UberNoggin

Appalachian State faculty (Stephen Bronack and Richard Riedl) presented along with James Witte from Clemson about their joint project called “Carolina Virtual World Consortium” in which the two schools have joined forces to explore many different virtual world spaces for use in education both at Clemson and at Appalachian State.

Qwaq was demonstrated (it’s based on Croquet) which has features like importing Sketchup designs, live web site viewing on objects in world, as well as combining video feeds onto avatars. It looks very useful and may overcome some of the issues that folks might have with Second Life on campus (lower bandwidth and hardware requirements, flatter learning curve).

Witte then went on to discuss the research potential of virtual worlds and the consortium’s hope to begin researching pedagogical, social science research perspective to the project. Keep an eye on Witte and Clemson. Looks like they’ll be doing some great research via an Efficacy Trials and Implementation Studies approach. They intend to stay platform neutral which is awesome!

Factors they’ll consider in designing researchto measure efficacy trials and implementation studies:

• specification of research questions
• comparison groups
• sampling
• measures of mediating and moderating variables
• dependent measures
• data analysis

The audience asked questions about the perception and reaction of using “game-like” spaces on campus. Both speakers reflected that they’d had more hesitance from students than faculty or administration.

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