Wonderland 0.4 - Demo video

What to notice
It’s helpful to understand that Wonderland has been envisioned as a platform for working/collaboration across distance. It provides a more immersive experience than you could achieve with current available technologies such as video and phone conferencing, web-conferencing and chats.

Two things to consider in a virtual environment are its capacity to facilitate users achieving specific tasks alone and together and its effectiveness at compensating for the missing sensory and contextual information we take for granted when we’re face to face.

The first point is not difficult to address. We call it task analysis, which means you break down a task into small components (sub-tasks) in order to understand how to design learning it. It gets tricky when you must also consider sensory and contextual information needed. We easily recognize the barriers to learning created by a classroom with fixed seating, inadequate lighting or instructional equipment, the same holds true in a virtual environment. Most of use use classrooms, we don’t build them. And we may walk into a technologically sophisticated room like our Learning Research Studio and have to learn how to use it technically and pedagogically.

So lots of things to think about.

Watch this video and you’ll see how Wonderland developers are designing for accomplishing specific tasks as well as compensating for missing sensory and contextual information. For example, when an avatar is speaking his body gestures and his name title (above his head) pulsates. This facilitates verbal communication and compensates for some of the visual information we have when we talk to people face to face. What else?

Suzanne

Activeworlds or Wonderland? Hmmm?

As we’re wading in the Activeworlds waters, deciding how we’re going to get in, I’m kind of wondering whether we should also (or instead) get into Wonderland a bit more. I’m connected to their and the Media Grid’s conversations, but we’re also looking at this with new eyes, with building some capacity to support a world in the future.

It’s really and apples and oranges thing, once I actually think it through. But the decision to allocate resources to one or the other is based (obviously) on its ROI.  There’s no obvious choice, as there was last year with SL.

Decisions, decisions

Where has all the knowledge gone? Activeworlds circa 1999

I began getting a sense of the bigger picture, let’s say the beyond Second Life view, of virtual worlds doing my dissertation lit review. Now that we’re actively looking into AW, I’ve come across a mountain of information. Projects, research, people, consortiums, conferences, all involved in this stuff in the late 90s, early  2000s.

I started on this page of educational resources for AW. Drilling through to this Vlearn 3D, and transcripts from roundtables at AWEDU, to a paper entitled, “3D Virtual Worlds and Learning: An Analysis of the Impact of Design Affordances and Limitations in Active Worlds, blaxxun interactive, and OnLive! Traveler; and A Study of the Implementation of Active Worlds for Formal and Informal Education.

Moral of the Post: Where has all the knowledge gone?

First person/Mouse View and designing space

In virtual environments you have a first person view. It’s when your viewpoint is as it is in real life, through your (avatar’s) eyes. It provides a more visually immersive experience than when you’re view is third person, or over your avatar’s shoulder.
In Second Life, it’s called mouseview and it’s a rather visually awkward experience. (I should take a mini survey of SLers, but my guess is that the majority use 3rd person view most of the time.) Your field of vision is better. The reason SL mouseview is awkward is because your field of vision is at about 25%; you have no peripheral vision to speak of.

In  Project Wonderland, you can adjust your field of vision and add peripheral vision to your 1st person view.  What a noticeable difference that makes, all of a sudden being in the 1st person, feels like it does in the physical world.

But as I was walking around with my improved 1st person view, I still had trouble navigating the space, although it’s incredible unbuilt. I realized the absence of the typical markers we rely in actual space to navigate our way around, everything from walkways, to doors, to signposts, to familiar structures. I’ve notices this in SL on and off, the degree to which a space has been designed for way finding, for easy navigation and understanding what the space is for. Just some of the issues that come up when we begin designing learning in such a space.

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

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.

What Exactly Is A Virtual World?

Pop quiz: What is a Virtual World?

a) A shared space
b) Avatar-based chat room
c) 3D collaborative experience
d) All of the above
e) Or something else?

With new Virtual Worlds being announced almost weekly, the question bears asking.

The Virtual Worlds Review, for example, a pioneering effort in describing the development of Virtual Worlds, suggests six features common to all Virtual Worlds:

  1. Shared Space: the world allows many users to participate at once.
  2. Graphical User Interface: the world depicts space visually, ranging in style from 2D “cartoon” imagery to more immersive 3D environments.
  3. Immediacy: interaction takes place in real time.
  4. Interactivity: the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content.
  5. Persistence: the world’s existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in.
  6. Socialization/Community: the world allows and encourages the formation of in-world social groups like teams, guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, etc.

However, with more companies and institutions jumping on the VW bandwagon, I begin to wonder if the term is becoming more broadly defined.

Case in point: Weblin.

The Weblin website describes their virtual world as follows:

Weblin “turns the web into a virtual world. Your personalized weblin avatar surfs the web with you, enabling you to see friends and meet new ones on the same site as you. Weblins can chat, move, show emotion, visit lounges, and trade stuff with other weblins.”

Wow! The whole web! Sounds interesting, yes? I thought so and quickly created a weblin for myself. I chose my avatar and decided to surf the web right away.

So.. IS Weblin a Virtual World? Or maybe Virtual World lite? Yes, it allows a shared social space, communication, immediacy. However, is it persistent? Does it allow any level of meaningful user customized content? Not really.

Why is this important? For a couple of years now, educators have been using Second LIfe as the standard by which to evaluate instruction and learning in a virtual world. But not all Virtual Worlds ARE Second Life. They each have unique capabilities and characteristics that must be carefully evaluated.

Does this make Weblin and other platforms “bad”? No. But it does make them different. And a wise educator will take the time to evaluate those differences in light of what s/he is attempting to accomplish with his/her students - and then make the most appropriate choice.

Is Second Life an elaborate chatroom?

At its base it more or less is. I’ve gleaned this sentiment from different conversations in the metaverse, mostly blogs and threads, often from people who are long time inhabitants of the web as a social space, as well as some gamers who are derisive of its ungameness.

One comparison is that to MOOs, texted-based synchronous environments, where users built and experienced the space with text-based commands and descriptions, such as “Go through the door labeled hall,”  “You are in an expansive hall lined with flickering sconces . . .” MOOs were more popular with techier types than the average person in the 90s.

Visually based chatrooms, an extension of IRCs, grew in popularity in the later 90s and early 2000s, and environments such as Active Worlds and There, count among them. Both are 3D and are often compared to Second Life.

From the standpoint of education and as an educational technology, SL is little more than an elaborate chatroom for most people. When you deconstruct SL in terms of its affordances as an educational technology that is also situated in an institutional context, it quickly loses value as compared with other educational technologies.

There are other things to do in Second Life besides chat, but let’s try to understand what they are, and how and why they fit into a learning endeavor. As Stephen Downes has pointed out, SL mirrors the real world and as a result affords the same kinds of educational approaches we use in the real world. I’ve observed this too quite early on and as a result have spent little SL time involved with the educational community.

I hope to elaborate on these issues in a way that helps faculty understand this domain and its relevance for teaching and learning.

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