Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
The audio recording for the session described below can be found here.
Please note that the actual session begins at about the 4:00 minute mark.
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Just a little self-promotion for a talk I’m giving tomorrow. Here’s the description and the instructions for watching the session online through Breeze. The online session is open to the public.
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To register, go to http://www.indiana.edu/~tltc/ and click the Technology Integration Series (TIS) link. For those of you who wish to attend remotely, you can go to http://breeze.iu.edu/tltcgames/ and log in as a guest. Remote attendees will be able to interact via chat. A description of the session follows.
Abstract: Today there are over 150 virtual worlds open to users. From Webkins to World of Warcraft, IMVU to Second Life, there are a wide variety of virtual worlds with millions of users. However, for researchers and educators, there are important small differences between these spaces that make some more valuable than others. In this presentation Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins will share the results of a study including 75 virtual worlds and their mechanics. Participants will learn about common trends in virtual world development as well as interesting spaces where no virtual worlds exist.
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Hi Sarah– I just attended your presentation, and learned a lot. I was the guy who made the crack about Hobbes. But seriously, I wonder if there are political scientists/theorists out there who have thought to see WoW and other games like it as a simulation of “the state of nature.” If so, Hobbes’ theory doesn’t seem to be doing that well.
I’m an English prof here at IU, and have been thinking a lot about “play” in its vast intricate reach. Huizinga: “Play is older than culture.” And the stimergic stuff today was very thought-provoking about a potential important difference between play and game, in the virtual world: games “start over” and games “end,” in some kind of way, so they cannot really be stimergic–they are two rigidly rule-bound. Second Life, by contrast, is “play.” (btw, this is all without first-hand experience of playing these games, though I think I am going to have to change that as regards Second Life). So, my interests were twofold today: one was my own thinking, and the other was more about improving the use of virtual technologies for the life of my department, its teaching and its communal intellectual life.
So, congrats on getting the diss done. What kind of job are you hoping to land–I mean in what kind of department?
Thanks for being so inviting–I would not normally have written someone after a presentation like this one, but I really liked it and you seemed ready to receive a note, so here it is!
Jonathan Elmer
I too found it extremely useful. I’m going to look more closely at your facets as I revisit my diss chapters, since “things have changed” since I drafted the proposal. This is a very much needed thinking framework useful to any discipline. But since mine is education, I’m particularly interested in having frameworks to help educators muddle through it all.
I find mine one of the few critical voices speaking up about the educational relevance of virtual worlds, well for the time being, it’s all about SL. I’m convinced learning occurs, as Steinkuehler, Black and Kafai and others have suggested and I’ve experienced. However, I’m unconvinced that students in structured, academic learning contexts acquire the competencies those courses propose to develop because the course takes place in SL.
Most college level instructors have little to no pedagogical or instructional design training. Teaching is a kind of cottage industry, all fine and good, but as we start working with sophisticated systems, it’s no longer solely about a blackboard, handouts and students all from the same neigborhood. The endeavor of teaching in 2009 is wildly complex.
Learning isn’t only about students saying they learned or being engaged. It’s also about measuring their achievements and the degree to which course activities and assignments align with clearly stated learning outcomes. We must ask ourselves extremely pointed questions about what we want students to be able to do as a result of our course at the same time we’re considering the tools they have at their disposal.
Our history is spotted with experimental approaches to teaching that have failed to improve students’ learning. There’s in fact evidence suggesting that unsound practice has a more negative effect on lower performing students than on average or better performing students.
And it’s widely known that American high school and undergraduate students rank fairly poorly when compared with students from comparable wealthy nations.
So where am I going with all this? Educational research: mapping, defining, describing, vetting, assessing. It’s all needed.
Suzanne: I couldn’t agree with you more. My hope is that the facets will give educators handy terms with which to describe the kind of worlds they need to test new pedagogical approaches and to better understand and research the way people casually learn in online games and social worlds.
Sarah
Sarah,
Yes!! That’s why I’m so excited about it. It opens up another level of conversation.