Virtual Worlds (VWs) are not new and have been around at least since the 70's in the form of text based virtual worlds, aka MUDs and MOOs. I experienced a strong sense of immersion in those massively multi-user, collaborative virtual environments in the early 90's ... they were addictive. In fact, that addictive, immersive experience kept me away from the current visually, aurally and vocally rich VWs, such as Second Life, as I saw them as massive in another sense ... my time! However, colleagues with edu non-profits such as the New Media Consortium and Educause dragged me in. It has been a time consumer but not a time waster, so right now I still have no regrets.
I remember my first trip into Second Life, the orientation was pretty straight forward and I raced through it. However, once I got 'in-world' and someone dragged me over to the New Media Consortium's island, I started to feel quite disoriented. It felt very akin to being in another country where I could not speak or read the language. I not only had to learn the 'language' of the software interface but also had to learn the 'geography' of the space. And once I got to meet people, I had to learn the norms of communication. It was all pretty exciting and very immersive from the start. The visual element coupled with the aural element of ambient sounds (there was no voice chat at the time) impacted on my perception of the environment and on my behaviour in it. In terms of communication with other people (avatars), I was able to transfer quite a lot from my MOO, text-based virtual world, experiences. So perhaps more akin to me travelling from UK to say Italy, whereas for others it might have been more akin to travelling from UK to China! I did a lot of travel exploring on my own in Second Life for a number of weeks (once or twice a week), as I wanted to get a feel for these strange lands and the different people and cultures within them. These kept expanding and changing, so 18 months later I still like to spend some time each week finding new islands and people. For the last 14 months, Second Life has become a key part of my self-directed professional development and I have been co-facilitating fortnightly, informal teacher development sessions in Second Life since Aug 06. If you'd like to know about these, all the sessions have been blogged and are also on a wiki.
From these experiences, immersion in virtual worlds, at least for me, comes in a number of ways. Obviously the interaction with people and cultures from all over the world, as well as those unique to VWs such as furies, vampires, neckos, post-apocalyptics and more is one key area of immersion. But there is also immersion from the visual and aural elements of the environment. And there is an even stronger feeling of immersion when the visual, the aural and the interactive, shared experience with others occurs at live performance events, such as music concerts and performance art that can only exist in a 3D world . One example of such a performance is that directed by physical and virtual world artist, DC Spensley (aka DanCoyote Antonelli) - see the video trailer below of the latest performance premiered earlier this week.
However, I think there is an even stronger element of immersion than these ones though in VW environments, and which is connected strongly to identity and learning to be and become. In terms of learning, I see learning in VWs as having strong connections and parallels with active learning pedagogies such as inquiry-based learning (often called discovery learning in the US) and problem-based learning, where students' identities expand as they learn to become a biologist or a civil engineer or a marketing professional or an ethnographer. In virtual worlds, we can become part of a myriad of different communities and cultures (just as we do in the physical world) and our learning world is expanded to include the virtual. And we learn to weave these communities into our physical world communities; creating our learning trajectories through them (see Etienne Wenger's Learning for a Small Planet).
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.