BP19_2009113_Discussion Board_Virtual Worlds_BenefitDetrimentAge

Retroactively posting Discussion Board entry to blog:

Week 3 - Discussion Board - Virtual Worlds

What are the benefits of virtual worlds in educational settings? Can they be used for any age group?
I agree with Telitha Lucier when she wrote: “The teacher needs to match the age of the student with the content of the virtual world.” Charles Mills also pointed out that “There are age appropriate sites available for everyone capable of manipulating the computer technology required to explore.”

For young children, a cute and fun virtual world can be a way to “trick” them into learning by making the lesson more like a game. Bright colors and animations keep their eyes (and hopefully their attention) on the screen.

For older students, a virtual world can be an enjoyable immersive experience that captures their imagination. Like the competitive and exploratory aspects of a scavenger hunt, it can be a more active and shared way of getting information than the passive process of reading a book alone.

For adults, I feel differently. Although I have seen examples of corporate sites in SecondLife, with virtual conference rooms and even gatherings around a pretend campfire, I see only a surface entertainment value to these. Rather than leveraging the engagement of the “digital native” twenty-something, it seems to be pandering to their short attention span and aversion to boring grown-up business activities like meetings and classes. Tempting them into participation by placing it into a virtual 3D game-like setting devalues the importance of the engagement.

Yes, a class session or a business meeting may be long, and you may get distracted, and you may not want to be there, and every moment of it may not be directly relevant to you. Couching that required reality in the context of a virtual setting that resembles a video game seems like a novelty to get and keep the participants’ attention, which should not be required in a professional context. If the content is important and relevant enough for the adults involved, a spoonful of VR sugar should not be needed to make the medicine of onscreen meetings go down.

Will learning within virtual worlds somehow be a detriment to the educational processes? What do you think?
Critical aspects of human face-to-face interactions such as tone of voice and facial expressions are lost with avatar representations. Participants will be less empathetic and less responsive to inter-personal dynamics because they are not well represented in a virtual world. As Romel Muex wrote: “Children from ages 5 to about 8 are still learning socially appropriate behaviors for the classroom and functioning appropriately in a virtual education setting may be more than they could handle…”

Also, the overhead for equipment setup, environment build-out, training, implementation, and technical maintenance of virtual worlds may be too costly of an investment to be practical. As Van Manson wrote: “trying to figure out how much time is needed to introduce, learn, and use these virtual worlds can become very time consuming, considering that all you are going to use it for is a virtual field trip: seems a little much.”


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