An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing a Virtual

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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing a Virtual World for Collaborative Learning 1,2,5

Andreas Schmeil NewMinE Lab University of Lugano (USI) Via Buffi 13 6900 Lugano, Switzerland +41 58 666 46 74

Michael Steinbusch , Alar Jost1,4, Martin Henn3, Markus Jacobi3, Max Schwitalla3 1 2

[email protected] 5

Henn Architekten, 80333 München, 3 TU Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Henn StudioB, 10178 Berlin, Germany 4 +49 89 52357 176

[email protected]

[email protected]

ABSTRACT It has been shown that collaborative learning can be supported by computers, especially online tools, where students meet with peers to work on exercises together or discuss in groups. We share the spreading belief that virtual worlds (3D collaborative virtual environments) are especially suitable for collaborative learning, and present a novel interdisciplinary approach for the design of virtual worlds and the collaboration experiences in it – we claim that drawing from different disciplines and their best practices is a promising way in order to exploit the new – and for most cases not yet evaluated – features this medium offers.

Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.1 [Computer Uses in Education]: Collaborative Learning, Distance Learning. K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education]: Computer science education, Information systems education, Self-assessment. H.5.m [HCI-Miscellaneous]: Design methodology for a 3D Virtual World for Collaborative Learning.

Keywords Virtual Worlds, 3D CVE, Collaborative Learning, Experience Design, Virtual Architecture, Programming

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Béatrice Hasler Department of Psychology University of Zurich Binzmuehlestr. 14 8050 Zurich, Switzerland +41 44 361 36 16

INTRODUCTION

It has been shown that collaborative learning can be supported by computers, especially online tools, where students meet with peers to work on exercises together or discuss in groups, also from a distance (see [3]). We share the spreading belief that virtual worlds (i.e., 3D collaborative virtual environments) are especially suitable for collaborative learning, and present an interdisciplinary approach for the design of virtual worlds and the collaboration experiences in it – we claim it is a promising way in order to exploit the extensive features this medium offers.

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Our use case, the ShanghAI Lectures (http://shanghailectures.org) is a mixed-reality global teaching and international student collaboration project. Its core components are a lecture series on embodied – natural and artificial – intelligence (see [15]) presented by Prof. Rolf Pfeifer, director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab) at University of Zurich, and international task assignments for students. The lectures are broadcasted from Jiao Tong University in Shanghai in fall term 2009 via video-conference. Approximately 300 students will collaborate in self-managed global virtual teams on projects and weekly group assignments, view video-recorded lectures and expert talks together, and meet with experts in this field, all embodied as avatars in a 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE). For the development of this virtual world we chose to build on Sun’s open-source Project Wonderland toolkit, which enables the customized design of the virtual environment, the extension of communication tools such as immersive audio and cameras into the real world and collaboration features such as shared applications, the implementation of authentication schemes and social software features, such as virtual business cards. The remainder of this paper starts with illuminating the background, namely collaborative learning and virtual worlds and their applicability to the former. In section 3 we describe the didactical approach of the ShanghAI Lectures and the resulting requirements the project has for the virtual world for its exercises. Section 4 presents our interdisciplinary approach in detail and describes the corresponding workflow. We conclude with giving an outlook and presenting future steps in our research.

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BACKGROUND

In order to elucidate the decision of using a virtual world for an intercultural collaborative learning project, the following defines (computer-supported) collaborative learning and presents some of its key concepts, before leading over to virtual worlds and a presentation of reasons why the medium is especially suitable.

2.1

Collaborative Learning

Dillenbourg [3] thoroughly discusses the various aspects and approaches of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). One main understanding is that it occurs as a side-effect of collaborative problem-solving, where peers work together in a

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group, sharing a common goal (i.e., to solve a problem). A collaborative situation involves interactions between participants, synchronous communication, negotiation and effects [3]. An approach to structure and formalize, and also pre-construct collaboration processes is the concept of Collaboration Patterns, which have been defined as “techniques, behaviors, and activities for people who share a common goal of working together in a group” [6]. Roschelle & Teasley [17] define collaboration as “a coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem”. For the latter they coin the term Joined Problem Space. Similarly, also taking up this notion of (non-physical) space as a crucial requisite for collaboration, Nonaka et al. [13] define ‘ba’ as a shared context for knowledge creation. It is thus advantageous to exploit the features of the environment in which collaboration takes place, and to support awareness of information in it as well as of the presence of others and their ongoing activities [7].

2.2 Virtual Worlds for Collaborative Learning Dourish [4] believes that “probably the most significant transition, in terms of […] user interface models that are familiar to us today, was the transition from text to graphical interaction”. This can be understood as a transition from communicating using mere one-dimensional streams of characters to interacting in a 2D space (a Collaborative Virtual Environment, CVE). Tomek [22] defines a CVE as a software environment that creates a “configurable universe which emulates a number of serviceable aspects of physical reality”, such as the mentioned concept of space, movable objects, navigation, and communication between (representations of) humans. Schmeil & Eppler [18] summarize relevant motivations for using CVE for information sharing and knowledge management, and outline how three-dimensional CVE in particular can enhance functionality and usability in a number of respects. Using the introductory mental model of transitions from above, utilizing 3D spaces can be understood as entering the very space in which information and data is organized spatially, as opposed to having separate spaces for users and information in scenarios merely utilizing 2D collaborative environments. Formal definitions of Virtual Worlds are still generally rare. To date, a virtual world is agreed to be a special type of 3D CVE, also labeled Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE), in which a multitude of users from anywhere can be present at the same time and meet, communicate and navigate with avatars in a shared space, together with information and knowledge. Furthermore, virtual worlds allow for a form of virtual social interaction resembling face-to-face interaction in many ways: avatars can approach each other, face each other, gesture to each other, and, in some cases, exchange facial expressions. The education community has identified virtual worlds as a novel medium for collaborative learning. Especially modern education approaches such as constructivist learning, situated learning, and problem-based learning are applicable in these environments [11]. In addition, a number of in-world conferences have emerged, particularly in the popular virtual world Second Life, such as SLEDcc, the SL Education Workshop, and SLCC.

It is only in recent years, however, that studies about mechanics of social interaction in virtual worlds are conducted: Moore et al. [12] for example study awareness and accountability across several online worlds; Ducheneaut et al. [5] investigate player-toplayer interactions in a virtual world; Wadley & Ducheneaut [23] experimentally examine collaboration in Second Life. These studies highlight shortcomings of both the designs of the virtual worlds themselves, and the interaction and communication models applied in the environments, and also make design recommendations based on their ethnographic studies and experimental results. Just as it is the case with game design, the design of collaboration experiences is a domain where social sciences can have much influence both by recommending best practices and evaluating the effects of virtual social environments [5] [20]. The ShanghAI Lectures with its virtual world exercises is a pioneer project that employs a highly interdisciplinary approach [8].

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THE SHANGHAI LECTURES CASE

The ShanghAI Lectures aim to foster collaboration in a multicultural and interdisciplinary global teaching context. In terms of educational goals, the project aims to (a) create a platform for the development of reflective thinking, (b) support the development of intercultural communication competencies, and (c) create the conditions for practicing an effective use of novel collaboration technologies, in order to prepare students for a modern work environment. However, the novel technology of virtual worlds for global collaborative learning should not impose a hindrance by no means, therefore it should be usable intuitively. We pursue a “Learning through Discussion” approach to foster intercultural learning – which has been found to be essential to foster active learning and to construct conceptual understanding [9]. Small group discussions focus on thinking and reasoning instead of rote memorization; they enable students to reflect on their own thinking, discuss issues, exchange ideas, question statements, and formulate questions for clarification. In this view, lectures are supposed to foster students' motivation to learn a specific topic and to awaken their interest and curiosity while the actual learning takes place individually outside of the classroom and – in this case – in cooperation with peers, in a virtual world. In order to create a feeling of self-presence (or in other words for the user to identify with his virtual embodied representation) the users need to be given the possibility to customize/individualize their avatars. Therefore, an avatar configurator with a high degree of freedom is required so that users can represent themselves in the virtual world with the required attributes (e.g., skin color, sex, age etc.) that they can identify themselves or feel comfortable with – an avatar’s appearance does not necessarily have to be modelled after its user [16]. We claim that an increased level of self-presence is beneficial (or even a precondition) for meaningful social interactions and to create a sense of co-presence among interacting users. Due to technical constraints, only about 35 avatars can be online on one server so far. For this reason all students are divided into 5 teams of 5 students on each server, which constitutes one major

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constraint to the design of the virtual world. Also, the omnipresent notion of performance is a constraint when dealing with computer graphics; 3D models should not be too complex.

4. AN INTERDISCINPLINARY APPROACH TO DESIGNING A VIRTUAL WORLD Our presented approach employs a highly interdisciplinary team of communication scientists, architects, psychologists, and computer scientists to design the virtual world and collaboration experiences within it. Utilizing Sun’s Project Wonderland toolkit as a virtual world platform we build UniWorld as the collaborative virtual environment as a place for the exercises of the ShanghAI Lectures. The following sections present the two main methods in our virtual world design approach, namely Experience Design and Programming, and show how they fit in the process, by presenting the workflow of the method we apply.

4.1

Experience Design

The term Experience Design was coined in brand marketing; the basic idea was to deliver experiences that differentiate the products of one’s particular brand from similar products of competitors. Only since recently it has been recognized as an emerging full-fledged design discipline [2], and has become prominent mostly for the design of games, and also for the design of leisure activities for future home environments. Experience Design is understood to comprise more than its related discipline of User Experience Design, which is prominent in designing for the World Wide Web but mostly regards the aspects of functionality, efficiency, and desirability [10]. For the design of effective collaboration experiences, however, social, communicational, and interactional factors, just to mention a few, have to be taken into account. Streitz et al. [21] first applied the term of Experience Design in the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), which is closely related to CSCL. For this field, the Experience Design approach could mean a transition from system-oriented, importunate smartness to people-oriented, empowering smartness [20]. In regard to virtual worlds or CVE in general, Experience Design has not yet been mentioned in the scientific discourse. Schmeil & Eppler [19] present a framework for the description and creation of collaboration patterns in virtual worlds, based on semiotics theory; it connects the infrastructure of available actions and objects in a virtual world (the syntactic level) through a dramaturgy (the semantic level), giving meaning to the former, to goals in given contexts (the pragmatic level) – and thus constitutes a suitable blueprint for the design of collaboration experiences for virtual worlds. In other words: collaboration patterns scaffold collaboration experiences. Our approach utilizes this framework in order to create collaborative learning and collaborative project work experiences (the pragmatic context) by designing appropriate dramaturgies (the semantic level) that make particular use of Wonderland’s features and properties (the syntactic infrastructure), and its design and virtual architecture, manifested in our implementation, UniWorld. The dramaturgies (particularly the settings, roles, and steps) draw from experience of former, traditional student exercises on the same content. The objects that were formalized by the Experience Design are forwarded as requirements for the software developers who implement virtual

tools and other objects, whereas the created collaboration processes, rules, settings, actions, and roles of participants serve as input for the next step leading to the world design, the socalled Programming.

4.2

Programming for Virtual Architecture

In the context of spatial design, Programming does not relate to software development but is a systematic and exhaustive practice to collect and structure information that can serve as guidelines for a design process including a setup of spatial configurations. The method gathers dynamic from the relation between problemseeking and problem-solving. First Programming approaches have been introduced to the architectural design practice in the USA by the architecture company CRS about 50 years ago [14]. Since the 1980s Programming has been enhanced and extensively applied by Henn Architekten (Germany), resulting in a sophisticated process that in the meanwhile is established also in international practice. It has primarily been recent paradigm changes in collaborative work practice and the increased importance of interdisciplinary teams, also across different cultural backgrounds and on a global scale, that demand innovative solutions considering spatial configurations, under the premise that the systematic aspects of architectural spaces have a middle-term influence on the formation of social networks [7][4]. Programming fulfills the purpose of organizing the architectural design and building process as a basic step in the beginning. In practice, however, Programming tends to exceed this purpose and emerges as a general strategic spatial organization process. The technique is particularly applicable whenever the task of a spatial organization – be it finally discharged into a building or not – is of such innovative nature that a precedent has to be set. The ShanghAI Lectures and especially its exercises situated in a virtual world setting represent such a precedent, as the functional design of virtual worlds is yet to be thoroughly investigated. The main principle of the Programming approach is to clearly separate the task (or: problem) from the target solution. Instead of directly heading for a building concept or another sort of final solution, the challenge is to scrutinize the “architecture” of the problem at first. Once an organization has assertively acclaimed the need for a new spatial strategy, all the knowledge, experience, ideas and imaginations of the involved parties are gathered. An extensive workshop and additional interviews are a good practice for this step. The most characteristic manifestation of Programming – often equated with the procedure as such – is writing of all pieces of information and knowledge on cards by trained drawers, in real time during the workshop. Each card plots one idea both in keywords and with a diagram or visual metaphor. The information gained is structured into the categories of aims, facts, concepts, tasks, and requirements. Further steps employ complex diagram charts to concentrate and organize information for particular fields of investigation. 3D models are applied to organize even more complex relations and their display for further workshops. Step by step the constructed information space is transformed into embodied spatial concepts, appropriate either for buildings, cities, businesses, or collaborative virtual environments. In summary, Programming creates a contextual information space (i.e., a multidimensional and flexible order), composed of both textual and visual elements, prior to the final design.

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Design problems are complex in the case of collaborative spaces as several issues interact with each other: spaces are perceived – visually, atmospherically, acoustically; spaces are interpreted, walked across, spontaneously used for gatherings, etc. The construction of spaces is bound to resources and technical limits. Spaces and their configurations mirror imposed organizational ideas; they limit or foster self-organization, corresponding to diverse aims. As these entirely different issues interact and together form a design problem, an interdisciplinary approach is inevitable. Programming is a method to identify, to describe and to display these issues and to show their conflicts and agreements.

4.3

Workflow

Figure 1 illustrates the workflow of our interdisciplinary approach to virtual world design for collaborative learning experiences. It is shown where the several steps interface, i.e. which output of a preceding step serves as input for a subsequent step. It further shows how the steps form a cyclic process, in which experiences, evaluation results, and practices can be utilized in a subsequent design cycle (macro view). This comes in particularly handy, as Programming – being a design method – does not determine the requirements for the one and best design, but rather provokes a set of equally relevant design solutions serving as independent environmental variables. Thus, the outcome of the Programming step leads to a manifold description of a design problem. Whereas on a micro level some designs can be evaluated in the direct next step of the workflow, for different major design decisions and implementations an more thorough evaluation step might be required, namely the analysis phase on the macro level: the usage of a virtual world offers a chance to empirically evaluate variations of design parameters (particularly if all behavior data can be tracked, for later analysis).

5.

FUTURE WORK AND OUTLOOK

It is crucial that we advance our understanding of group interaction processes and the influence both collaboration design

and virtual architecture have when working in virtual worlds, and why virtual teams succeed or fail in using these novel collaboration technologies effectively. The ShanghAI Lectures aims to improve the understanding in this issue by systematically investigate cross-cultural collaboration in virtual worlds. Research into architecture is problematic in principle as the correlations between varying spatial settings and interaction patterns and networks can only empirically be determined whereas any implementation of a given architecture (an architectural solution) by building naturally demands for the one and best solution – and will for good reasons not be realized in alternatives. In this respect collaborative, interdisciplinary, and educational virtual projects such as the ShanghAI Lectures offer new perspectives for both, a research into architecture under a performative perspective as well as under consideration of environmental and configurational – i.e., architectural – variables into socio-psychological, co-variant CVE and HCI research programs. The ShanghAI Lectures serve as a research platform to carry out studies that are embedded in a general research agenda for the systematic investigation of collaborative learning and working in 3D CVE [8]. The research project aims to explore various aspects of virtual team behavior in 3D CVE and to generate lessons learned that can guide further research and future virtual world design. The educational context makes it possible to carry out a controlled field study with experimental manipulation of context factors (i.e., “input variables”). For this purpose, we have implemented a behavioral tracking system in UniWorld that offers the opportunity to collect longitudinal data of in-world behavior in an unobtrusive way [5]. Also audio and chat communication data and work artifacts (e.g., shared work documents) are stored and can be used for quantitative and qualitative analysis of content. Once a design problem has been worked out it can be responded to by a series of solutions which in turn can prove their fitness. If the solution to a problem is a material building it will naturally not be realized in variations. In virtual worlds alternative solutions can be realized, implemented,

Figure 1. Workflow Diagram at both Micro and Macro Levels 4

and evaluated. These appear as independent variables in the research context; the design of spaces contributes to the experimental design as a whole. As more and more virtual world platforms allow for alteration, creation or import of virtual objects, architecture, whole world designs, functional features and even basic functionality, we can observe an emerging trend, from merely copying real world features and experiences, including technologies and interfaces, to an adaptive experience/world design. Based on an adaptive world design the appearance and behavior of a virtual world as such can change in real-time due to usage, success and failure, and self-organizing processes. This development can be conceived of as an increasing virtuality. To optimize a player’s (or: user’s) experience, designers should exploit the flexibility of digital environments [5]. In the first design cycle of UniWorld (for fall term 2009-2010) the virtual world and collaboration experience design will be limited to a rather simple level, comprising a world design operating in more or less familiar modes of orientation, relating to floors and walls, performing actions like walking and talking, creating nearness and distance, experiencing gravity, collision, etc. A second design cycle – already planned for next fall semester – will go beyond this level and introduce more sophisticated virtual objects, interactive and behavior-driven virtual tools, and a responsive virtual architecture, with the aim of exploiting the distinct features of virtual worlds.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors thank Andy Zbinden for his helpful comments on this article, and Rolf Pfeifer and the rest of the ShanghAI Lectures team for their excellent work in bringing this education, design and research project forward.

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REFERENCES

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