E-MUVEs

It's not Warm and Fuzzy but maybe it is Do-able?

An analysis of selected components that enhance the Learning Experience in 3 E-MUVES, viewed through the lens of Presence.

I LOVE my name E-MUVES!! 

I think I have it!

Fabulous session last night with Michael on River Quest and Virtual Singapura.
I WANT HIS JOB!!!
Interesting the effect of affect - everytime I hear/read about the things like "design", "narrative", "social richness" I get a warm and fuzzy feeling.
I think I have directed the question - will see in writing it up if that warm and fuzzy feeling persists ..... that will be my guide.

Full circle

From à

This manuscript will appear in Jacobson, M. J., & Reimann, P. (Eds.). (2009).

Designs for learning environments of the future: International perspectives from the learning sciences. Springer. Please do not quote from this version.

Chapter 5

Design Perspectives for Learning in Virtual Worlds

Michael J. Jacobson

àTo the Bibliography

Barab, S., Warren, S., & Ingram-Goble, A. (2006). Academic play spaces: Designing games for education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association,, San Francisco, CA.

àTo Google Scholar Search

Picking up term Design Education

Finding following Article

Engaging By Design: How Engagement Strategies in Popular Computer and Video Games Can Inform Instructional Design

Michele D. Dickey 2005

- Educational Technology Research and Development 53 (2) 67-83

àLooking at Springer Link suggested articles

Instructional Design for Situated Learning

Michael F.Young

To meet the test of "authenticity," situations must at least have some of the important attributes of real-life problem solving, including ill- structured complex goals, an opportunity for the detection of relevant versus irrelevant infor- mation, active/generative engagement in find- ing and defining problems as well as in solving them, involvement of the student's beliefs and values, and an opportunity to engage in col- laborative interpersonal activities (Young &

McNeese, in press).

Gibson (1979/1986) suggested that our perceptual sys- tems are designed to detect invariance and will do so readily if given an opportunity. The designer's first task is to select the generator set of situations (complex, realistic problem spaces) that afford students the best oppor- tunity to detect the stable (invariant) concepts of traditional subject domains.

àSearch for online presence in Google Scholar

Drawn to this title that says Interaction is not enough….

Garrison, D. Randy and Cleveland-Innes, Martha(2005) 'Facilitating Cognitive Presence in Online Learning: Interaction Is Not Enough', American Journal of Distance Education, 19: 3, 133 — 148

Although the natural and appropriate inclination is to first direct interac- tion efforts to establishing social presence and creating interrelationships, this is only a precondition for a purposeful and worthwhile learning experi- ence. Teaching presence is important for the creation and sustainability of a community of inquiry focused on the exploration, integration, and testing of concepts and solutions

Garrison and Cleveland-Innes concluded that teaching presence in the form of facilitation is crucial in the success of online learning.

Which brings us back to the Jacobson article with concepts of scaffolding and intelligent agents  (and the Ketelhut where perception of teacher declined in experimental group)

Murray (2003). Agents may thus be designed to have three main roles in a low-to- high structure virtual world. First, agents could monitor solution profiles and if the learner seems to easily accomplish the task or solve the problem, then a more dif- ficult task would be provided. Second, agents could be designed to support persis- tence in the solving of a challenging task as quickly giving up would mean that prior knowledge and/or naïve conceptions may not be activated, with the result that the learner would not benefit from a subsequent structured experience. Third, agents could be designed to provide “structure” (i.e., scaffolding, direct instruc- tion) following the low-structure activity in which the learner struggled and failed.

Summary :

Design of online virtual environments for Education

Looking at concepts of immersion and social participation

Missing concepts that I am still drawn to Narrative and Social Richness

Scenarios

I would like to be able to keep different "scenario"s on my desktop.
When working on different projects I have a number of docs, pdfs, websites open.
Would like to be able to save them all and so when go back to work on it
all of those open and place themselves automatically.

Anyone know how to do this?

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.

Error in Converting PDF's to text and/or Google docs

Appears BIG BUG in this. Loses pages and pages of text, images, tables not included.
This should not be done.
Have to keep docs in Original PDF format which then begs the question "Why bother at all with Google Docs?" besides the feature of being able to access them remotely?

What is going on here?

There was a paper that had a quote from some MUD player saying that his MUD experience was more real than his RL (real life). How can that be? What is going on here? I need to go to sleep, being able to actually physically go to sleep is so wonderful, It is MY RL.
The kids made sushi, swam, painted nails, fought - it got my little WOW "addict" into the flow of things, as long as he wan't being accepted by the group because of his idiosyncracies he went to WOW, but when he was accepted he just loved being part of the madness.
Very frustrating to have to search through .pdfs  to find the reference but because I am soooo tenacious I finally did :

"The MUD is the real world—in the sense that the real self can be revealed there, without the constraints of everyday life that prevent people from expressing their inner beings. This player feels that everyday life as shaped by prejudices that are based on physical appearance. Again there is a separation between the two experiential planes, each having different affordances and constraints. Moreover, the respondent maintains that the real world is the MUD world because the real self finds its authentic form there." Talamo A.,Pozzii S.,Mellini B.(2010). Uniqueness of Experience and Virtual Playworlds:   Playing Is Not Just for

Fun. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 17: 1, 23 — 41

Isn't it more about the fact that the Self finds an "accepted" form here rather than authentic one?

I have thought long and hard about my sleek, sexy, intelligent, white Mac tonight.

When I log off does it continue to have fun?

Could I attribute it a personality or is it about how it reflects me?

Could I confuse "presence as medium as social actor " (The At the Heart of It: one).

But I have still been sitting in front of this object all night - clicking on receive to get mail, going through Face Book, checking who is on Skype....

are we all just lonely - we need the Piazza?

Well if so, we don't have a Piazza, so how are we going to deal with what we got?

Cyber connecting...

And each step towards cyber connecting leads us one step further from Sukha.

What is going on here?