by Robert L. Sanders

I’ve often wondered what it must have been like “In the beginning.” Imagine the difficulty in creating land and sea, mountains and valleys, birds and bees, and plants and trees. It’s no wonder God chose to rest on the seventh day! The most important and difficult decision regarding the creation of the world must have involved the creation of human beings and granting them the freedom to explore, harvest, and tame all that was around them. I have recently had the opportunity to get a glimpse of what this challenging undertaking must have been like as I have begun the planning process to create my own world, albeit a virtual world. While the world I plan to create will be a much more less complex world than our own “real world,” I have already confronted many questions and challenges that must be similar to those same questions and challenges faced so many eons ago.

The Instructional Technology faculty at Appalachian State University has been building 3D virtual worlds for the past several years. Due to recent interest from others, the Leadership and Educational Studies Department, which houses the IT program along with three other graduate programs, has committed to and invested in the necessary hardware, software, and technical support to expand these virtual worlds in terms of size (virtual acreage), number (of “worlds” and “population”), and faculty involvement. As a result, I am about to be “deeded” my own virtual plot to design and create for several of the courses I teach in the Library Science program. In the beginning, there will be nothing… no places to go or things to do. It will be my responsibility to design and create everything that will exist in this new world. I understand from talking and observing my instructional technology colleagues that there is some skill involved in the actual building of the virtual spaces in which my students will eventually interact and learn. However, it is not in the construction process that I am most anxious. As with any other technology I have used and mastered, I suspect that I will eventually learn how to build walls and roofs, install landscaping, and develop a system of roads and paths to facilitate the teaching and learning that will occur. Rather, I am most anxious about facing the more perplexing, philosophical, and theoretical questions I expect to have to answer; questions like, “What should teaching and learning look like in this world? How is teaching and learning different in this new environment similar to and different from other online environments I’ve used in the past?” and finally, “How can our college’s social constructivist conceptual framework inform and guide my design of this new virtual teaching and learning environment?”

I subscribe to a more constructivist, holistic, exploratory approach to teaching and learning than to other more directed, didactic approaches. While this approach is now second nature to me after many years of teaching in a face-to-face environment, it admittedly becomes more challenging in an online environment in which teaching and learning is mediated by the technologies I choose to use. I have often blamed the design of the learning management systems and other online tools I’ve been provided for some of these challenges, arguing that the tools provided were designed with a more traditional behaviorist approach in mind. It’s been my experience that these tools tend to support a more linear, sequential style of teaching and learning, in which a unit or course would consist of discrete lessons for the students to complete and master before moving on to the next. Computergraded quizzes and tests, generally better at testing the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, are built into these systems to make sure the students are keeping up with the work and comprehending what they are doing. I have resisted using these popular learning management systems the way they were intended and have opted out of utilizing some of the more traditional features they offer. I do take full advantage of the communication and collaboration tools they provide, and have experimented with various ways to organize and share content, resources, and project assignments that are more in line with my social constructivist framework. However, despite my attempts, I still feel that students are not truly engaged in my online courses they way I would like them to be and believe that there may be “better” tools available to create the type of virtual constructivist learning environment that I envision. It is my hope that as I now abandon these more traditional learning management systems and their inherent behaviorist designs and move toward the use of new tools to design and create a 3D virtual world, that I will no longer be limited by technologies designed with for an approach to teaching and learning that is diametrically opposed to what I believe about learning. However, I have to wonder if I will find myself designing a course that is still more traditional and teacher-centric than the engaging, interactive, and immersive world of discovery in which I believe, even though I may now have the tools to build what I want. That question remains to be answered and will perhaps be the topic of a future paper. Until then, all I can do is think, reflect, read, plan, design, think some more, and build. Along the way, I will naturally encounter many challenges and confront many questions having to do with what teaching and learning looks like in this virtual world I am about to create. What follows are some of those questions I have already encountered and some thoughts on how I plan to address these questions as I continue with the design process.

Question 1:

What do I want my students to be able to do? What might teaching and learning look like in this virtual world?

I teach graduate courses in library science to students who intend to work as school media coordinators in K-12 schools across North Carolina. There are specific skills and content knowledge that my students need to have when they take on the role and responsibilities of this position. My course objectives are subsequently aligned with these skills and this knowledge in order to assure that our MLS graduates the best possible candidates for the positions available. How I chose to address these objectives though is entirely up to me and is only limited by my own imagination and the resources available to me. While I consider myself imaginative and creative, I acknowledge that I might be limited in my ability to foresee how new and powerful learning tools might change the way teaching and learning occurs in my courses. However, there are certain behaviors and activities I hope to observe in this unique learning environment for which I am planning.

To begin the process, I must first revisit the Reich College of Education’s conceptual framework, which serves as a guide to guide the teaching and learning that takes place within the college. This framework is based on three assumptions supported by a rich theoretical and research base (Reich College of Education, 2005).

• Learning occurs through participation in a Community of Practice;
• Knowledge is socially constructed and learning is social in nature in a Community of Practice;
• Learners proceed through stages of development from Novice to Expert under the guidance of more experienced and knowledgeable mentors in the Community of Practice;
• An identifiable knowledge base that is both general in nature and also specific to specialties emerges from the Community of Practice;
• All professional educators develop a set of Dispositions reflecting attitudes, beliefs, and values common to the Community of Practice.

These five assumptions have assisted me in my teaching and were, in fact, part of the reason for my accepting a position at Appalachian State University. I have long held these five core beliefs, albeit in a less formalized way. The conceptual framework based on these assumptions goes into great detail on what each of these assumptions means and elaborates on the theory and research identified to support each.

While the conceptual framework was not written for any particular teaching and learning environment, it is likely that most who helped write it had a face-to-face environment in mind. I have attempted to apply these core beliefs into the design of my past online courses but have struggled with the limits the tools put on the social construction of knowledge and the development of communities of practice, in particular. While email, discussion boards, and chat rooms may offer ways for students to communicate and interact, they are typically used to simply recreate the types of interactions that take place in a face-to-face environment. As such, the knowledge that has been shared and the communities that have formed have been similar to what has occurred in my face-toface courses. On one hand, it is reassuring that online courses can be “as good” as a traditional faceto- face course. On the other hand, I believe the power of learning in a virtual world is that teaching and learning can be approached in a completely new and innovative way which empowers students to fully realize the vision of our college’s conceptual framework and inducts them into a true, socially constructed community of practice in which students “proceed through stages from Novice to Expert under the guidance of more experienced and knowledgeable mentors in the community of practice” (Reich College of Education, 2005). This approach implies and even requires a level of collaboration and interconnectedness that I belief is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve in a more traditional distance learning environment. It requires online tools that are designed around the belief that content should be driven by the usefulness of what is learned, needs determined by the students rather than assumed by the instructor or the content delivery system employed, usefulness of the courses should be linked to external value added rather than assumed, and opportunities for learners to interact frequently to build a community of practice (Watkins & Kaufman, 2003).

I have examined virtual worlds that were designed to resemble virtual classrooms in which a student’s avatar would enter a classroom, sit at a desk, and “listen” to a lecture on the topic of the day. These recreations of traditional learning environment are exactly the kind of uninspired examples of how learning technologies can be under utilized. In contrast, Riedl, Tashner, and Bronack (2005) have identified an approach in which students choose their own paths through a series of “hypermazes” that contain information, resources, and discussions linked directly to students questions and experiences generated while exploring the maze. According to these authors, “these areas allow students to move to them and between them in a non-linear fashion according to their needs and interests with timeline for projects, sharing (discussion, brainstorming entries, etc.), establishing a flow for the class” (Riedl, Tashner, & Bronack, 2005).

The differences between these two approaches exist in the philosophy from which the course designers and instructors approach the course. Those who design courses in which students are passive recipients of information approach teaching and learning from a much different theoretical perspective than those who create a learner-driven environment in which student are expected to engage in learning according to their needs and interests. It is the latter of these approaches that I intend to follow in my own design and development of a virtual world for learning. I want my virtual world to be student directed and exploratory in nature. I want students to engage in critical thinking, cross-disciplinary dialogue and activities, and to participate in communities of practice in which students are at times novices and at other time, experts. I want to provide a resource rich environment in which students have access to content available in a variety of media formats (video, still images, audio files, etc.) and make available to them tools to manage and manipulate this content to create, construct, and make meaning from the information. I want to be able to provide all this in a safe and motivating context in which learning is both risk-free and enjoyable, and in which learning takes place through interaction, meaning making, and collaboration with other students in the course. In other words, I want to design a virtual version of a social constructivist classroom that embodies the five assumptions of our conceptual framework.

Question 2:

How might the teaching and learning differ between this world and other learning environments I’ve used in the past? What might students be able to do in this world that they’ve not been able to do before in any other learning environment?

The tools I’ve used in the past to manage and facilitate online courses have been limited. Many learning management systems are designed with features and tools that reflect a more traditional, didactic approach to instruction and seem to reflect more behaviorist, teacher-centric theoretical approach to teaching and learning. These tools have allowed me to create lessons and units in a sequence, and provide a variety of traditional style assessment and evaluation tools to monitor the student’s progress through these activities. The tools provided make it very easy for me to post a lecture (as a text, audio, or video file, or as a PPT presentation) and to provide quizzes and tests to ensure that my students have viewed that lecture, read the required course readings, and completed the assignments. Since this is not the way I view teaching and learning, I have found these tools to be inadequate for designing a course using a more social constructivist approach to which I subscribe. Riedl, Tashner, and Bronack (2005) support these concerns in stating that most online learning looks like traditional face-to-face learning and that there is nothing innovative in the use of the technologies available to us today to create engaging online learning experiences for our students. In most cases then, students end up doing the same things in an online course that they would in a face-toface course. While this may be acceptable for some, I believe it is an unfortunate situation considering the powerful tools that are often available to us as course designers and instructors, especially those tools embedded in the virtual world environment. Not only does a virtual world provide my students and me with 24/7 access to one another, the course material, and the resources needed to meet the course objectives, it also allows for a more immersive, metaphor driven environment that supports and encourages more personal interactions, collaboration, exploration, and discovery. The threedimensionality of the virtual world also incorporates time, distance, and presence as important elements into its design and subsequently uses these elements to provide for more authentic learning opportunities than a flat, linear, online system ever could.

While a 3D virtual world offers many of the same online tools that other, more traditional LMS provide (i.e. chat rooms, discussion board, web pages), the immersive nature and the inherent aspects of time and space have the potential of making the virtual learning environment more engaging and student-centered. Students have a sense of presence as defined by time and distance as a result of their using an avatar to move around within the world. This presence allows for the opportunity to interact with others in the world, not only in formal ways designed within the context of a class activity, but perhaps more importantly, in informal or serendipitous ways as students casually meet others as they move from one space to another. This freedom of movement and the opportunity for both formal and informal interactions with others should not be underestimated. This feature of a virtual learning environment can be utilized in a variety of ways to support and promote several of the assumptions and beliefs of the conceptual framework discussed above, including but not limited to the idea that knowledge is socially constructed and that learning emerges out of a student’s involvement in a community of practice.

The social constructivist approach to teaching and learning is based upon the assumption that students need to work and learn within a community of practice. Fortunately, there is a growing body of research that focuses on the formation of virtual learning communities. While instructor and student work within these communities, each has different roles and responsibilities to ensure the viability of the community. Collins and Berge (2001) suggest that the instructor’s role is to “promote human relationships, affirming and recognizing students’ input; providing opportunities for students to develop a sense of group cohesiveness, maintaining the group as a unit, and in other ways helping members to work together in a mutual cause.” The students, on the other hand, are responsible for “using the guidance [of the instructor] in a meaningful way” and for seeking solutions to real-world problems, asking questions, and critically evaluating their own learning through reflection and dialogue (Palloff & Pratt, 1999).

In this type of virtual collaborative environment, students work together and ideally, with others outside of the course roster, to “generate deeper levels of understanding and critical evaluation of the material under study” through sharing, discussing, providing feedback, and building connections between communities (Palloff & Pratt, 1999). Ultimately, a virtual world can serve as a foundation for a new and innovative approach to teaching and learning in which students become members of a crosscollaborative learning community (Riedl, Tashner, and Bronack, 2005).

Question 3:

Does an instructional design methodology currently exist than can guide my design of the virtual world I want to create?

The Reich College of Education’s Conceptual Framework discussed above can provide some guidance in developing an environment that supports a “social construction of knowledge and the need to develop a community of practice” (Riedl, Tashner, & Bronack, 2005). While this conceptual framework is not an instructional design methodology, the social constructivist theory on which it is based can offer significant guidance in the design and development of a virtual learning and teaching environment. Several other theories and strategies exist that I believe can also provide some guidance in the design of a virtual world. These include research in the area of metaphorical graphical user interface design, microworld learning environments, and Cyrs’ IMPPACTs model.

Metaphorical Graphical User Interface Design

Metaphorical teaching and learning environments found in virtual worlds afford instructors many new possibilities of engaging students in different kinds of interactions than those found in other web-based course development structures. The design of such experiences requires a close look at how metaphors are used to support exploration, knowledge acquisition, collaboration, and reflection (Sanders & Tashner, 2004). While it might seem that this area of research would direct the physical design of the spaces needed, much of what has been written in this field addresses more philosophical issues that must be considered long before any development and building takes place. Metaphors can and should be complementarily aligned with one another to assist learners in developing a “conceptual framework of understanding through which the learner can further enhance prior knowledge and conceptualize a higher level of understanding towards the knowledge being obtained” (Henry & Crawford, 2001). Henry and Crawford further suggest that through the utilization of metaphorical graphical user interfaces (MGUI), “a sense of community is presented to the learner, and in turn, a collaborative e-learning environment is well on its way towards realization” (Henry & Crawford, 2001). This community emerges out of an immersive environment in which students “collaborate on projects, work in teams, and create material and artifacts together… Students assume a variety of roles…and students must negotiate as they will have to negotiate in the adult world” (Marshall, 2000). These metaphorically designed worlds address the assumptions of our conceptual framework and provide an unprecedented opportunity to create a teaching and learning environment that supports the types of interaction, collaboration, and meaning making that I envision.

Erickson argues that the use of metaphors in an online learning environment can be valuable in offering students a model to assist in understanding more abstract concepts in more familiar, concrete terms (as cited in Cates, 1994). According to Rosendahl-Kreitman, the use of metaphors can help students understand a concept and content more quickly than without the use of the metaphor (as cited in Cates, 1994). While more traditional learning management systems use icons (desktops, folders, files, etc.) to provide students with some context for navigating and using they system, a virtual representation of a physical space or artifact is not metaphorical. Rather, the virtual representation must be different in its representation (Cates, 1996). These icons do not offer students, as Lakoff and Johnson explain, an opportunity for “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (as cited in Cates, 1994). In the use of true metaphors, the comparison between one thing and another is not literal. Rather, one thing, often familiar, is a figurative representation of the other, often abstract or unfamiliar.

Black adds to this discussion that metaphors can be used to help students learn and understand how things should work (as cited in Bishop & Cates, 1996). Mountford supports this position, stating that content can be better learned through the interaction with metaphorical graphical user interfaces by providing “superficial and deep similarities between familiar and novel situations” (as cited in Bishop & Cates, 1996). Ultimately, it is the finding of these and other studies that the use of metaphors helps students build knowledge, develop higher level thinking skills, build community, and gain a more universal understanding of the subject matter being taught (Bishop & Cates, 1996; Henry & Crawford, 2001).

A study conducted by Sanders and Tashner (2004) suggests that these Immersive MGUIs may offer students a more engaging and stimulating learning experience than what they would have in a NGUI environment and that the actual role of metaphors, both underlying and auxiliary, may be to offer a level of familiarity and comfort to students, while providing more concrete ways for students to better connect with abstract ideas and concepts. This finding supports the findings in prior studies by Cates (1994), Bishop & Cates (1996), and Henry & Crawford (2001). However, findings in this current study suggest that a virtual world must be well designed and provide students with a vast array of complementary metaphorical tools, activities, and content they can utilize and explore. One also must be very aware of the course goals and objectives, which may actually include inviting students to operate outside their comfort zone as they explore new and different ways of ways of learning (Sanders & Tashner, 2004).

Microworld Learning Environments

Papert’s (1980) research in the design and use of microworld learning environments to engage learners in higher-order thinking is very relevant to the design of a virtual world. In a microworld, “Knowledge, skills, and attitudes are integrated through problem-solving activities, and instruction is situated in rich meaningful settings” (Jonassen, 1996). Jonassen goes on to say that “microworlds are exploration environments that exploit the interest and curiosity of the learner, so they must contain phenomena that learners are interested in. They incorporate instructional strategies such as modeling, coaching, reflecting, exploring, and encouraging the learner to debug his or her knowledge rather than apply principles attained during direct instruction.” This point confirms my concern that there are few prescriptive guidelines for designing either a microworld or a virtual world. However, Jonassen does offer several suggestions to support the type of learning desired in these “self-regulated” learning environments. The instructor should:

• Share the responsibility for goal setting with the students;
• Use the microworld as a problem-solving space and allow students to work within this space to generate hypotheses;
• Accept and encourage incidental, unintended, and serendipitous learning;
• Help students make connections between the microworld and the “real” world;
• Model hypothesis-generating behaviors when students are unable to generate problems, goals, and hypotheses;
• Promote collaboration between students and groups of students; and,
• Expect students to share their findings with other students in the microworld (Jonassen, 1996).

While not a prescriptive design process, these seven suggestions can serve as guiding principles to help me keep in focus my new role in this new type of environment in which students will assume more responsibility for their own learning than ever before.

IMPPACT

One final design approach that may prove practical in guiding the design of a metaphorical, virtual world based on a social constructivist framework is Cyrs’ IMPPACTS model (Cyrs, 1999; Cyrs, 2000; Sanders & Abbott, 2002). While this model was actually developed for use in a more traditional distance learning environment and as part of an instructional systems approach to design, it takes on new meaning when applied in the context of teaching and learning in the type of virtual world environment to be developed. This eight-component model offers a model for designing an online activity. The instructor and learners are free to arrange, organize, and engage in these eight components in virtually any order rather than having to follow a more linear/sequential process of moving from one component to the next. IMPPACTS serves as an acronym for Introduce, Motivate, Present, Practice, Apply, Communicate, Transfer, and Supplement. While an instructional module may include all of these components, it is not necessary to include every component for every activity designed. And again, there is no prescribed order in which these components must be used. These two characteristics work well in the type of exploratory environment of a virtual world.

Introduce provides an opportunity for entry-level requirements to be shared; background information and experience to be considered; context to be established; and learning objectives to be addressed. Motivate addresses the need for students to understand why they should learn the content and how it will benefit them. Present is an opportunity for new skills, information, and examples and non-examples, to be presented. This presentation can be done using a variety of tools, media, and styles of presentation. Practice involves students engaging in activities and projects that serve to deepen their understanding of the content and skills presented, and can be conducted in the context of team building and sharing. Apply refers to the technology tools necessary to support and manage the other stages of the model. It requires the instructor to ask, What tool or tools are most appropriate or applicable for introducing a project, motivating my students, presenting this information, etc.? Communicate involves all aspects of communication between and among students and instructor, and promotes opportunities for interaction and collaboration in the context of the other stages of the model.

Transfer offers students the chance to apply what they are learning in authentic ways and in a realworld environment. Finally, Supplement extends the learning by providing additional resources, examples, and activities to further learning on a particular topic or issue (Cyrs, 1999). I will want to find ways to introduce the learners to the knowledge and skills they may encounter as they enter into a new virtual space. I want to design these spaces in such a way that the students are motivated to explore discover, and interact with those around them. Learners will need opportunities to access information and resources at the point of need, and be able to use this information through practice and application to help make the learning more authentic and meaningful to them. There must always be channels available for communication, with other learners, the course instructor, and among the larger community of practice. It is likewise important to create situations that allow learners to transfer what they learn and do in a virtual world to their own “real” worlds and ensure that additional resources and opportunities to extend their experience supplement their learning.

Conclusions

My plan then as I begin to design and develop my upcoming course in a virtual world is to start with the learning objectives for the course and brainstorm metaphors that can complement these objectives by providing a rich and engaging environment in which to learn. Then, with the five assumptions of the RCOE social constructivist framework in mind and a consideration for the research conducted in the areas of metaphorical graphical user interface design and microworld learning environments, I intend to develop a world in which the spaces support activities that are designed using the IMPPACTS components described above. Students can access these spaces and activities in their efforts to discover and explore those course topics and issues that most interest them and that they find most relevant. In doing so, they will ideally begin to form the basis for the kind of community of practice in which their learning emerges out of their participation in the community and their interdependence upon one another. This, of course, is just the beginning of what I’ll need to do to get this and other courses started. I just hope that I’ll have a chance to rest on the seventh day.

References

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