What’s a virtual world & how should we pay attention to them?

Posted on June 11, 2008 
Filed under Helpful, Reflections, Trends

Thanks Cathy! Great summary. I was going to comment, but since I can post, :) I thought I’d do that and extend the discussion.

I think we need to refine the term “virtual world” for our audience and context and extend the conversation to include cultural, organizational and pedagogical perspectives.

Improving student learning is our main goal and it’s easy as technologists, to take a somewhat instrumentalist approach to achieving that.

Here are my In-a-nutshell attempts at refining the notion of virtual worlds for our audience and context.
 Cultural: Children are growing up playing in virtual playgrounds like Habbo, Neopets, Club Penguin,etc. Read more from BBC Tens of millions of adults spend an estimated 10-20 (See footnotes) average hours per week in MMOGs and commercially available virtual worlds. The majority are white and middle class. These are not neither culturally nor socially neutral locations of play. They have emerging cultures of their own. In adult environments, there are legacy cultural mores and practices from MUDs, chatrooms, instant messaging and online communities.

Organizational: At the organizational level, these should be considered first as educational technologies. As a public institution we have students, faculty and staff from diverse cultural, SESs and technological backgrounds. We make decisions about human and technological resources to support learning.

Pedagogical: Tools are pedagogical means not ends. At the same time, there is currently more evidence of learning through play, than there is of learning through pedagogy in these environments.  I DO believe people learn in them. The first questions are what, how and why. The second are: are faculty ready to change  what they do, how and why.

1 Ortiz dxe Gortari, A. (2007, September). Second life survey: User profile for psychological engagement & gambling. Paper presented at The Virtual 2007 Conference: Interaction, Stockholm, Sweden.

2 Yee, N. (2006b, June). The demographics, motivations, and derived experiences of users of massively multi-user online graphical environments.
Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, 15(3) 309-329.

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