Virtual Learning Worlds

This session, in addition to Raph’s talk, are the main draws for me at State of Play 09. Primarily because Jim Bower is on it. I was sitting with Jim for Raph’s talk, and as people sat down he warned “I might offend some of you, sitting at this table is risky”. Like Raph, I’m sure he’ll say some things that might ruffle some feathers…which is exactly what needs to happen at these academic-centric conferences.

Nice thing so far: panel is not limiting itself to VWs, but also including game people. Chen - author of the more recent “Serious Games: Games that educate, train, etc…” Comes from the gaming community, reaching across to education. Good to see people going this route vs. most people that go from education to the game industry (without really understanding it).

Dr. Rodenbacker (mispelled, I’m sure, can’t read the name tag from back here).
Bloom’s taxonomy - after the 2001 revise, it starts to align much better to virtual worlds.
Howard Gardner - theory of multiple intelligences about education. Also parrallels VWs.
Roger Callois - Types and structures of play. These are game-dominated theories, but they can be parallel to education and learning.
R. Bartle’s player type breakdown - again, these can be taken out of games and applied to classrooms. Students can break down into these roles within a classroom. Achievers, socializes, explorers and killers.

The good doctor now puts all this into a nice little grid. Will need to find this later on the web (assuming he has it out there somewhere). Old classroom theories + VW theories offer very interesting insights into engaging students.

Margaret Corbitt up now, got into this with VRML mid-90s. Spends most of her time in active worlds. Good focus - how do you help teachers structure 45-min lessons to bring into the classroom?
Sounds like Margaret has overcome a lot of challenges in implementation. How do you role this out in after-school programs in inner cities? Rooms where students must share computers? Training teachers to use this stuff effectively?
Live demos can be risky at events like this…

Ms. Turkay up, PhD student at Columbia’s teacher college. Created Teacher’s College island in SL. Worked with students at Columbia to work in SL. Students building in SL, exploring teaching possibilities in SL.

Jim B. up.
“This isn’t a Macintosh, this will go downhill…”
Inquiry based, scientific education in mid to late 1980s in Middle School.
This was NOT theoretical, it was real kids, with real teachers, in real classrooms TRYING new stuff.
Built a VW in 1986. Line of kids to use the hypercard VW was blocking access to the card catalog in the library, librarians wanted it out.
FUN is important!
Whyville will be at 25m in 9 months from now…with NO marketing or advertising. impressive.
Whyville has now generated a magazine that flows with the VW, in-use in various large cities on the west coast (LA, san fran)
Ran a contest for Clams (the currency in whyville) to get teachers to sign up to use Whyville. 2-week contest, winner in Texas got 600(!) teachers signed up to use Whyville. Mind boggling…a kid…in 2-weeks…signed up over 600 real teachers to start using whyville in the class.
Whyville going to be in 30 languages soon.
Whyville has an open-door policy in terms of researchers and data. Jim is more than happy to let researchers have full access to ALL the data for Whyville.
Blocking content in schools (blocking the web)
‘last i heard, cars are dangerous. People die in cars. I look outside of schools and they have parking lots. Under this logic, you should close your parking lots. Driver’s ed? Get rid of that too, cars are dangerous’.
This logic has to stop regarding school board’s and administrator’s need to control everything in the classroom. RE: net policy.
Theme of conference is plateau: VWs are on a plateau right now, dunno if we go up or down. Jim says that’s bullshit, we’re FINALLY just getting rid of the crap.
Learning in the VWs: “This is just HOW primates learn!” Schools have just been screwing it up over and over.
Interesting anecdote about kids getting suspended in elementary school. Kids then go home and play in whyville all day (with their friends, who ALSO got suspended). In a strange way, this works out. Kids are still learning (arguably better than in a classroom).

Have a great audience member (sounds like a teacher) giving a great, animated run down of WHY the school model is out of wack in terms of cost structures and delivery. Schools seem to be spending more and more money (costs increase to do things better) vs. learning in virtual worlds where things are heavily frontloaded but get cheaper and cheaper (big investment in design and development, but then costs significantly fade out).

Video games and education are both storyboarded.
This form of education (storyboarded) does not work. It’s more important to put the models and environments in place that allow the exploration and manipulation of environments.

What is the best educational software ever written, by leaps and bounds? Google search. period.

Interesting intro note: D. Hunter continues to reflect that “I’m happy the hype around virtual worlds is finally over”. On one hand I can agree. In this crowd, the hype is definitely over. Maybe even in the news, the hype is dying down. But where I work (IST at Penn State), the hype is still very real. This is good on one hand…people are paying attention and getting excited. But it’s also bad, people think they are just ‘discovering’ this field and some people see Second Life and think that’s the only virtual world out there.

Strange….

Raph had to ban his little brother from UO for griefing (lol)
His little bro also is the one who brought down Iran’s technology infrastructure via Twitter. Raph’s point “I feel insignificant now compared to him. NO ONE is doing anything this interesting in virtual worlds right now”.

VWs as web 3.0? Riiiggghhhttt…if anything, VWs are still web 1.0-like.

Why the web works? People can do whatever the hell they want, massive openness. Unfortunately, VWs do not work this way. Yet. I smell an intro to…

METAPLACE

Goal to be open, decentralized. Raph’s company hosting all metaplace worlds now, but once it goes public the goal is to let anyone host.

Raph’s first build of metaplace was basically a re-build of how the web works.

Killer app. for VWs? Having FUN. All the stuff people are doing in this room is non-significant. Gotta love a speaker who’s willing to ruffle feathers in a room of academics like this.

Metaplace as an ISP. “We’re not sure what people will do with our service”

Metaplace is up to 30,000 worlds. It’s a connection of worlds, with a global chat channel that pulls them all together. All sorts of interesting questions this leads to regarding policy and law: the SAME questions that come up from browsing various web sites.

Metaplace so far:
- lots of ‘dollhousing’, like creating protests of pieces of interactive art.

Academic outrage: “Metaplace makes it too easy to infringe on copyright”. Bullshit, it’s exactly as easy as the web.

Web browsing: no one is on ONE page at a time, we all use tabs. In VWs, you still can’t do this, normally only in one world at a time. Raph is finding that metausers basically do ‘tabbed browsing’ through metaplace, and hang in multiple worlds at the same time.

“Twitter to me, is like guild chat for the internet.
instead of slaying dragons, we’re slaying bookmarks”
These things like twitter are becoming everyday tools we use on the web. Metaplace has the potential to do something similar.
The traditional definition of VWs (persistence, multi-user, etc) start to break down when looking at Metaplace, b/c it’s a hell of a lot like the web.

“If vws are going to be relevant, what are we going to have to leave behind to get there?” in terms of how we currently think about VWs.

Overall a good talk. Raph’s always has an interesting take on things and provides animated talks.

I tend to take notes in my blog at conferences. It primarily gives me a way to capture some of the more interesting things I learn at conferences in a chronological order, plus it is searchable and databased so I can revisit this in years to come when I inevitably find myself thinking “What was that thing Dan Hunter said in the closing of day 1 that is directly applicable to the grant proposal I’m working on right now?”.

So the series of posts yesterday and more to come today are rough notes, meant primarily to keep track of my thoughts so I can reflect later but also to share with colleagues who could not make it here. I hope some of these strings of text make sense.

Dispel myths that seem to be held by the graybeards:
- majority of us are not fighting with our supervisor about the legitimacy of using games
- many of us are exploring things other than the traditional, tenure track research positions

Seems to be a contradictory theme about “what would I do if I had to go back to grad school and be my own grad student?”
Do something you’re passionate about vs. do something strategic that will yield results for your goals (publishing, big $$$, whatever your goals appear to be.)

How rules and design of virtual worlds translate to practice. Practice forms due to rules, stemming from design. Lots of different dynamics and unexplored relationships.

Find journals that turn around articles FAST! Write, write write. Blogs, journals, everything and everyone that will help get your ideas out.

When everyone agrees with your ideas and praises them…you might not be on the right track in an interdisciplinary space. In many cases, you WANT people to jump up and question what you’re doing.

We still don’t really comprehend the virtual. People calling things “real vs. virtual” are wrong. Physical world vs. virtual world makes more sense because everything is real, including the virtual worlds.

The virtual worlds ‘domain’ should never be your home field. It should be something that you relate your home field (psych, anthro, law, etc.) to.

D. Hunter and T. Burke working on book: commons themes across virtual worlds with things like guilds and institutions, real money transactions, etc.

Things aren’t really changing that fast…people writing about MUDs and other, similar environments for years.
- we just have VERY short attention spans

Need to build collegiality - be happy similar research is going on and get to know those people.

Publishing - start by publishing in very broad, general journals. It will help you drive into more specific journals later.

Be clear about what you are trying to do:
Descriptive vs. prescriptive
“Is” vs. “ought to”
Quantitative. vs. qualitative

Research Creator - classification for funding agencies in Canada. Great idea (future to use this as creation process to count for things like tenure and promotion)

Always start with your home discipline when looking for jobs. So for instance, instructional designer with a focus on games. At this point it’s too difficult and risky to lead with games or games studies.

Game industry rep: “You have a PhD? PhDs don’t work in our industry (or at least none have yet!)”

Lot’s of great thinking outside my specific field. Seems to be LOTS of qualitative focused studies focusing on politics, governance, intimacy, work, play, consumerism, gender, identity, and much more.

I find myself in the minority in terms of my focus: design, development & implementation phases of USING these for learning and instruction. I consider that a ‘front-loaded’ focus. I get the impression many people here are more ‘back-focused’…in essence, very scholarly research that emerged AFTER observing or experiencing things in VWs.

BioWare - 3 classifications of gamers
- casual
- serious
- hardcore
The casual crowd is actually generating 90% of the revenue, but only spending 5-10 bucs a year. Ads, ads, ads…

Not enough research on video and/or audio pleasures in games. This is an example of something staring us in the face as researchers, but we kind of force ourselves into (supposedly) deeper, more meaningful themes.

Need to be able to extrapolate our research OUT OF virtual worlds. Instead of starting your description of your research with “I look at X inside world of warcraft…” it should be “hey, I found this interesting theme within organizational collaboration that should be explored more to see if it is generalizable in the field, etc…”

What’s the over/under of each speaker mentioning world of warcraft? This comes up at least every other time someone talks or adds an idea. Both good and bad, as it’s sometimes being used as a non-example.

Kind of an emerging issue with VW research (now that there are SOOOO many): people seem to be centered on SPECIFIC VW research (WoW, EQ, etc) but not enough research spanning multiple VWs. The players of many of these VWs migrate, would be a good idea to capture things like this across VWs.
- BUT…you may not be able to get as much depth by doing this. If you’re focusing, for instance, on high-end raiding in WoW you might not want to stay confined to that space to gain the best understanding possible.

Methodologically speaking, we sometimes make our problems out to be unique that no one has encountered before when we study VWs. This is BS. It’s VERY rare to be in this situation. Example: how do we, from a methods standpoint, caputre the uniqueness of 3D motion and how that impacts our research? People have studied TV and broadcasting for a LONG time, they have answers to our method problems. We have to get our heads out of the VW hole in the ground and learn methods from other disciplines.

Interesting graduate study research: student’s committee was behind gay and lesbian Indonesian studies to a degree, but proposed research in SL immediately got dismissed by committee as non-relevant.

VW researchers all over the map in many ways:
- Disciplines
- Audiences

Interesting thought from Bart Simon “What if we, at the Games and Culture journal, put a moratorium on ALL articles dealing with WoW and SL”.

With Thomas Malaby and Bart Simon as ‘graybeards’ leading the panel

Studies:
1. High-end raiding guilds, focused on raiding baselines for getting into it.

2. Creating and studying a web-based game to focus on technology governance policy.

3. WoW ethnography on “what does it mean to be a successful WoW player?”.

4. Intimacy in WoW - premise “WoW is actually boring by itself, it takes meaningful, intimate interactions to make and keep the game interesting”.

5. Consumption patterns in SL - who is buying in SL, what are the patterns? Turns out the majority of SL players (at least in this study) fall into the “freebie-cheap” consumption patterns in SL.

6. Politics and games

7. Study of 3D learning in Queenlands, Australia. Using SL and Exit Reality VWs to leverage in various educatinal and learning contexts. Check out Terra Incognita island.

WoW Research - VASTLY different simply due to level caps and the game changing
- this is VERY hard to put a finger on because things are changing SO fast in these environments. Makes research tough.

How do you historically put things into perspective for a place like WoW? Like a bank of anecdotal memories. Examples: Deviate fish fear through a BWL gate, kiting bosses to cities, the plague, etc.
How do you capture player’s personal histories of anecdotes? Your personal narrative within WoW?

Why compare WoW to workplace? Ever since the dot.com boom (and subequent bust) brought a very game-like, playful attitude to the workplace. Comparing WoW guilds (or other guilds from VWs) WHY is this interesting? Huge stress from Bart on WHY? WHY is your question important? WHY should people care? HOW will this impact organizations or entities in your specific area and related areas?

Shift of focus from GAMES and the experiences within them to what happens OUTSIDE the game environment that also provides interesting stories and experiences. Sites? Friendships? Intimacy?

Turn ‘that which is obvious’ back into ‘why is this interesting’? WoW and SL have been done…ad nausea. If you’re in these spaces, make it interesting, NOT obvious.

I’m at the State of Play 2009 graduate symposium today which is shaping up to be an interesting experience. It appears they are looking to do an ARG of sorts, but I’m not sure it starts until tomorrow at the conference proper.

I really didn’t get much time to research the conference before attending, but I was happy to see that Raph Koster is keynoting tomorrow, likely talking about Meta Place. I’ve had a beta account for a long time for Meta Place but only logged about 5 hours or so total. Interesting idea for a virtual world, curious to see how it will play out.

I’ll try and get some things posted here over the next couple days about some of the sessions. Not sure how much twitter will be utilized here, but a few people are starting to post things under the #sop09 hash.

I’m presenting tomorrow at the Drexel Online Learning Conference. The talk will focus on my experiences last semester teaching IST 110: Information, People and Technology. This post is primarily to support the talk with additional resources.

IST 110 Syllabus
Contains:

• Link to the course blog
• A list of all the assignments with links to the PDFs (feel free to use these assignments if you’d like, or email me for a copy of the Word document if you’d like to edit)
• The grading structure of the course

Slides from today’s talk are online in PDF format. Nice to be back around IIT alums and other folks doing excellent work in various fields. It felt a little strange at first being an academic talking to a corporate audience, but several folks mentioned that their organization is looking into Second Life, and the talk helped clarify a lot of the issues they are working through.