Session 3: Being and Presence in Virtual Worlds
2nd Global Conference
Monday 12th March – Wednesday 14th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
“That Ever-Ephemeral Sense of ‘Being’ Somewhere”: Reflections on a Dissertation Festival in Second Life
Clara O’Shea
The University of Edinburgh, Scotland
The MSc in E-Learning at the University of Edinburgh is a fully online distance programme with around 150 students from over 25 countries. The Dissertation Festival was developed as an opportunity for students undertaking their dissertations to reflect on their process, and to share ideas, issues, inspirations and feedback with tutors and peers.
The Festival took place in Second Life (SL) on a specially developed island . The island captured the Festival atmosphere with banners, kites, a sunny, meadow-like environment and playful elements like sushi and champagne. Each student contributed a poster, presentation and haiku to this naturalistic exhibition and meeting space. Festival events included a champagne poster viewing session, synchronous presentation sessions and a week-long exhibition for viewing and commenting on student work.
The Festival was more successful than we had anticipated, with participants commenting particularly on its ‘specialness’. We engaged in generative, rich dialogue with participants to explore what this ‘specialness’ was and what it means to be part of a community in an online, distance programme.
In our analysis, we explored this further asking what it means to be ‘here’ at the University of Edinburgh and in what ways the Festival encompassed, challenged or shaped ideas of location and identity in distance learning. Our findings suggest that reports of ‘specialness’ related to a sense of community, shared purpose, shared membership, and the celebratory nature of the festival. The roots of this are linked to the wider practices and ethos of the MSc E-Learning and specific practices for engagement in SL. We have also identified different layers of cues that helped shape the interactions within the festival itself, from the affordances of the constructed environment, the arrangement of ‘props’ like posters and scripts, through to modeled behaviours, all of which supported a peer-group interaction with a flattened hierarchy.
Visually Present But Psychologically Absent in Distributed Team Meetings: Social Presence as a Multi-Dimensional Construct in 3D Virtual Environments
Anu Sivunen and Emma Nordbäck
Aalto University, Finlan
Virtual teams that work towards a common goal, are dispersed across many locations, and communicate through technology face several challenges in their operation. One of the key challenges is the lack of presence due to different work locations and time zones. 3D virtual environments (VEs) could be seen as a collaboration tool for virtual teams that resolves this challenge as they provide a unique sense of social presence via shared collaboration space and avatars.
Presence is a concept that has interested scholars for decades and several definitions of presence exist. In this paper, we will focus on social presence, which is the psychological sense of being together with others in the mediated environment. However, research has not sufficiently explored social presence as an observable, on-going process and taken the role of interaction into account when studying the phenomena. The goal of this study is to explore how virtual team members’ social presence occurs and develops when collaborating via avatars in a virtual environment Second Life.
The participants of this study were 11 graduate students from four different universities from the USA, Finland and India. We used qualitative, ethnographic methods of data collection. The group had weekly meetings in VE which were observed and recorded. Data gathered from meeting observations were analyzed qualitatively.
Our findings show that in the meetings, social presence appeared as situational phenomenon that constantly varied between high and low. The occurrences related to social presence were mostly communicational in nature. 82% of all occurrences coded as high in social presence were purely related to active communication, whereas only 8% of occurrences were related to technical reasons, such as avatars’ body orientation. A rich VE is thus not sufficient for creating high social presence in teams, despite its unique shared space and avatars.d
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Design for Dasein, Personalising Avatars for More Effective Learning
Mark Childs
Coventry University, UK
Dasein means literally “being there”, and can be interpreted to mean that our existence is grounded in our immediate environment; a concept introduced by Heidegger in the 1920s of Dasein (Dreyfus, 1991; 15 – 16). Previous research indicates that enhancing this sense of “being there” enables experiential learning to be conducted more effectively (Childs, 2011) and that for learners, a requirement of this sense of being there is to be able to design and personalise their avatars so that learners feel they properly represent them within the virtual world. Indeed, Cheng, Farnham and Stone (2002; 99) observed that the ability to personalise avatars was the most requested feature of the virtual worlds they investigated.
This paper brings together case studies from a current project, that of the Global SciEthics project at West Chester University in Pennsylvania and a previous study, conducted in the University of Southern Maine (Childs, Schnieders and Williams, 2011). The earlier project observed that the personalisation of avatars not only overcame some of the anxieties that students felt about being exposed as “newbs” in the virtual world, but also became a platform and focus for their social interactions within that environment. As much of the learning within that case was of a social constructivist form, having an effective means to convey and recognise individuality, and assert their social presence within that arena, was particularly important.
The latter project is located within OpenSim and aims to give students an understanding of ethics within different simulations. This study concerns the preparatory activities that were provided to the students, and analyses the impact the development of personalised avatars had on the students’ capacity to learn.
The conclusions are that, for most students, the need to present themselves as an individual, and for that presentation to reflect essential aspects of their personality means that educators in virtual worlds must provide opportunities for students to alter and personalise their avatars. Even those students who do not wish to change their appearance benefit from the reflection on their identity and their role within the environment necessitated by the rejection of personalisation. The opportunity to present themselves as individuals and personalise their avatars has a positive effect on their ability to learn.
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