This is an alphabetical list of all the papers that have been presented to the League of Worlds conferences. Those that are available for viewing or downloading are linked by their titles to the relevant page.
Please note, that we have not counted a or an or the when arranging the titles alphabetically.
alphabetically by title
Administrative Commitment to Virtual Worlds: Roma Angel, Appalachian State University, United States
Crouching students, hidden resources: designing and implementing a virtual library: Geri Purpur, Appalachian State University, United States
In May 2004, the Appalachian State University (ASU) Distance Learning Library Services team and faculty members from the Instructional Technology program began collaborating on a virtual library located in the AppEdTech online virtual community. AppEdTech provided a perfect venue for us to afford easy access to our resources and services to faculty and off-campus students in the Instructional Technology/Computers program. Through a joint effort, the library was designed and e-resources were added. The future direction and success of the library depends on: a) the interaction between librarians and students via new technologies, b) increased access to web-based resources (books, journals, databases), c) evolution of the AppEdTech virtual community, d) continued collaboration between distance learning librarians and faculty members and e) responding to feedback from students enrolled in the program.
Effective work in 3D/virtual world environments requires thoughtful attention to conceptualization. Five faculty members who teach in or are developing virtual world teaching environments will discuss the influence of a college of education’s social constructivist framework on their creation and revision of a these worlds. As well, faculty members will reflect upon their own teaching and student learning goals and outline how these principles mesh or conflict with 3D teaching environments. Successes and limitations will be addressed along with five major principles from the conceptual framework document that guide the work: (1) learning occurs through participation in a Community of Practice; (2) knowledge is socially constructed and learning is social within the Community of Practice; (3) learners proceed through stages of development from Noivce to Expert under the guidance of more experienced and knowledgeable mentors in the Community of Practice; (4) an identifiable knowledge base that is both general in nature and specific to program areas emerges from the Community of Practice; and (5) all members of the Community of Practice develop a common set of dispositions that reflect the Community of Practice’s attitudes, beliefs, and values.
In the Beginning…The Genesis of a Virtual World: Robert Sanders, Appalachian State University, United States
Constructing a virtual world requires certain technical skills and the ability to make difficult decisions regarding how the world will look and feel. However, the most difficult aspect of building a virtual world has less to do with the building of the virtual spaces and more to do the conceptualization of how teaching and learning will occur in this new type of environment. This paper examines the process of planning a virtual learning world by focusing on the key design questions that need to be asked prior to building virtual instructional spaces.
This paper looks at the hidden economic underbelly of the increasingly popular online virtual worlds. There are companies establishing real-world sweatshops designed to produce virtual goods that can be sold at vast, and very real, profits.
As an innovative approach to teaching the novel, web-based role-playing simulations in the literature classroom engage students by placing them directly into the conflict of the story, thus increasing motivation. The story, then, comes alive as students interact with one another via their personas. Through play, students gain insight into character portrayal by understanding the inherent motivation of characters to recognize real life psychological and sociological conditions of these otherwise fictional entities. Students benefit by acquiring a deeper understanding of character, theme, language and historical perspective.
Insights gained from the evaluation of an on-line role-play simulation conducted with final year teacher trainees, highlighted the benefits and challenges of E-learning as a tool to promote critical thinking in relation to decision-making. The simulation titled A Different Lunch facilitated the creation of an interactive social environment containing leadership challenges for early childhood practitioners. By stepping into the roles of key stakeholders, students were required to respond to an incident at a fictional child-care centre.
This paper reflects on a two-time experiment in online learning: a web-based Role Play Simulation (RPS) on Venezuela, run during a two-week Masters Foundation course, and soon to be used as part of a new Masters on Human Rights, Development and Social Justice at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague. Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote is an acknowledged favourite of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (as well as Castro and Sub-Commandante Marcos). Chavez warns his enemies that “they will not be able to do away with the dreams of this people, who are defending (the Republic)…with their souls…even with their own lives”(Chavez, 2003: 19). Given the abortive 2002 coup against Chavez, backed by the US, it is easy to understand how the tiniest, apparently frivolous issues might become symbolically important. Character, script and actions of mistrust emerged as powerful vectors of agency for students engaged in the RBS, finding expression in a range of cooperative and conflictual strategies adopted by players with great creativity. The parallels between the unreality in Don Quixote and the powerful constructed realities of the simulation are brought out in the paper, which is a think-piece that does not seek to come to any hard and fast conclusions.
This position paper compares how the professional profile of students in higher education can be built in a virtual environment and in a traditional (“physical”) classroom, with the background on basic principles of pedagogy. The paper also looks at how the traditional classroom teaching can be effectively adapted to the virtual classroom. It also looks at the role of the teacher in a virtual environment compared to the physical classroom environment. This can be viewed from two different aspects: the class as a community that works together and the student working individually.
This paper critically discusses and demonstrates the design and creation of a ‘virtual museum’ to educate and explore the heritage of Western Australian architecture. In building a virtual museum, we quite literally built on the metaphorical construct of an architecture that has long been applied to the structuring of digital information systems and simulated worlds.
This virtual museum, now published as a CD-Rom and widely distributed to the general public and schools, simulates an institution akin to the nineteenth century museum that collects together and interprets architectural ideas, images, maps and artefacts of buildings and places that are now significantly altered or demolished.
We are now very familiar with arguments that digital media has revolutionised the representation of information. Hypertext and multimedia techniques that enable the integration of text, sound and images within a single screen, offer, in principle, innovative ways of constructing and presenting histories. However, it seems that many specific historical and aesthetic issues relating to the creation of multimedia histories are yet to be fully raised or examined.
In this paper I reflect on some of the potentials and drawbacks of creating multimedia histories through our experience of creating a CD-ROM titled Visualising the Architecture of Federation.1 I will discuss why we chose the CD-ROM format, and walk through the metaphor that structured the CD-ROM narrative and imagery. Following this, questions will be posed as to how the visual, non-linear constructs of multimedia and hypertext may be engaged without losing comprehension or meaning of material. I will also raise particular considerations about the creation of a visual digital-based architectural history, and why it may offer more than a printed book on the same subject
This paper presents research and illuminations for discussion from a study which explores the intuitive resonances between drama education, game play and rich immersive environments. In particular, it seeks to illuminate and clarify whether the affordances of virtual game worlds and those of dramatic worlds created through the structures and strategies of drama education can work together to inspire new world views.In drama education, the concept of playing and learning is exploited through development of dramatic worlds where participants draw on their actual world knowledge to create unique experiences. Virtual environments temptingly offer a third world where playing to learn might be deepened.This sub-study exploits a drama experience called ‘History’s Purchased Page’ which explores the mystery of who actually climbed Everest (an activity taken from O’Toole and Dunn, 2002, pp. 120-131). Within this experience the children take on the role of historians and game designers who are employed by a fictitious company to design interactive software that offers learning experiences around the conquering of Everest. A key learning outcome of this experience is that the participants start to problematise the nature of historical “truth” through active engagement in a dramatic world that uses web based media, images and recounts to support immersion in the event.
This feasibility stage of the study sought to understand what might happen if the “being there” of drama is combined with the “being there” of a persistent world. The research posed two key questions:
1. Would the experience be more engaging if the students were also given opportunities to enter a parallel persistent on-line world capable of generating rich visualisations of the Everest context and the chance to deepen their immersion via avatar presence and exploration opportunities – opportunities to not only “see” the Everest world but also “act” within it?
2. How does this immersion in the virtual world affect the children’s engagement in the dramatic world, especially with regard to the tensions that usually drive dramatic worlds - including the all important tension of metaxis [defined as the “the state of belonging completely and simultaneously to two different autonomous worlds” (Boal, 1995, p. 43)].
This paper will report on the initial findings of this project, focusing on dramatic tension and its relevance as a framework for understanding what happens when dramatic, virtual and actual worlds collide.
The course makes use of a semester-long text-based simulative construct to provide an internal and external student cohort with appropriate content and educational process supported via a blended-learning model for internal students and an online model for external students. Internal students are also able to access the electronic material as an adjunct to their lectures and workshops. External students are supported through a website providing resource material including summaries of lectures and a Flash based Learning Object which holds all Symposium (workshop) information.A scoping tool for eliciting and specifying pedagogical needs for construction of simulations (including elicitation and description of the particular educational environment) was developed as a precursor to content development and will be described within this paper.For the purpose of clarifying the pedagogy and learning opportunities discussed in this paper we need to clarify the distinction between ‘simulation’ and that of a ‘simulative construct’. Specifically it is recognised that while a text based approach does facilitate the development of ‘role-play’ it is not an immersive simulation.In this context the student experience is largely ‘rule-play’ i.e. rules and steps are defined which allow the student to proceed. This could be considered in some ways similar to the manner in which software algorithms define the way in which people can operate within a virtual environment i.e. the ‘rules’ which define the ‘structure’ for the virtual environment.Roni Linser & Albert Ip argue that a ‘…simulation is a …artificial environment in which a particular set of conditions is created in order to study or experience something that exists or could exist in reality’
(http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw04/papers/refereed/ip/paper.html Accessed June 2005).In this context then the Symposium text content provides the framework for ‘simulation’… however as some elements normally associated with simulation do not exist we prefer to define it as a ‘simulative construct’ and thus use that terminology throughout this paper.