I wish I could have painted my ideas in this post

Organising my time between this module and 5023 got me to work today on the article 

Ketelhut, D. J., Clarke, J., & Nelson, B. C. (2009). The development of River City, a multi- user virtual environment-based scientific inquiry curriculum: Historical and design evolutions. In M. J. Jacobson & P. Reimann (Eds.), Designs for learning environments of the future: International learning sciences theory and research perspectives. New York: Springer.

And of course it immediately dawned on me that the Universe was giving me a little gem to help me in the direction I was taking with my research. The interactivity between all the modules has been growing in my awareness for some time now - but I am slow (and children would add a no-life!!!) And I might add I am not a linear, objective, logical, rational thinker (re Schaef  again). My mind is like one chaotic network of nodes of thought, links of action and overlays of crisis. Maybe this is another way of seeing ADHD ? I am not able to vertically organise my thinking pattern to get from Problem : What is my Research Question ? to Solution : This is my Research Question.  Instead I jump all over the place, look into every nook and cranny of an idea, stand up, sit down, go off on tangents – and I love it – I experience so much more.

Don Carson had got me intrigued with the design aspects of games and spaces and the creativity behind the richness of the narrative. This article describes the design process of River City, a MUVE-based inquiry curriculum. So many elements of the design are what users respond to in MMORPGs.

I need to get Gee’s book on what we can learn from Video Games (on call – love calling a book – it means I just go to the front desk and get it – tried calling books that are even at the Fischer Library but the system wouldn’t let me L) in order to see what work has already been done in correlating the aspects of MMORPG that draw in millions of users and using these in learning contexts. I know many aspects of this have been dealt with but it seems like some issues could still be expanded through recent research :

For example River City student’s perception that their teachers were compelling them to strive for understanding declined by 0.93 –the study suggests that this difference was due to the more autonomous nature of the experimental group. « However, we caution that more research into this and effects of the intervention on students’ understanding are necessary to tease out the underlying explanation for this difference. ».

A study by Lee et al. (2007) The Case for Caring Colearners: The Effects of a Computer-Mediated Colearner Agent on Trust and Learning. Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 183–204 suggests incorporating “positive social virtues, such as caring orientations, into interactive media to enhance communication and learning.”.

Fallmann, D. (2009) A different way of seeing: Albert Borgmann’s philosophy of technology and human–computer interaction. AI & Society (25) 1, 53-60 also spoke about how specific values might be incorporated into the design of interactive systems that foster engagement with reality. He argues that we have gone beyond developing interactions that are effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, and easy to learn  but now also require «  the enjoyable, exciting, and meaningful, something that is curious, playful, intimate, creative, and sometimes even ambiguous and mystical. » A design must no longer just be efficient but also have affective qualities. For Presence as social richness, (Lombard & Ditton 1997) Presence is the extent to which a medium is perceived as "sociable", "warm", "sensitive", "intimate" and is related to concepts such as intimacy and immediacy, where language is a vector of immediacy.

With this approach the perceptions of the students may have been enhanced by designing the interactions in a way that they felt they were getting the support from the actual environment, agents, and/or other participants possibly even the teacher’s Avatar which could have given verbal support at key stages.

My research so far has given me a wealth of information to draw on at every twist and turn but I now need a more honed approach to focus on specific aspects that would be reasonable and of value.

I am going to get Gee’s book and going to research Barab some more, in particular the two references quoted in Ketelhut’s article 

Barab, S. A. & Squire, K. D. (2004). Design-Based Research: Putting Our Stake in the Ground. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(1), 1-14.

Barab, S., Thomas, M., Dodge, T., Carteaux, R., & Tuzan, H. (2005). Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns. Educational Technology Research & Development, 53(1), 86-107.