a Smash Success’. MSNBC. Viewed 12 May 2012. http://www.ingame.msnbc.msn.com/technology/ingame/minecraft-xbox-livesmash-success-766955. Iáñez, Eduardo, Andrés Úbeda, José Azorín and Carlos Pérez, ‘Assistive Robot Application Based on a RFID Control Architecture and a Wireless EOG Interface’. Science Direct. 21 May 2012. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921889012000620. Reardon, Sara. ‘Google Hints at New AR Glasses in Video’. New Scientist. 4 April 2012. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/04/google-hints-at-new-arglasses.html. Second Lie. ‘Kinect Hack Brings Real Time Animation To Second Life’. Viewed November 2011. http://second-lie.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/kinect-hack-brings-real-time-animation. html. Smith, Alan. ‘In South Korea, Kinect and RFID Power an Augmented Reality Theme Park’. Springwise. 20 February 2012. http://www.springwise.com/entertainment/south-korea-kinect-rfid-poweraugmented-reality-theme-park/. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. UK: Penguin. 1992.