Virtual Worlds and Education

Context

This special issue of Educational Research focuses on developing our thinking about the educational possibilities of virtual worlds, which are defined here as being environments within which users are represented by and operate through an avatar and can interact with others over the internet or local area network.

There has been a growing interest in virtual worlds within the education community, as reflected by a growing number of special issues of journals on this subject (e.g. ALT-J, volume 16, no. 3, 2008; BJET, volume 40, no. 3, 2009; Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, volume 2, no. 1, 2009). These sources have provided a rich introduction to the field and have documented its emergence (e.g. Salmon and Hawkridge 2009). However, the field is currently under-theorised, with much of the initial work being exploratory, descriptive and often technologically driven (Savin-Baden, Gourlay, Tombs, Steils, Tombs and Mawer in this issue, 123–133). There are exceptions, such as the work on the Schome Park Programme that set out to use virtual worlds to explore alternative visions of education, underpinned by existing educational models and leading to the development of key dimensions of practice that need to be considered when thinking about education in any context (Twining 2009a, 2009b; Twining and Footring 2009; Twining and Peachey 2009).

This special issue aims to build upon and extend the exciting work in the field, focussing on critical analysis, pedagogical considerations, and the development of ‘models’ and ‘frameworks’ to inform and enhance future work with virtual worlds in education.

Overview of this issue

An overview of the papers within this special issue highlights a number of themes: the Anglo-centric nature of the contributions; the predominance of Second Life™ Virtual World; and a concentration of work looking at virtual world use in Higher Education (though the conclusions and emerging frameworks and models from all of these papers appear to have broader relevance).

Looking across the content of the papers, additional themes are evident: a focus on experiential, active, problem-based or investigative modes of pedagogical engagement; the juxtaposition of ‘the real’ with ‘the virtual’; barriers to use that range from the technical to clashes of culture; and the need to be able to make comparisons with other mediated environments. Some of these are explored in some detail within the papers themselves, but issues around ‘reality’ and uptake need further exploration here (see Appendix).

Real or virtual

Throughout much of the literature, there appears to be an assumption that what happens in virtual worlds is not real. This is most evident in the terminology used, which juxtaposes ‘the virtual world’ with ‘the real world’ and in so doing denies the reality of virtual world experiences. Castronova (2007) challenged this orthodoxy in his book entitled Exodus to the virtual world: How online fun is changing reality. His argument revolved around the notion that reality is a personal construct: ‘What matters is which realm, real or virtual, is receiving more of our time and attention’ (77).

White and Le Cornu (183–196 in this special issue) help to explain how virtual world experiences can be real, when they argue that virtual worlds are cultural spaces ‘in which participants’ experience is actually secondary, mediated through vision, yet such is the power to draw in and engage that, together with the human ability to project and imagine, participants have the impression of learning through primary experience’ (192). Whilst sometimes using terms such as ‘real world’ and ‘real life’, they go on to talk about the cultures of the ‘physical and virtual worlds’, a recognition of the tension that referring to ‘the physical world’ as ‘the real world’ creates in a context in which people often perceive their virtual experiences as real.

In Ketelhut and Nelson's paper (151–167), students are taking on the role of scientists in a virtual town. The focus of the paper is on demonstrating that virtual inquiry can in some circumstances be as effective as physical inquiry in developing students’ real-world science competence. They use the terms ‘virtual inquiry’ and ‘physical inquiry’ to avoid any suggestion that the virtual world activity is unreal, though occasionally they still refer to ‘the real world’ and ‘real world science’.

Twining (2010) has taken this one step further, arguing that virtual worlds may provide opportunities to engage learners in activity which is ‘more real’ than anything they typically experience in their physical world schooling. This is based on work in the Schome Park Programme on dimensions of practice, and specifically the Pedagogy Dimension (Twining 2009a), which is illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The pedagogy dimension (adapted from Twining 2010).

Twining (2009a, 2010) suggests that ‘learning by becoming’ involves a greater depth of engagement than the other categories on the Pedagogy Dimension. This was illustrated in Schome Park, where the number of objects on the island (prims) had to be limited (this is a technical constraint within Second Life). The students (aged 13–17) set up a planning regime, with Planning Officers who would remove buildings that did not gain planning permission within a set timeframe. There was nothing ‘pretend’ about removing a building that might have taken someone many hours to create, nor in the reactions to such building removals. The level and nature of engagement of participants reflected this ‘reality’ and was qualitatively different from that of participants involved in even the best role-play activities within the island (such as the weddings and murder trial). Throughout the work on the Schome Park Programme the term ‘the real world’ is replaced by ‘the physical world’ in order to reflect the claims to reality that both can make. If this practice were adopted more widely, it would help overcome a major source of confusion within the literature on virtual worlds.

Restricted uptake

It is clear that the use of virtual worlds is currently restricted to individuals (and social groups) who have exceeded a high technology access threshold. Even within privileged groupings (such as universities) in countries such as the UK that are considered to be reasonably technologically advanced, access to virtual worlds still presents a technological challenge (see Kirriemuir's paper in this special issue, 215–227). However, the barriers to uptake go far beyond having access to appropriate technology.

Savin-Baden et al. explore the pedagogical issues relating to the use of virtual worlds in some depth, on the one hand, arguing that the challenges the use of virtual worlds in education present ‘mirror the persistent questions around which higher education research and development constantly revolve’ (130), such as ‘why do things in this way?’ and, on the other, suggesting that virtual worlds may challenge ‘traditional’ pedagogic relationships between teachers and learners. This is echoed by Ketelhut and Nelson's brief reference to their sample teachers’ pedagogical and logistic concerns and, in particular, the difficulty they had in coping with the shift in their role that the strongly child-centred approach within River City entailed. Merchant (135–150) extends this argument in his exploration of the challenges that using virtual worlds present to schools. His conclusion is that features of the current education system (in the UK) constrain conceptions of literacy and the scope for innovation that virtual worlds may offer. He goes so far as to suggest that the use of virtual worlds may challenge the established views of learning within schools (in the UK).

It is important in the context of this discussion of restricted uptake of virtual worlds to acknowledge the limited geographical spread of the sample of papers in this special issue. Whilst this reflects the areas where work in this field is more strongly established, it raises questions about the applicability of the findings to other cultural contexts. It is interesting to speculate, for example, how members of the Kalasha, a society in which an individual's gender and social status determine access to social spaces (see Salmon, Nie, and Edirisingha's paper in this special issue, 169–182), might respond to virtual worlds. We need to be conscious of the cultural disjunctures that can occur across physical world spaces as well as between physical and virtual worlds (see White and Le Cornu in this special issue, 183–196).

Comparisons across mediated environments

One of the pedagogical challenges to any educator is deciding on the most appropriate way to support learners in achieving their goals in particular contexts. Inevitably, this includes consideration of the most appropriate technology to use. A number of the papers in this special issue address this issue directly. For example, Ketelhut and Nelson's paper (this issue, 151–167) sets out to provide evidence for the efficacy of virtual scientific investigations. Three of the papers explicitly set out to develop or adapt frameworks to support thinking about the use of virtual worlds, and in so doing support comparisons across different technology-based tools.

Salmon et al. explore the migration of Salmon's established five-stage model for supporting learning through asynchronous text based communication to the realm of virtual worlds. The resultant model, whilst still the subject of ongoing research, provides valuable insights into key considerations in introducing learners to virtual worlds. The description of its development highlights important differences between asynchronous text-based forums and virtual worlds.

White and Le Cornu provide a framework for analysing people's engagement in virtual worlds in terms of the extent to which they feel they belong (‘co-presence’) and the extent to which they are engaged in communal activity (‘eventedness’). As White and Le Cornu indicate (183–196), this framework can be applied across ‘a wide range of technology-based learning experiences’ in a way that helps identify the different potentials (and risks) associated with each.

Childs rather ambitiously sets out to develop a reference model that brings together all the key components of a range of typologies used to analyse what he refers to as ‘mediated environments’, ‘i.e. environments that create a metaphorical space in which participants can position themselves and be embodied’ (197–213). The purpose of this reference model, the Mediated Environments Reference Model (MERM), is both to highlight the key elements of such environments, and also support cross-fertilisation and integration of research into different technologies so that they can build upon and inform each other. As Childs concludes, this is work in progress, but it provides a strong foundation for negotiation and further research.

Appendix

Table

	Title	Country	Context	Virtual World
Savin-Baden et al.	Situating pedagogies, positions and practices in immersive virtual worlds	UK	Higher Education	Second Life
Merchant	3D virtual worlds as environments for literacy learning	UK	School	Active worlds
Ketelhut and Nelson	Designing for real-world scientific inquiry in virtual environments	USA	School	River City
Salmon et al.	Developing a five-stage model of learning in Second Life	UK	Higher Education	Second Life
White and Le Cornu	Eventedness and disjuncture in virtual worlds	UK	Higher Education	Second Life
Childs	A conceptual framework for mediated environments	UK	(Higher Education)	Mediated environments
Kirriemuir	UK university and college technical support for Second Life developers and users	UK	Higher Education	Second Life