this thesis proposes using 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments for such
support. To validate ... Evaluation of Viras by case studies in a university
environment.
Supporting Social Awareness among University Students with Collaborative Virtual Environments
Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland
Submitted for the Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doktor Ingeniør
Department of Computer and Information Science Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering Norwegian University of Science and Technology May, 2004
Department of Computer and Information Science Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering Norwegian University of Science and Technology ISBN 82-471-6360-8 (printed) ISBN 82-471-6359-4 (electronic) Doktor ingeniøravhandling 2004:73 ISSN 1503-8181
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Abstract This thesis is about supporting social awareness among university students with 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs). Learning is essentially a social activity. Therefore, social awareness can be beneficial for university students in their working and social activities, facilitating cooperation, and sharing of resources and providing a good social climate. Social awareness is defined as awareness of the social situation in a group or a community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both. As the mechanisms available in the university environment are not always sufficient for supporting social awareness, this thesis proposes using 3D Collaborative Virtual Environments for such support. To validate this proposal, the thesis presents a set of requirements and a place metaphor for a CVE for social awareness support. A virtual world, Viras, (Virtual Awareness Support), designed according to these requirements, has been evaluated in case studies involving university students. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized as follows: C1. Identification and discussion of existing mechanisms for social awareness support among university students and their limitations. C2. A characterization of CVEs and associated awareness mechanisms along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact. C3. A characterization of place metaphors in educational CVEs, and Archipelago, a place metaphor for a CVE for social awareness support, combining features of the identified metaphors. C4. A set of requirements along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact, according to the needs of learning communities and groups. C5. Viras: design and implementation of a 3D virtual world, for social awareness support, in two phases. C6. Evaluation of Viras by case studies in a university environment. This thesis is both theoretically and empirically based. The theoretical base includes socio-cultural theories and the existing research in the CVE field. The empirical evaluation includes case studies involving students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The requirements, the design and therefore the answers to the research questions are formed in an iterative fashion, through the development of Viras and evaluation of it in the empirical cases. The work described in this thesis has been performed within the framework of the CAGIS research project, financed by the Norwegian Research Council.
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Preface The research presented here is conducted within the framework of CAGIS research project (Cooperative Agents in Global Information Space). This project has been financed by Norwegian Research Council and involved a number of researchers at the Department of Computer and Information Science, NTNU.
Acknowledgements This work would not be possible without all the people who helped me along my way. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors Professor Monica Divitini and Professor Reidar Conradi for their time, patience and valuable feedbacks. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Computer and Information Science, NTNU, especially the software engineering group, for their support and for providing a good working environment. This work could not be conducted without the students who participated in the creation and evaluation of the virtual world described in this thesis. I would like to thank them for their time and effort put into this project. Their participations resulted in a number of creative virtual constructions and provided me with many valuable experiences. I would also like to thank Professor Mary Lou Maher and colleagues at the Key Centre for Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney, where I had a research stay, for a warm welcome and inspiring discussions. These discussions provoked some ideas for summing up my work. Many thanks to Alex Grigny de Castro, developer of the Xelagot scripting language and environment, which is used a lot in this work. His extensive consultations have been extremely helpful during the practical part of this research. During all these years I enjoyed a great support from my friends, both here in Norway and in other parts of the world. I would like to thank them for cheering me up during the difficult periods and just being there when I needed them. Special thanks to Sergey Lukyanenko for sending me his latest novel when I needed some encouragement. His ideas of life in cyberspace served as an important source of inspiration for this work. I could never finish this thesis without the support of my family. I am very grateful to my parents for their encouragement, boundless patience and love. I also want to thank my brother for cheering me up with his jokes and my grandmother for her kindness. And finally, I would like to thank Knut, the best husband in the world. During these years, he gave me all thinkable and unthinkable support. I am endlessly grateful to him.
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Table of contents Abstract_____________________________________________________________ii Preface ____________________________________________________________ iii Acknowledgements___________________________________________________ iii Table of contents ____________________________________________________ iv List of tables _______________________________________________________ viii List of figures _______________________________________________________ ix
Part I: Summary _________________________________________________1 1 Introduction________________________________________________________3 1.1 Social awareness ________________________________________________3 1.2 Supporting social awareness among university students _______________4 1.2.1 Computer-based support for social awareness_______________________5 1.2.2 Supporting social awareness with CVEs ___________________________6 1.3 Research questions ______________________________________________8 1.4 Research context, method and contributions _________________________9 1.5 Outline of the thesis ____________________________________________11 2 Theoretical background _____________________________________________14 2.1 Activity theory_________________________________________________14 2.2 Learning Communities__________________________________________16 2.3 Groups _______________________________________________________18 2.4 Theoretical background: discussion _______________________________18 3 Related work ______________________________________________________20 3.1 Supporting human processes with IT technology ____________________20 3.2 Communityware _______________________________________________23 3.3 Characterization of educational CVEs _____________________________24 3.3.1 Learner ____________________________________________________25 3.3.2 Place______________________________________________________28 3.3.3 Artifact ____________________________________________________29 3.3.4 Awareness mechanisms: summary ______________________________31 3.4 Place metaphors in educational CVEs _____________________________31 3.5 Related work: discussion ________________________________________33 4 Requirements, design and empirical evaluation: phase I ___________________34 4.1 Initial requirements (Requirements I) _____________________________34 4.2 Viras: design I _________________________________________________35 4.3 Viras: implementation I _________________________________________36 4.4 Cooperative scenario I __________________________________________37 iv
4.5 Case study I ___________________________________________________40 4.6 Results of Case study I __________________________________________42 4.6.1 Learner ____________________________________________________42 4.6.2 Place______________________________________________________43 4.6.3 Artifact ____________________________________________________44 4.6.4 General results ______________________________________________44 4.6.5 Summary of results for Case I __________________________________45 4.7 Intermediate case ______________________________________________45 4.8 Lessons learned in preparation for phase II_________________________47 5 Requirements, design and empirical evaluation: phase II __________________50 5.1 Revised requirements (Requirements II) ___________________________50 5.2 Viras: design II ________________________________________________52 5.3 Viras: implementation II ________________________________________57 5.4 Cooperative scenario II _________________________________________57 5.5 Case study II __________________________________________________59 5.6 Results of Case study II _________________________________________61 5.6.1 Learner ____________________________________________________62 5.6.2 Place______________________________________________________63 5.6.3 Artifact ____________________________________________________65 5.6.4 General____________________________________________________66 5.6.5 Summary of results from Case II ________________________________67 5.7 Comparison of Case I and II and improvement suggestions ___________67 6 Evaluation ________________________________________________________71 6.1 Evaluation of results against original assumptions ___________________71 6.1.1 Learner: summary of results and evaluation _______________________71 6.1.2 Place: summary of results and evaluation _________________________71 6.1.3 Artifact: summary of results and evaluation _______________________71 6.1.4 Summary of general results and evaluation ________________________74 6.1.5 Summary of results from case studies ____________________________76 6.2 Evaluation in the context of related work___________________________76 6.3 Evaluation of the empirical results: summary _______________________79 6.4 Evaluation of the research method ________________________________80 6.4.1 Construct validity____________________________________________81 6.4.2 Internal validity _____________________________________________81 6.4.3 External validity_____________________________________________83 6.4.4 Research method: conclusion __________________________________84 6.5 Answers to research questions____________________________________84 7 Conclusions _______________________________________________________88 7.1 Summary of contributions _______________________________________88 7.2 Directions for further research ___________________________________90 Glossary ___________________________________________________________91 v
References _________________________________________________________92
Appendix A: VirAS and Active Worlds
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A.1 Active Worlds___________________________________________________101 A.1.1 Movement _________________________________________________101 A.1.2 Menus _____________________________________________________102 A.1.3 Tabs ______________________________________________________102 A.1.4 Contacting other users _______________________________________103 A.1.5 Building and simple object scripting____________________________103 A.1.6 Advanced programming______________________________________104 A.2 Viras __________________________________________________________105 A.2.1 The world and its contents ____________________________________105 A.2.2 Advanced building facilities ___________________________________106
Appendix B: Research tools and data _________________________108 B.1 Research tools __________________________________________________108 B.1.1 Exercise questions ___________________________________________108 B.1.1.1 Exercise questions Case I___________________________________109 B.1.1.2 Exercise questions Case II __________________________________110 B.1.2 Questionnaires ______________________________________________112 B.1.2.1 Questionnaire Case I ______________________________________112 B.1.2.2 Questionnaire Case II______________________________________114 B.1.3 Interviews__________________________________________________116 B.1.3.1 Questions interview Case I__________________________________116 B.1.3.2 Questions interview Case II _________________________________116 B.1.4 Logging____________________________________________________116 B.1.5 Online observations__________________________________________117 B.1.6 Examination of constructions in the world and analysis of building __117 B.2 Research data __________________________________________________117 B.2.1 Questionnaire Case I_________________________________________117 B.2.2 Questionnaire Case II ________________________________________119
Part II: Papers _________________________________________________123 Paper overview _____________________________________________________125 Paper 1: Supporting awareness in education: overview and mechanisms ______127 Paper 2: Supporting learning communities with collaborative virtual environments: Different spatial metaphors ___________________________________________134 Paper 3: Supporting Social Awareness: Requirements for Educational CVE___140 Paper 4: Collaborative Virtual Environments for Supporting Learning Communities: an Experience of Use____________________________________146 vi
Paper 5: Virtual Spaces as Artifacts: Implications for the design of Educational CVEs _____________________________________________________________156 Paper 6: Repository of virtual places as community memory ________________164 Paper 7: A repository of Virtual Places as Community Memory: an Experience of Use ______________________________________________________________173
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List of tables Table 1.1 Chapters and research questions ________________________________13 Table 1.2 Papers and research questions __________________________________13 Table 3.1 CVEs and awareness mechanisms _______________________________32 Table 4.1 Requirements I ______________________________________________34 Table 4.2 Requirements I and corresponding design features __________________36 Table 4.3 Summary of results for Case I___________________________________46 Table 5.1 Requirements II______________________________________________51 Table 5.2 Comparison of Requirements I and II_____________________________52 Table 5.3 Requirements II and associated design features. ____________________56 Table 5.4 Virtual places, indexing artifacts and associated functionality _________57 Table 5.5 Summary of results for Case II __________________________________68 Table 6.1 Learner ____________________________________________________72 Table 6.2 Place ______________________________________________________73 Table 6.3 Artifact ____________________________________________________74 Table 6.4 General results ______________________________________________75 Table 6.5 Summary of empirical results ___________________________________77 Table 7.1 Papers and contributions ______________________________________89 Table 7.2 Contributions and research questions ____________________________90 Table B.1 Questionnaire results Case I __________________________________118 Table B.2 Questionnaire results Case I (cont.)_____________________________119 Table B.3 Questionnaire results Case II__________________________________120 Table B.4 Questionnaire results Case II (cont.) ____________________________121
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List of figures Figure 1.1 Research method ____________________________________________11 Figure 1.2 Papers, main themes and research questions. _____________________13 Figure 2.1 The basic structure of mediated human activity ____________________14 Figure 2.2 Activity structure ____________________________________________15 Figure 2.3 Activity Centered Design _____________________________________16 Figure 4.1 A personal house, created from a pre-built template ________________38 Figure 4.2 Personal islands connected by bridges with the group island _________39 Figure 4.3 Viras at the beginning: view from above _________________________39 Figure 4.4 A basic set with a big and two small islands and 5 house types ________39 Figure 4.5 One of the basic house templates with associated artifacts ___________39 Figure 4.6 Mediating activities with virtual places __________________________48 Figure 5.1 The catalogue island with indexing artifacts ______________________54 Figure 5.2 New Archipelago with a central island, adjoining catalogue island and basic island templates _________________________________________________55 Figure 5.3 A “basic“ student “house“/island divided into a “working“ and “leisure“ part _______________________________________________________________55 Figure 5.4 A place template, based on a last-year student construction, used as a meeting place _______________________________________________________59 Figure 5.5 A 3D to-do list ______________________________________________63 Figure 5.6 Announcements on the wall of the central house ___________________66 Figure A.1 Active Worlds browser ______________________________________101 Figure A.2 An example of an avatar and associated actions __________________103 Figure A.3 Object Properties Dialog Box ________________________________104 Figure A.4 Xelagot interface___________________________________________105
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Part I: Summary
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1 Introduction 1.1 Social awareness The social nature of learning has been widely recognized (see e.g. Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 1999). Social interaction is acknowledged to play a fundamental place in learning (Gifford & Enyedy, 1999). This suggests that a successful learning implies a well-functioning social environment. This is supported by empirical findings. For example, empirical studies show that academic peer interaction and involvement in social activities is important for learning outcomes and satisfaction of the university students. This is especially important for first year students and in cases of transitions from one study program to another, but is generally valid for all levels of the university education (Asmar & Peseta, 2001). Pascarella & Terenzini (1991) support the role of social interaction in the educational attainment process and claim that “factors that maximize (educational) attainment include a cohesive peer environment”. The lack of peer contact in a university environment may result in dissatisfaction of students and inhibition in learning activities (Asmar & Peseta, 2001; Bazeley et al., 1996). In this context, Brown & Campione (1994) emphasize the importance of creating an environment where students taking a class together have shared goals, and where they respect and support each other’s efforts. In such an environment, everyone is a potential resource for the others, and different individuals are likely to serve as resources on different occasions. Discussion and collaboration among students are common and play a key role in learning. The learning benefits of this approach include promotion of higher-level thinking processes, high motivation and successful integration of students with different backgrounds (Brown & Campione, 1994; Rogoff, 1994; Garcia, 1994; Ormrod, 1999). To be able to serve as a resource for each other, students need to be aware of what resources are possessed by their peers and what activities they are engaged in. For example, consider a student group that is assigned to work on some project. Knowing that another group in their learning environment is working on a similar project can be very beneficial. As they can share knowledge and can avoid making the same mistakes, they can generally make their activities more effective through joint efforts. Most of the knowledge sharing outside established social structures, such as classes or groups, relies on personal acquaintances, like being a member of a basketball group. This, however, gives rise to the following two problems. First, the social network is limited and it is often impossible to find someone that can help. Second, as also discussed in the context of knowledge management (Davenport & Prusak, 1997), the closest persons are not always the most competent. Therefore, an effective sharing of information and resources is also dependent on the awareness of social relations between students. For example, learners who share many relations (work or friendship) are more likely to share information and resources. However, new or different information is more often received from those with whom the relations are weaker (Granovetter, 1973; Haythornthwaite, 1998). The awareness of such relations
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is also important for effective interaction between students and for a high level of involvement in social activities. Therefore, for effective sharing of resources, peer interaction and a good social climate and therefore better learning, students need to maintain a high level of social awareness. The latter means awareness about resources, activities and social relations in the surrounding social environment. The problem of supporting social awareness is especially important in learning communities. Learning communities can be thought of as shared histories of participation and learning (Wenger, 1999). In the context of a university, an example of a learning community may therefore be a group of students taking a course or a set of related courses together. In such a community, students participate in different activities, such as working on a project and have different roles according to their level of expertise. Learning in this context is primarily thought in terms of belonging and identity (Wenger, 1999). Therefore, a successful participation in learning activities implies awareness of memberships, belongings and the level of expertise of the learners, for example social connections and composition of working groups. There exist a number of different definitions of social awareness in the literature. Generally, awareness can be thought of as “the understanding of the activity of others, which provides a context for your own activity” (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992). In a number of definitions, see e.g. (Tollmar et al., 1996; Gutwin et al., 1996; Prinz, 1999), social awareness is defined as awareness about the social situation of other people. This means awareness about what they are doing, whether they are engaged in a conversation and whether they can be disturbed, and of who is around and what is up. All these definitions consider mostly events that happen at a certain moment of time. Other definitions are more general and assume a broader context. An example is group-structural (structural) awareness defined by (Gutwin et al., 1996) as knowledge about people’s roles, positions, status, responsibilities and group processes. Similarly, according to (Goldman, 1992) and (Gutwin et al., 1996) social awareness is awareness about the social connections within a group. In the following the term social awareness in a learning community or group will be used as stated in the definition below: Social awareness (SA) is awareness of the social situation in a group or a community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both. This awareness includes knowledge on learners’ resources, activities and social network. Social awareness can be short-term and long-term. Short-term (synchronous) awareness is awareness of a social situation at a certain moment. Long-term (asynchronous) awareness is awareness of the social situation in general and over a certain period of time. 1.2 Supporting social awareness among university students This section provides a short discussion of existing social awareness mechanisms used by university students and their limitations. A more extensive and detailed discussion can be found in Paper 1.
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There are various mechanisms for promoting social awareness in everyday life, like chance encounters, message boards, verbal and non-verbal cues (Huxor, 2001). For example, one may look at what other people in the same room are doing, their conversational patterns and emotional state. These techniques are not always sufficient due to various reasons. These include physical distances between the students; different schedules for the group members; social fears and inhibitions; available places that are not optimal for meetings, working and information sharing. For example, the empirical study conducted during this work, shows that a university does not provide an optimal environment for extracting cues about the surrounding social situation and for supporting social awareness (Paper 1). At the same time, students generally agreed that an increased awareness about resources, activities and social network will result in a number of positive consequences. These include better learning, better social environment and better meeting and working place (Paper 1). Various groupware tools, such as ICQ (“I Seek You”) and BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work), have been used to promote awareness, overcoming the limitations of everyday modalities of interactions (Gutwin et al., 1996). The following sections contain a short discussion of commonly used tools for supporting social awareness in the university environment and suggest using Collaborative Virtual Environments for such support. 1.2.1 Computer-based support for social awareness Popular tools like ICQ provide an overview of who from the user’s contact list is available for conversation, who is temporarily unavailable and who is off-line, i.e. these tools provide awareness of users’ status at a certain moment. Exchange of messages may provide awareness of current activities. It is also possible to post different information about oneself, thus providing indication of one’s age, occupation, interests etc. However, ICQ does not provide support for “weak ties”, those contacts that are not in our primary list, but still important for our work (Huxor, 2001). It cannot convey visual information about the users’ mimics and gestures, appearance, position and orientation relative to other users. Neither does it provide support for “chance encounters”, an important mechanism for supporting awareness. For example, together with the possibility of meeting a person and initiating a conversation, the spatial arrangement of the meeting place provides a possibility for negotiating communication. One can be “looking busy” or can stop and say “Hi” while passing a person in a corridor, depending on whether the conversation with this person is desirable or not (McGrath & Prinz, 2001; Huxor, 2001). Such functionalities are not supported by tools like ICQ. E-mail provides even less functionality in this context. Awareness can also be supported by portable personal devices, like mobile phones and PDAs (Liechti et al., 1998). Using these devices, the users can receive notifications of various kind about the status and ongoing activities of other users. The basic awareness mechanisms here are mostly the same as in ICQ. This approach provides mostly information about the social situation at the moment and requires more effort than just “taking a glance” at the people around or the user list. For the purposes of information sharing, many students use BSCW in their daily activities. According to (Farschian & Divitini, 2000), the awareness mechanisms in BSCW are very specialized for writing a document in a small group. Thus, these 5
mechanisms provide indication of a rather narrow segment of the group’s overall activities. It is therefore difficult to use these mechanisms to gain awareness of activities of larger groups (Farschian & Divitini, 2000), as well as of users’ social life and resources. The information provided by the described tools does not always provide sufficient awareness about the social structures, relations and memberships, as well as activities and roles. This appears also in the empirical study described in Paper 1. Also, the described tools mainly focus on supporting already established groups who usually have a common task and have a tighter interaction between group members (Schlichter et al., 1998). They are not sufficient for fluid and more loosely coupled communities (Paper 1). Therefore they are not sufficient for supporting social awareness the way it is defined here. The following section will consider the potentialities of CVEs in supporting social awareness among university students as opposed to other applications mentioned here. 1.2.2 Supporting social awareness with CVEs A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a computer-based, distributed, virtual space where people can meet and interact with others, with agents or with virtual artifacts (Snowdown et al., 2001). CVEs have been widely used in educational settings of different types, ranging from elementary school to higher education. They can help in promoting social awareness and community building whenever the distribution of learners or other factors make it problematic. CVEs can do this by providing a social arena where students and teachers can meet overcoming the barriers of the physical world (Neal, 1997). Examples include Virtual Campus (Maher, 1999; Maher et al., 2001; Clark & Maher, 2001; Li & Maher, 2000) used for lectures, seminars and collaborative design at the university of Sydney, and a number of worlds in Active Worlds Educational Universe, such as Ecollege of Santa Cruz University of California. Collaborative Virtual Environments can support student communities and groups in university settings in many ways, as discussed in the following (see also Paper 2). CVEs can also create an infrastructure for developing and maintaining awareness about community’s development, knowledge, social dynamics and on-going activities, i.e. social awareness. It can be done by supporting dynamic community building in a flexible virtual space and providing alternative means of communication and information sharing, as discussed below: •
Supporting community building. It can be difficult sometimes to gain overview of existing social structures. CVEs, however, can support learning communities and groups by increasing the awareness of the current social situation and the underlying social structures in general. This can be done, e.g., by providing awareness by monitoring activities around an object of interest (a virtual thematic meeting room). Alternatively, it can be done through graphical clues about different social aspects, such as membership status, connections between persons, activities etc. CVEs can also provide special tools for leaving such clues by the users. In this way, CVEs can facilitate formation of teams and groups sharing the same interests and goals.
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•
•
•
Supporting communication. Communication plays a key role in supporting social awareness and keeping a community alive. Particularly important is the communication that is triggered by casual encounters. This communication is reported to be essential for knowledge sharing (Davenport & Prusak, 1997) and strengthening the ties among community members. Casual encounters are therefore vital for developing and maintaining awareness of for example on-going activities and provide occasions for socializing, help requests, exchange of information etc. Such communication is dependent on spatial arrangement, e.g. proximity of desks in a laboratory and attendance to the same classroom. CVEs can help in overcoming this limitation since they allow communication independently by geographic location. Moreover, different clues can be used to indicate if someone is busy or is available for conversations, what activities people are engaged in at the moment. Other clues would indicate who is cooperating with whom, etc, thus providing awareness, a “snapshot” of the current social situation in the community. Supporting information sharing. Any learning community relies on a patrimony of information that must be accessible as much as possible by all its members. CVEs can support learning communities by providing them with a place that can be enriched with artifacts conveying information, such as documents, pictures, links and notes. In this way, both social awareness and general community activities (educational, social etc) can be supported. This approach can have various benefits. First, the physical configuration of the place can be used to support navigation. For example, it is possible to put into a room all the documents connected to a certain topic or a certain persons/groups and their activities. One could then connect the room to other rooms that contains related documents. Second, the physical organization of the information can ease memorization. In fact, the spatial nature of memory is recognized in psychological theory. For instance, the “method of loci” (Spence, 1984) is a technique for accessing information, where things are remembered by associating them with places or images. Third, place can support memory of social activities and encounters with other users (Huxor, 2001), thus maintaining awareness of a community’s social life. With a CVE it is easy to provide support for the dynamic construction of the information space of the community, allowing the participation of all the members. Moreover, different levels of participation can be allowed. Providing an alternative spatial structure. Research in social science indicates that space and place plays an important role in social life. According to (Giddens 1984; Greenhalgh, 1998), space is a key resource for establishing and enabling an activity, allowing different modes of participation and awareness and negotiation of common resources. Different spatial aspects can also provide a number of clues of social network, of ongoing activities and of resource distribution in a community. Such spatial aspects could be the area occupied by a person or by a group, or the mutual spatial position of persons or their artifacts. However, the existing boundaries and structures of the physical space in campuses and universities do not always provide the optimal context for communication, for group work, etc. They lack also flexibility necessary to reflect current social situation in the community. Therefore, CVEs can support social awareness by providing an alternative spatial structure, one that is more dynamic than the real one. Such dynamic and flexible environment can evolve with the community, providing up-to-date awareness of the participants’ activities, cooperation patterns, social network etc. 7
There is a great variety in CVE applications, including those used in an educational context, ranging from text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) to 3D virtual worlds (Bruckman, 1997; Neal, 1997; Talamo & Ligorio, 2000). There are a number of examples of supporting awareness in 3D CVEs, such as Nessie (McGrath et al., 2001) and ThreeDness (Nunnari & Simone, 2004). Usually, 3D applications, compared to text-based ones and 2D ones, have certain limitations in terms of resource demand such as bandwidth. They can, however, recreate a social and learning environment that is maximally close to the real world, and with much higher flexibility. According to (Dickey, 1999; Winn, 1993), ”3D virtual worlds provide a possibility for learners to construct, impact and interact with symbolic representations and data first hand which in many ways is consistent with how learners engage and learn in physical world”. Social behavior and interaction in a 3D world is also closest to the one in real life. This is confirmed by for example a study by (Jeffrey & Mark, 1999), comparing social interaction and navigation in traditional chat rooms and a 3D CVE (Active Worlds). Users in the 3D environments exhibited social behavior similar to the one in reality, such as people gathering in conversation groups and keeping personal distance. A comparison with the chat room shows that 3D space provides richer clues about the social situation (for example, who is talking to whom), providing “visual awareness of others”. In addition, 3D landscape influenced social behavior and supported social navigation in a way similar to what is common in real life. This suggests that 3D worlds can allow a more effective and natural extraction of clues about the social situation in the community than in text-based and 2D environments. In addition, 3D worlds provide experiences that are not always possible to replicate in physical world classrooms and provide a collaborative setting for situated and experiential learning (Dickey, 1999). This implies not only advanced possibilities for collaboration, 3D visualization and exchange of experiences, but also unique opportunities for learners to construct and express their identity and social belonging. This can be done through embodiments, created artifacts and interaction with other learners and the environment (Dickey, 1999, Talamo & Ligorio, 2000). This suggests that 3D CVEs have promising potentials for social awareness support. 1.3 Research questions The main focus of the research presented here is supporting social awareness among university students. As the analysis of the problem domain shows that CVEs, especially 3D, can be a useful tool in this context, the main research question of this work is formulated as follows: MRQ: What are the limitations and benefits of 3D collaborative virtual environments for social awareness support among university students? To answer this question, it is necessary to: •
provide a definition of social awareness and identify the existing support mechanisms used by university students, their shortages and therefore the need for additional support;
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analyze the possibilities offered by 3D CVEs in terms of supporting social awareness and thus supplementing the existing mechanisms; derive a set of requirements for a 3D CVE supporting social awareness among university students; empirically evaluate such a CVE to identify associated limitations and benefits.
The main research question is therefore divided into a set of related questions: RQ1: What are the limitations of social awareness mechanisms used by university students, in accordance with the adopted definition? • What are the mechanisms used by university students for supporting social awareness? • What are the limitations of these mechanisms? RQ2: What mechanisms do 3D CVEs offer for support on major dimensions of social awareness among university students? • What are the mechanisms for supporting awareness of resources, activities and social network among university students, in short-term and long-term perspective? RQ3: What are the requirements for 3D CVEs supporting social awareness, based on the identified mechanisms? • According to what dimensions can requirements be classified? • What are the requirements along these dimensions? RQ4: What are the limitations and benefits associated with using a 3D CVE designed according to these requirements for social awareness support in university student communities and groups? • What are the usage patterns in connection with social and learning activities, and what is the associated impact on social awareness? • What are the limitations and benefits associated with using the 3D CVE for social awareness support, and what are associated potentials? 1.4 Research context, method and contributions The research presented here is conducted within the framework of CAGIS research project (Cooperative Agents in Global Information Space). This project has been financed by Norwegian Research Council and involved a number of researchers at the Department of Computer and Information Science, NTNU. This project has been targeted at providing cooperating human problems solvers with support for distributed and concurrent teamwork, and to develop a corresponding IT support (CAGIS, 2001; Ramampiaro et al., 2000). In this context, the focus of this work has been to provide support for collaborative social and learning activities involving university students. The research presented in this thesis is both theoretically and empirically based, following an iterative process and gradually refining the answers to the research questions. The major theoretical background of this work is the Activity theory and research on learning communities described in the works of Vygotsky (1978), Wenger (1999), Engestrom (1987) and others. This allowed to derive the social needs a
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learning group or community might have during the learning process. It was later necessary to supplement this background with additional theoretical perspectives. The motivation for using CVEs for social awareness support is based on both analysis of the relevant literature concerning a range of “traditional” collaborative tools and an empirical evaluation of how these tools are used for social awareness support by university students of our department. Studies of the literature in the CVE field lead to a characterization framework for educational CVEs and characterization of place metaphors. The initial set of requirements for a CVE supporting social awareness is derived from this framework and the theoretical background. To evaluate the requirements, the following design and the underlying principles and assumptions, a prototype, called Viras, was implemented using the Active Worlds technology. The prototype was accessed in exploratory case studies involving students of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. There are generally a number of problems associated with empirical studies of the effect of ICT in a collaborative learning context and their validity. We can mention limited time-span, and experimental settings that are different from real-life social context in which ICT is used. In such situations, unforeseen circumstances connected to the introduction of a new tool may unrealistically restrain the collaborative processes among learners, thus affecting the results (Fjuk & Ludvigsen, 2001). In this way, we can loose overview of the complex interconnection of different aspects, such as organizational arrangements, properties of ICT, educational practices and other factors. This was shown by, for example, Muukkonen et al. (1999), Muukkonen et al. (2001) and Wasson et al. (2000). Also, it is necessary to be careful with forcing the use of a new tool upon the students as it can to a certain degree influence and hamper their natural collaborative and learning practices (Fjuk & Smørdal, 2001; Muukkonen et al., 2001). The prototype has been evaluated in three case studies. The first case study has been designed as an exercise, due to practical and pedagogical conditions as discussed later. This approach has therefore some limitations, as discussed in the former paragraph. The goal of this case was to explore the effect of different aspects of the system on social awareness in the class and associated limitations and benefits. In an additional case the system was used in a more real-life educational situation (a project-based course). The intention was to create an environment where learners can present their project, exchange experiences and have social and educational activities. Another goal was to explore the connection between social awareness achieved by the learners and their learning outcomes. However, as the usage of the system and therefore the background for analysis was very limited (as discussed later), it was later decided to focus on the social awareness issues and the limitations and benefits of Viras in this context. Therefore, the next and last case was again designed as an exercise. The requirements and design were refined in an iterative fashion, following the empirical results from the two first cases. The empirical evaluation was based on triangulation of results from different data sources: logs of conversations and activities, participant observation, interviews, students’ written evaluations and questionnaires. The details of the case studies are described in Chapters 4 and 5. The discussion of validity and evaluation is presented in Chapter 6. This research resulted in the following contributions, which are summarized and discussed in Chapter 7:
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C1. Identification and discussion of existing mechanisms for social awareness support among university students and their limitations. This contribution is related to RQ1. C2. A characterization of CVEs and associated awareness mechanisms along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact. This contribution is related to RQ2. C3. A characterization of place metaphors in educational CVEs, and Archipelago, a place metaphor for a CVE for social awareness support, combining features of identified metaphors. This contribution is related to RQ2. C4. A set of requirements along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact, according to the needs of learning communities and groups. This contribution is related to RQ3. C5. Viras: design and implementation of a 3D virtual world, for social awareness support, in two phases. This contribution is related to RQ4. C6. Evaluation of Viras by case studies in a university environment. This contribution is related to RQ4. Figure 1.1 provides a schematic description of the adopted research method:
Figure 1.1 Research method
1.5 Outline of the thesis This thesis consists of a summary that presents the background and the major results of this research and a collection of 7 research papers where the performed work is described in more detail. Also, an appendix with a short description of the prototype and Active Worlds platform, on which the prototype is based, is attached. The summary is structured as follows: •
Chapter 1, Introduction, presents the problem domain and defines social awareness, discussing its importance for university students and limitations of the existing mechanisms and tools. Then, this chapter suggests the adoption of 3D CVEs as a supplement to existing practices. In this way, Chapter 1 adresses RQ1, which is fully addressed in Paper 1.
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•
•
•
•
• •
Chapter 2 presents the essence of the major theoretical background of this thesis, the Activity theory and the work on learning communities by Wenger (1999) as well as some research on groups and group processes. The focus is on the social needs learning groups and communities may have during the learning process. Chapter 3 presents the related work on cooperative systems in general and educational CVE in particular with associated awareness mechanisms. A classification framework of CVEs along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact and a classification of different place metaphors in educational CVEs is also presented, thus addressing RQ2. This research question is answered in more details in Papers 1 and 2. Chapter 4 describes the first phase of the iterative process, starting with a set of requirements, Requirements I, for a CVE for social awareness support along the 3 dimensions mentioned earlier. It proceeds with the initial design for a virtual world, Viras, based on the place metaphor, Archipelago. Later in this chapter there is a presentation of two case studies with results. The chapter ends with lessons learned, showing the need to revise the requirements and the design of the system. Therefore, Chapter 4, together with Papers 3 and 4 addresses RQ3 and RQ4. Chapter 5 presents revision of requirements and design based on lessons learned as presented in Chapter 4. Later in this chapter there is a presentation of the last case study with results and the lessons learned. This chapter, together with Papers 5, 6 and 7 addresses RQ3 and RQ4. Chapter 6 provides an overall evaluation of the results and discusses issues in connection with the validity and research method. Chapter 7 concludes the summary, discussing contributions and future work.
The papers are structured as follows: • • • • • • •
Paper 1 considers limitations in connections with supporting social awareness among university students with traditional groupware tools and discusses mechanisms provided by CVEs. Paper 2 provides the classification of different place metaphors used in educational CVEs and presents a new metaphor, Archipelago. Paper 3 provides a first set of requirements and a design for a CVE supporting social awareness, Viras. Paper 4 describes the implementation of Viras and empirical results of its usage by the students of our department (Case I). Paper 5 provides a set of intermediate requirements for virtual places as artifacts. Paper 6 presents a second set of requirements for Viras as repository of virtual places for social awareness support. Paper 7 describes the implementation of a repository of virtual places and the usage of the redesigned system (Case II).
The relation of papers and chapters to research questions is summarized in tables 1.1 and 1.2 below. An overview of all papers, connection between them and their relation to the main themes of the thesis and the research questions is visualized in Figure 1.2. It is natural that there exists a certain amount of overlapping between these papers as they all were presented at different research forum. Therefore it was necessary to repeat some results and theoretical background to provide an understandable and
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consistent presentation for the reader. There has also been some divergence in the adopted terminology and presentation of requirements and results from the cases. This summary is therefore meant to summarize and connect together the results presented in the papers.
RQ1 RQ2 RQ3 RQ4
Chapter 1 X
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
X X
X X
X
Chapter 6 X X X X
Chapter 7 X X X X
Table 1.1 Chapters and research questions
RQ1 RQ2 RQ3 RQ4
Paper 1 X X
Paper 2
Paper 3
Paper 4
Paper 5
Paper 6
X
X
Paper 7
X X X
X
Table 1.2 Papers and research questions
Figure 1.2 Papers, main themes and research questions.
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2 Theoretical background The major goal of this work is to investigate the limitations and benefits of using Collaborative Virtual Environments to create an infrastructure for social awareness support among university students. In order to create such an infrastructure, CVEs must be designed taking into account the social nature of learning. Socio-cultural theories have lately been proposed as a theoretical framework for the design of CSCW and CSCL systems because they emphasize the social nature of work and learning, see e.g. (Bardram, 1998; Kuutti, 1994; Gifford & Enyedy, 1999; Fjuk et al., 1999; Miao et al., 1999). This thesis does not aim at designing an environment for collaborative learning directly. However, we seek to create an infrastructure to facilitate social awareness in a learning community and thus the social processes around learning (since learning is a social activity). Therefore, the view on learning as social activity is adopted for deriving a set of requirements for CVEs supporting social awareness. As the design was refined in an iterative fashion, it was later necessary to consider other theoretical approaches. The details can be found in the papers, so only the Activity theory and learning communities approach is presented here as the main background for our design. This chapter is structured as follows: Section 2.1 gives a short introduction to the Activity theory and its importance for CSCW and CSCL design. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 address learning communities and groups, while Section 2.4 contains discussion and presents a reformulated definition of social awareness. 2.1 Activity theory The Activity theory is based on the work by Vygotski (1978), Leont’ev (1981) and later Engestrom (1987). The fundamental unit of analysis is human activity, which is directed towards an object, mediated by cultural artifacts and is social within a culture (Bardram, 1997). A
S
O Figure 2.1 The basic structure of mediated human activity (Bardram, 1998)
Activity theory is based on the idea that culturally defined tools, or artifacts, mediate all activity. This is illustrated by Figure 2.1 where S is a subject (a person), A is a mediating artifact and O is the object or result of the activity (Bardram, 1998). An artifact can therefore be thought of as a tool for mediating activities. In the rest of the thesis, we use the term artifact according to this definition and the way it is understood within the Activity theory. Engestrom summarizes the main components of the theory in the activity structure illustrated in Fig. 2.2 (Engestrøm, 1987):
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Figure 2.2 Activity structure (Engestrøm, 1987)
The main components of the triangle are artifacts, object, division of labor, community, rules, and subject. The components in Fig. 2.1 represent the top of this pyramid. Individuals and groups can be seen as “subjects” situated in communities mediated by rules of participation and division of labor. The artifacts are placed centrally since all human work is characterized by the collaborative production of artifacts; each of them is made with the purpose of mediating a certain activity. The mediating characteristics of an activity is crystallized or objectified into these artifacts (Bardram, 1997). The artifacts are continuously modified and shaped to meet the evolving needs. Previously it has mainly been focused on a single artifact. The recent trend (Engestrøm, 1987) is to consider a whole set of connected artifacts instead of single ones. This results in a system that includes not only multiple cognitive artifacts but also primary ones used in daily practice. In the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Kuutti (1994) uses work activity as a basic unit for analyzing a cooperative working situation for design purposes. Also Bardram (1998) argues that Activity theory can help to understand the way in which work activities are cooperatively realized in order to design efficient cooperative technology. Activity theory can therefore serve as a theoretical foundation for design of CSCW. Bardram (1998) defines CSCW as a Collaborative Work Activities Mediated by Computer based Artifacts. He provides also a framework for understanding of collaboration artifacts and designing of computer artifacts for mediating collaborative work activities. Similarly, in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Learning (CSCL), the focus has lately been shifted to learning activities as unit of analysis. A number of different designs have been used for facilitating learning in communities and groups in the CSCL-field, for example Domain and Learner Centered Designs (Gifford & Enyedy, 1999). The former is based on the transmission model of knowledge transfer. This model suggests that knowledge is an identifiable object that is possessed by a person that can be conveyed from the instructor to the mind of the student, detached from any social context. Because of its focus on the disciplinary domain, it is called Domain Centered design (Gifford & Enyedy, 1999). The Learner Centered Design approach proposes to design learning technology by focusing on the cognitive capabilities and needs of the learner. Gifford & Enyedy (1999) argue that the theories behind these approaches lead to designs that do not fit with the basic participation structures in a classroom. For example, the Domain Centered Design model rewards imitation and memorization while limiting sense-making and meaningful dialogue. The Learner Centered Design sees the learning as a highly individual activity and does not provide enough support for peer interaction. To conclude, both these approaches ignore the social context of learning and the role of conversation and collaboration (Gifford & Enyedy, 1999). According to these authors, Activity theory 15
is considered as a new theoretical framework for CSCL. This is because it in greater degree then the earlier approaches emphasizes the social nature of learning and considers learning as a participation in cultural practice. Gifford & Enyedy (1999) suggest a new design model based on the Activity theory: Activity Centered Design, where the activities performed by learners are placed in the center of the model (Fig. 2.3). At the same time, all the activities are placed on a learning trajectory, followed by the learners during their development. A trajectory in this context can be defined as a continuous motion through successive forms of participation, connecting the past, the present and the future (Wenger, 1999). Other elements in the model are cultural tools (artifacts), teachers and collaborative user groups.
Figure 2.3 Activity Centered Design (Gifford & Enyedy, 1999)
Gifford & Enyedy (1999) argue that the triangle in Figure 2.2 should serve as a checklist for the design of learning environments. The implications for the design of learning environments are according to these authors as follows: • •
Social interaction and conversation plays a fundamental place in learning The way activity is organized can only be understood from its historical context. That means that designers should pay attention to the interaction between multiple trajectories of the individuals. The trajectories include the development of cultural practice, the development of people within a practice and development of ways of participating within the cultural practice. An example can be a student’s movement through different forms of participation in a project group: from a novice to an expert and a leader.
The following sections will consider the properties and needs of learning communities and groups. 2.2 Learning Communities Community is a central component of the Activity theory (Fig. 2.2). Particularly relevant to the discussion is the seminal work on learning communities and communities of practice presented by Wenger (1999). In this perspective,
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“communities of practice can be thought of as shared histories of learning” (Wenger 1999). Each activity is situated on a learning trajectory, so that learners move through activities, progressing from partial to full participants (Gifford & Enyedy, 1999; Wenger, 1999). Continuous negotiation of meaning is the core of social learning and involves two processes: participation and reification, together forming a shared repertoire. The repertoire of a community includes routines, tools, words, ways of doing things, stories, actions, concepts etc., that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice (Wenger, 1999). Participation is the “complex process that combines doing, talking, thinking, feeling, and belonging. It involves our whole person including our bodies, minds, emotions, and social relations” (Wenger, 1999). Reification is the “process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into thingness” (Wenger, 1999). Learning communities can be thought of as shared histories of participation and learning (Wenger, 1999). Members have different roles as master and apprentice and there is a progression through these roles, along the learning trajectories. Therefore, there is a need for artifacts that can comprise the outcome of the activities and thus serve as the shared repertoire of the community and as the indicators of a learner’s movement along trajectories (Tolsby et al., 2001). The collection of such artifacts can be used by the subjects of the community in further activities and to support their movement along the learning trajectory as well as self-reflection and construction of meaning. Another important concept is identity. Identity is defined by Wenger (1999) as negotiated experience, community membership, learning trajectory and nexus of multi-memberships. A learning community can strengthen the identity of participation by incorporating its members’ past into its history and opening new trajectories. As identity is connected to the activities on the learning trajectory, it can be expressed by the artifacts that comprise the outcome of the activities. In this way, the past experiences and history of community members are reified within the shared repertoire as documents, plans, etc. Another aspect of identity is multiple memberships, which involves reconciliation of boundaries and creation of bridges across the landscape of practice. In some cases, the boundaries are reified with explicit markers of membership, for example, titles and degrees, or with boundary objects. They connect and coordinate different practices and communities (Wenger, 1999). Participation and reification can create continuities across boundaries. For example, an artifact, or product of reification, can be present in different communities. At the same time, people can participate in different communities at once. Wenger (1999) argues that learning should be primarily addressed in terms of identities and modes of belonging and only secondary in terms of skills and information. In this perspective, experiences involving new forms of membership, multi-membership and ownership of meaning are at least as important as the curriculum coverage. Social relations and interests play thus a very important role in the development of a learning community.
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2.3 Groups Within communities, members can join in tighter interactions, forming groups. As for members of communities, members of groups go through different trajectories of participation and build up a history of their own. We consider a group as a subject within a community (Fig. 2.2). The result of activities performed by subjects of a community is an artifact, a reification of experience. The collection of such artifacts will comprise the shared repertoire and history of the community, which is also used by groups in further activities. A group goes through a number of phases during its development: belonging, control and interdependence (Schutz, 1958), thus moving along learning and participation trajectories. In order to perform activities and proceed through the phases successfully, negotiate the roles and division of labor, it is crucial to provide effective group communication. Communication structures in the group are also important as indicators of the group’s power structure (Cartwright & Zander, 1968). Also the distribution of resources and control over them provide a clue of the patterns of relationships in the group. 2.4 Theoretical background: discussion This chapter provided a short overview of the major theoretical background of this thesis. The Activity theory and especially the Activity Centered Design Model provide a background for characterization of CVEs presented in the next chapter. The theory concerning learning communities and groups and their needs provides a basis for the requirements for 3D CVE for social awareness support, presented in Chapter 4 and 5. Also, the definition of social awareness can be reformulated from the perspective of the needs of learning communities and groups within the framework of the Activity theory, as discussed below: In a learning community or group within the community, learners move along different learning and participation trajectories. These movements are mediated by rules. The identity and activities of learner are expressed in artifacts, which comprise the shared repertoire of the community. These artifacts are again used to mediate other activities, which are regulated by the division of labor and are directed to an object or target of the activities. For example, students take a course together. They move along learning and participation trajectories when they form and change working groups, make friends and find collaboration partners. They move from “apprentice” to “master” according to existing rules, for example as they master the taught subject better. They perform a number of social and educational activities, such as organizing a class party and working on a project together, according to existing patterns for division of labor. These activities produce artifacts: a picture from the party for the former and a project delivery for the latter. These artifacts express the identity of participants (party participants and authors of the project). The artifacts also express the activities and resources (dancing at the party and expertise in project-related activities). These artifacts become a part of the shared repertoire and can be used to mediate further activities: creation of the class’s photo album (party) and reference for new projects and exam preparation (project deliveries and presentation). The artifacts can also give a number of clues concerning the social situation in a class or group: who is friends
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with whom (being together at the party), who works with whom (project groups), who is expert in certain area/doing similar project. Based on this discussion, the definition of social awareness can be reformulated as follows: Social awareness is awareness of the configurations and developments of learning and participation trajectories of the learners in the communities and groups. This definition can be directly related to the definition in Chapter 1: Social awareness is awareness of the social situation in a group or community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both. This awareness includes knowledge on learners’ resources, activities and social network. Short-term (synchronous) awareness comes from a brief overview of a social situation in the community at a certain moment. Long-term (asynchronous) awareness is awareness of the social situation in general and over a certain period of time. As learners progress through different activities along participation and learning trajectories, from “apprentice” to “master”, their resources in terms of interests, levels of skills and knowledge constantly change. Likewise do their memberships and modes of social belonging, i.e. their place in the social network. Therefore, awareness of the resources, activities and social network of the learners in communities and groups implies awareness of their learning and participation trajectories. Short-term awareness can be thought of awareness of the configuration of the trajectories at the certain moment. Long-term awareness implies awareness the development of the trajectories over a period of time.
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3 Related work The goal of this chapter is to identify mechanisms for social awareness support provided by CVEs. The major focus is on supporting a community of university students who need to find potential collaborators on various learning and social tasks. However, since groups are the subjects within the community according to the Activity theory, they are also considered, though less explicitly than communities. In order to identify these mechanisms, this chapter is structured as follows. Section 3.1 provides a short overview of different issues in connection with supporting human processes, especially collaborative ones, with IT. Section 3.2 narrows the focus on technological support provided for communities, which is the main focus of this research. This provides a background for the following discussion on CVEs and later for evaluation of results. Section 3.3 presents a characterization of CVEs and associated awareness mechanisms, to provide background for the requirements. Section 3.4 considers various place metaphors in educational CVEs in order to provide a background for the design. Section 3.5 concludes the chapter. 3.1 Supporting human processes with IT technology IT supports various human processes in everyday life and work. However, not all tools are successful and function according to the original intention. The major reason for this is, according to (Norman, 1988), that the fundamental principles for designing for people are not followed. For example, if the designer’s and the user’s conceptual models are different, the tool may be used in a wrong way. To design a functional system, the designer therefore must know and understand the user and processes the computer system is intended to support. Also, a true understanding of a tool can only come through usage as the tool can change the system and therefore the requirements. The system must match the skills, expectations and needs of the user, which is difficult to predict due to individual differences among the users (Myers, 1994). The picture gets more complex if one moves from single-user applications to systems for supporting cooperative work. CSCW applications aim at supporting individuals who share resources to work collaboratively together to some common end. Users interact with the system both individually and as a social group/organization, so the provided support must support both individual and group processes (Murray & Hewitt, 1994). The field of CSCW is therefore multidisciplinary as it has to take into account a wide range of issues when designing cooperative applications. These include social dynamics in groups and organizational policies, processes and norms. Therefore, in addition to “pure” computer science disciplines, one has to consider and refer to spheres such as psychology, sociology and business administration. In this context, Bannon & Schmidt (1991) identifies these core issues for CSCW: •
Articulating cooperative work. The commonly accepted view of how people in an organization work, relies heavily on the traditional bureaucratic model, where people perform a number of tasks according to a set of specified rules (Bannon & Schmidt, 1991). In this context, Dix (1994) stresses the importance of recognizing real-life and informal practices in collaborative work processes as opposed to the official practices and procedures. The informal interactions in an organization are 20
•
•
• • •
crucial for articulation and conduct of work. Therefore, a successful cooperative tool should take into account these informal communication channels and provide at least two “level of language” (Robinson, 1989). That is, in addition to the naked functionality of CSCW application, the system should provide facilities allowing users to freely negotiate task allocation and articulation, or multiple alternative channels of interaction (Bannon & Schmidt, 1991). Sharing an information space. Bannon & Schmidt (1991) discuss the importance of maintenance of common information space among people performing cooperative work. People who collaborate may have different conceptual frameworks. Also, due to diversity of individuals in an organization and their goals the information gathered may be subject to misrepresentation. Therefore, CSCW systems should allow to understand the context, i.e. provide contextual knowledge of the conceptual frame of reference of the originator. Adopting the technology to the organization, and vice versa. Orlikowski (1992) argues that effective utilization of CSCW systems is strongly influenced by social and organizational matters (practices, norms, reward systems). This is illustrated by the classical example of introduction of Lotus Notes into a company (Orlikowski, 1992). In a competitive business culture, many users preferred to use Notes to increase personal productivity, rather than for collaborative work, and were reluctant to spend time on learning the technology and sharing resources. Other examples can be found in the fields of knowledge management in organizations and organizational memory. Organizational memory can according to Ackerman (1998) be supported either by making recordable knowledge retrievable (for example, in a database with documents) or by making individuals with knowledge accessible (listing persons with different skills/“yellow pages”). The tools for knowledge management vary accordingly from repositories and search engines to expertise databases and electronic forums (Dingsøyr, 2002). The effectiveness of utilization of these tools, as other collaborative tools, depends on a number of organizational and social factors. These include organizational costs in connection with usage of the tools/codification of the knowledge, organizational culture for knowledge sharing and social norms such as the willingness to share and ask for help (Ackerman, 1998; Dingsøyr, 2002). In this context, Grudin (1994) mentions a number of issues in connection with groupware and their effectiveness in supporting human processes and social dynamics in working groups: Work vs. benefit: the necessity for group members to perform tasks they otherwise would not do (e.g. updating electronic calendars). Critical mass problem: not enough users willing to use the system even if it is “good”. Social, political and motivational factors: the “unspoken” rules and processes that are difficult to capture and support.
CSCW systems span over a wide range of applications, supporting different aspects of cooperative work. This list is not exhaustive and just provides an indication of mechanisms and processes supported by groupware tools (Ellis et al., 1991): • • •
Message systems (e-mail); Multi-user editors (systems for collaboratively editing a document); Group decision and electronic meeting support (voting, ranking, idea generation); 21
• •
Computer conferencing (e.g. desktop conferencing); Coordination systems (allow individuals to view own actions and relevant actions by others, generates automatic reminders and alerts).
In analyzing the constraints of integrating CSCL applications in the educational context we face problems similar to those, which have been reported in the CSCW field (Lehtinen et al., 1998). Generally, CSCL systems concentrate on refining and integrating the learning process and the subject knowledge of the students with the help of other collaborating partners. Students interact with one or more collaborative peers to solve a given problem, mediated by the collaborative learning system (Kumar, 1996). CSCL applications can be divided into following main groups (Bannon, 1989): •
• •
Computer as data-gathering tool. The computer can be used simply as a datagathering tool that can support the investigation of collaborative learning processes between people, allowing for presentation of a task, and perhaps recording of responses, and later analysis of these responses. Computer as tutor. The computer can also be seen as a "tutor" with whom the pupil interacts, or even collaborates. Computer as mediator. The computer can help students to communicate and collaborate on joint activities, providing assistance in the coordination process and serving as a medium through which individuals and groups can collaborate with others.
As in CSCW context, in an educational setting, groupware often requires that some people do additional work. This can include entering or processing information that the application requires or produces or carrying out activities that do not naturally belong to users’ work. If this is not experienced as a natural and useful part of the study or teaching process, it is not likely that this tool will be accepted by all the participants, limiting the usefulness of the application (Lehtinen et al., 1998). In this way, social, organizational and political processes will always be involved in the adoption or rejection of particular technologies, both at the institutional level, and within the classroom - by teachers and students (Bannon, 1989). Therefore, the future research on CSCL should more systematically focus on the cultural, organizational, and individual constraints of the school context and the teaching-learning situation. (Lehtinen et al., 1998). This short overview shows that that designers of tools supporting human processes must take into account a number of factors, such as properties of human cognition and perception and the conceptual models the user have of technology and the nature of their tasks. However, a successful acceptance of tools supporting collaboration depends on a number of additional issues. Problems with adoption of collaborative tools do not always originate from the shortcomings of the applied technology (Lehtinen et al., 1998). Cooperative activities happen in the context of complex social interactions on different levels, from small groups to complex organizations, with a certain set of norms, working and learning practices. These practices and social dynamics vary between different environments, so a tool successfully utilized in one organization or university may be a total fiasco in another. Therefore, an evaluation of usage and acceptance of a CSCW or CSCL tool demands a reflection on the social and organizational issues in the surrounding environment. 22
3.2 Communityware As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, the major focus of this work is on supporting learning communities. Therefore, we look in more detail at the area within the CSCW and CSCL field that considers community support. The electronic support for groups and communities developed in slightly different directions. Communityware concentrated mostly on the building process, i.e. finding people with similar interests, while groupware focused on the collaboration process (Schlichter et al., 1998). The main activities in communities are communication and finding right people for collaboration (Schubert & Koch, 2003). Therefore, communityware can be defined as a medium for initiating contact and communicating with unknown collaborators who have similar interests and preferences, while groupware is a medium for contacting and interacting with known collaborators to achieve a shared goal (Schlichter et al., 1998). While groupware applications typically support the collaborative work of already organized individuals, communityware tools aim at supporting interaction among more diverse and amorphous group of people. It focuses more on an earlier stage of collaboration, such as group formation, and typically supports the process of organizing people who are willing to share some mutual understanding, experience, knowledge etc. (Ishida, 1998). However, the borders between these two application groups are rather fluid. A potential benefit of being part of a community is the easier identification of other community members who have the required competencies and skills and are willing to help and exchange information. Therefore, the main aspect of community support is to facilitate the identification and selection of potential collaboration partners (Schlichter et al., 1998; Schubert & Koch, 2003) and to encourage the development of mutual knowledge (knowing what other know) and mutual activities (doing what others do) (Ishida, 1998). In this context, Koch & Lacher (2000) identify following basic mechanisms for community support: • • •
Providing a medium for communication and for exchange of information and comments. Discovering and visualizing relationships. Using the knowledge about relationships to perform (semi-) automatic filtering and personalization to reduce information overload.
Communityware includes a wide range of different applications, based on the mechanisms mentioned above. Examples include: MUDs, various chat tools (Schlichter et al., 1998), 3D virtual environments allowing casual meetings (FreeWalk, worlds in the Active Worlds universe), PDA-based applications (Ishida, 1998) and web-based applications (e.g. WiKo, Prinz et al., 2003). The applications span over various educational systems such as Lecture 2000 (Schlichter et al., 1998), Vetumini (Active Worlds Educational Universe), geographic communities such as Blacksburg Electronic Village, patient communities (Krchmar et al., 2003), organizations. As this work focuses on supporting social awareness among university students, it is necessary to look at major types of community support in universities. Most existing work in this field focuses on supporting learning communities and knowledge-
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management support in special interests groups. Koch (2003) mentions the following major types of such support: •
•
•
Systems that provide community support in universities within the area of CSCL and e-learning. Examples include WebBoard, BSCW, LEEP (Robins, 2001) and Vetumini (Active Worlds). The problem with them is that they are too specialized on e-learning and group work and do not provide medium for supporting other needs (Koch, 2003). Community support systems that support the information flow in university departments (announcements, organizational info, scientific resources). Examples include Campus Pipeline (Koch, 2003) and generally Intranet applications. However, they do not exploit full potential on community support in university environment. Applications for basic communication and matchmaking support for students and alumni. Examples include Drehscheibe (Koch, 2003), a web-based portal where student can subscribe for information, put out information about themselves and be “matched” with other students with similar interests.
In this context, the support this work intends to provide spans across all these categories, with most focus on the last one. We seek to provide some functionality to allow facilitation of basic learning and social tasks. We want to create environment where students can have access to and share various resources. And finally, we attempt to facilitate matchmaking and search for collaboration partners by providing an infrastructure for social awareness support. 3.3 Characterization of educational CVEs This section focuses on social awareness mechanisms provided by CVEs. CVEs are generally characterized according to the used technology, for example immersive vs. non-immersive, or number of dimensions (2D vs. 3D). The characterization of CVEs suggested here is inspired by the Activity Centered Design model, proposed by Gifford & Enyedy (1999) for design and analysis of CSCL environments as described in Chapter 2 (Fig. 2.3). Though the focus of this work is not collaborative learning directly, it aims at creating an infrastructure around learning activities. Therefore, this model is used. In the center of this model are activities at time t, t+1, t+2 etc. Around the activity, there are collaborative students groups, artifacts to mediate learners’ activities, and teacher (or more capable students). With time, learners progress through different activities as they move along their learning and participation trajectories. In accordance with this model, we need a CVE to provide a framework around an activity at a certain time. Therefore, this thesis suggests to characterize the CVE, in which this activity takes places, in terms of learner, place and artifact: •
• •
Learner: corresponds to collaborative student groups and teacher (or more capable students) in the model. The representation of user in most CVEs is based on a single user (though a group can log in as one user sometimes), therefore an individual learner is used as a unit of analysis. Place: is where learners, artifacts and their activities are situated in (virtually). Artifact(s): correspond to cultural tools in the model that mediate learner’s activities, such as working documents, message boards, web links to lecture notes, online texts and books. This is in line with the discussion on artifacts in Chapter 2. 24
These dimensions can be illustrated with the following example. Learners, or a group of students with different levels of expertise perform an activity (discussion of an exercise) in a virtual environment in a group room (place) they have created. Their avatars (visual or graphical representations of users (Dickey, 1999)) or nicks (names) may refer to their level of expertise (e.g. teacher avatar/child avatar). While performing this activity, they use and refer to artifacts contained in this place. These may include links to online papers or lecture notes that are the part of curriculum, a sign stating distribution of tasks, links and signs with info of the participants of the activity. Their activity may result in new artifacts: a record of discussion or chat log, which can be put in the group place (for example as a web link to an online text file) or a sign with updated division of tasks. These artifacts can be used in later activities, for example the record of the collaborative discussion can be reworked by a moderator into an exercise delivery. The link to this exercise delivery can be put into the group place, for example on a virtual table. These artifacts (the log of conversation, a sign with task distribution) may be also examined by others and thus give a clue about resources, activities and social relations in the group. The awareness mechanisms offered by CVEs can be classified according to these dimensions. This is also discussed in Papers 1 and 3. CVE applications are based on the same general awareness mechanisms as other CSCW applications (Gutwin et al., 1996), such as direct communication and feedthrough. According to (Greenhalgh, 1998), 3D CVEs have an additional set of basic awareness mechanisms such as disjoint membership and topological distance (as discussed in more details in Paper 1). In addition to the basic awareness mechanisms, more “high-level” mechanisms are needed to support social and learning activities (Erickson & Kellogg, 2000; Wolf, 2000), based on the low-level ones. The following sections will therefore provide an overview of educational CVEs and of associated high-level social awareness mechanisms along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact. We divide the highlevel mechanisms into primary and secondary ones. The primary mechanisms for each dimension are structured according to the major dimensions of social awareness: resources, activities and social network. For each component of social awareness we identify mechanisms that support short-term and long-term awareness. We also present less central, secondary mechanisms, which provide support for the primary ones. Different elements of CVEs, presented below, can therefore be associated to primary or secondary mechanisms, or both, depending on the situation and context. To illustrate these mechanisms, we refer to the scenario described in Chapter 2 and continued in the previous paragraph (students taking a course together). The identified mechanisms provide an answer to RQ2. 3.3.1 Learner The learner is the user of the system. Elaborating on the classification proposed by Dickey (1999) for users, the following main elements for constructing learners are identified: presence, embodiment and identity. Presence is the extent to which a user feels that he is in the virtual world and to which extent other users and the environment appear to react to and be aware of the user (Hindmarsh et al., 1998). Witmer & Singer (1998) defines presence as “the subjective experience for being in one place or environment, even when one is physically 25
situated in another”. In order to support awareness in a virtual community, the system should provide indication about the presence of the individuals and visibility of individuals and their actions. Hindmarsh et al. (1998) distinguish between personal, social and environmental presence: •
•
•
Personal presence is defined as the extent to which one feels as if they are in a virtual world (Hindmarsh et al., 1998), with the following components determining engagement in the environment: view, action point and the position in the environment (Buscher et al., 2001). All these components are connected to the person’s aura, i.e. what he can see and be aware of, such as other users in the immediate neighborhood. Social presence is defined, on the other hand, as the extent to which other beings in the world appear to exist and react to the user (Hindmarsch et al., 1998). The basic sense of social presence in most virtual environments is supported by for example providing a list of persons online (textually) and a group of avatars (visually), therefore indicating the persons present in the various regions of awareness. An additional dimension of social presence is the mutual distances (both immediate and topological ones) between users’ avatars, their position, orientation and grouping (Jeffrey & Mark, 1999). Environmental presence is the extent to which the user feels that the environment appears knowledgeable of their avatar’s actions (Hindmarsh et al., 1998) and mostly depends on the technical possibilities of the system. This knowledgeability is often shown as feedback to the user’s actions, for example animation of user’s interactions with the environment (Cuddihy & Walters, 2000).
User embodiment is concerned with the provision of users with a representation to make others and themselves aware of their presence in a virtual space (Mania & Chalmers, 1998). An important part of human communication in the physical world is body language like gestures and body postures, facial expression, direction of gaze (Salem & Earle, 2000), as well as clothes and make-up. CVEs support these features to varying degrees. Embodiment can be supported in different ways: choice of avatars, body language, navigational and observational possibilities (Dickey, 1999): •
•
•
•
Avatars represent the identity of users, their status and their accessibility (Salem & Earle, 2000). The choice of avatars, associated functionality and modification possibilities vary among different systems. For example Active Worlds provide a predefined list of about 30 avatars users can choose from. Body language. Some of the CVEs, like Active Worlds, offer a number of predefined gestures like WAVE and DANCE. The body language can also be generated by extracting key words from the text messages, for example, LOL and Kiss (Salem & Earle, 2000). Navigation. In most virtual worlds users can navigate by pressing the arrow buttons on the keyboard or manipulating the mouse, to move into new rooms and spaces or make the avatar turn and then move in the right direction. Depending on the embodiment chosen, the user can have different possibilities for navigation, like “drive”, “walk” “fly” and “teleport”. In additional to the movement analogous to that in real life, the user can move along the topological ties in the space, for example following a link. Observation. In some systems the user is capable of observing the world from the 3rd person perspective, as well viewing different parts of the world from various 26
altitudes, zooming in- and out parts of the world, or acquire individually tailored views (Jåå-Aro & Snowdown, 2001). Identity is often tied to a user nick, avatar or a unique user number. It can be expressed in a number of ways: •
•
Communication and social reputation. The identity is often associated with a reputation, a circle of acquaintances, a place in the social hierarchy in the virtual world (Jakobsson, 2002) and is often not constant (Talamo & Ligorio, 2000). The reputation is usually created through communication. The studies of early textbased CVEs, e.g. (Bruckman, 1997), show the importance of communication in the identity construction in virtual environments. Created artifacts. Another way of identity construction is the manipulation of artifacts (Snowdown et al., 2001) and co-construction of environment (Talamo & Ligorio, 2000). For example, in Active Worlds, identity is tightly coupled to the artifacts the user creates, such as personal pictures, houses, signs and links.
The learner dimension can therefore provide the following mechanisms for supporting social awareness among university students: •
•
•
Resources: • Short-term awareness. Learners can express and obtain awareness of the each other’s resources by choice of avatar and real-time communication. For example, students in the example in the beginning of the chapter can use an avatar such as “teacher” or “child” according to their level of expertise. • Long-term awareness. Created artifacts (e.g. links to project files) and communication history (chat records of discussions) can also provide awareness of their skills and knowledge. Social network: • Short-term awareness. The sense of presence, communication and embodiment can provide awareness of social network at the moment. This can e.g. be done by indicating who is around (overview of the avatars), whom they are talking to (grouping of avatars), and gestures made by the avatars. Also, students in the same group may use similar avatars and express social relations “verbally” through chat, e. g.: “We are going to the movies tonight”. • Long-term awareness. Long-term awareness mechanisms include expression of social belonging through records of conversations and created artifacts, either explicitly, for example via a sign with a text (“I am in group 5”) or implicitly, by for example positioning of a virtual flower in a friend’s house. Activities: • Short-term awareness. The awareness of activities can be achieved through observing directly what avatars are doing, who is participating and what they are talking about. For example one can see who is gathered in a virtual meeting room (sense of presence and embodiment) and follow their communication and movements.
27
•
•
Long-term awareness. One can also reflect upon information expressed in conversations or left in artifacts by users, for example a log of the meeting where a project was discussed, or a sign with the division of project tasks. Secondary mechanisms for social awareness support. Awareness information can be collected and expressed by choosing appropriate embodiment (“a bird”) with associated navigation functionality and thus easily moving between different awareness regions. The environment can also provide overview by mechanisms unattainable in real world such as a “sky view”. Personal and environmental presence also facilitates collection of awareness information as it makes being in the virtual world more realistic.
3.3.2 Place The notion of place is important for social awareness support for two main reasons. First, many of the basic awareness mechanisms are tied to various characteristics of the place, such as aura, line of sight and k-nearest neighbor (Paper 1). These mechanisms allow the user to have an overview over the events in the intermediate neighborhood, within the “line of horizon”. Second, place has an important social function and provides a background for social events, user embodiments and artifacts. Virtual places can be classified along the dimensions outlook, structure, and role: • •
•
Outlook. By the outlook of a virtual environment we refer to how it “looks like”. The design could be quite abstract or, on the contrary, seek to recreate a certain place as closely as possible, for example a campus (Maher, 1999). Structure. By the structure we understand the mutual relations between different parts of the virtual environment, for example the mutual position of rooms within a virtual campus or the spatial organization of buildings in a 3D world. The structure can be predefined or created and modified by the users. Place structure also visualizes the existing social structures and power relations in learning group and community, e.g. DomeCity MOO experiment (Rayborn, 2001). Places can be structured both physically and topologically (through links), providing different possibilities for awareness management. Role. CVEs can play a number of roles, such as a meeting and working place (Talamo & Ligerio, 2000), an information space for accessing and sharing information, an environment for simulations and demonstrations of scientific concepts and art, and an arena for role-playing and story-telling (Machado et al., 2000). A system with a given design and structure can have one major role or several overlapping, interleaving roles, intended by the designer or introduced by the user.
The place dimension can therefore support social awareness in following ways: •
Resources: • Short-term awareness is not very relevant in this context as examining and creating places (e.g. a house) to reveal and signalize resources is too time-consuming and therefore ineffective in the short-time perspective compared to signalizing such awareness through avatars, user names and chat.
28
•
•
•
•
Long-term awareness. The design (outlook) of place can provide awareness of resources of the creator. For example, the complexity and design of a building may reveal the student’s building skills (mastering of a particular toolset, such as AW building tools), general skills in building design and architecture, areas of interest and expertise (e.g. the place is formed as a spaceship). Social network: • Short-term awareness. Place can play different roles and thus serve as an arena where mutual positions and orientations of the learner’s embodiments provide awareness of their availability and mutual social relations and social network. For example, two student avatars are standing together apart from the others, indicating they are engaged in a private conversation. • Long-term awareness. Place can provide long-term awareness by its structure and outlook, such as by showing the borders between different group areas. For example, we can assume that students building their virtual houses with similar design or outlook and closely together are connected to each other in real life as well, such as being friends or a part of one working group. Activities: • Short-term awareness. Place enhances awareness of up-to-moment activities by providing a framework for chance encounters and communication similar to what learners can experience in real life. To accomplish this, the virtual place can play a corresponding role, such as a meeting place or a virtual stage. For example, in a common meeting place, a user may bump into another user, observe what he is doing and start a conversation. • Long-term awareness. Places can also provide awareness of past activities, both social and educational, as these activities leave their traces in the place and form it, modifying its role, outlook and structure. For example, students build collaboratively an “exhibition” hall for their project, so visitors can see how far they have come and what their project is about. Secondary mechanisms for social awareness support. The structure and outlook of places and its components can provide clues and functionalities for navigation and possible actions. For example, a user can see what is in his “line of sight” and in what direction he should therefore go. Constructions created by other people, such as buildings, virtual bridges and “teleportation” links suggest directions to follow, thus supporting social navigation (Jeffrey & Mark, 1999). Places of different types (“private” houses, “meeting” rooms) with associated facilities suggest the way to use these places and activities that can be hold there.
3.3.3 Artifact An important aspect of interacting in the CVEs is manipulation of artifacts. We can differentiate between pre-designed artifacts for common use, such as whiteboards and bulletin boards, and those created by individual users or groups, such as documents and graphical items.
29
The artifact is the smallest unit of awareness management, with all the basic awareness management forms applicable to it. When artifacts are shared, they become both the subject and the medium for communication (Snowdown et al., 2001). Artifacts can serve communicational purposes (thus mediating awareness information) in following ways: •
•
•
Reflecting activities. An artifact can provide information about the activities performed on it. For example, users can observe the modification of the artifact directly, either in real time (animation of other users’ actions on artifact, pointers with the name of the modifier, highlighting etc.) or post factum, by reflecting on the change in the parameters (position, color, attached text etc.). Reflecting learners. An artifact can reflect the identity of the learner performing the activities. This information can be provided directly by observing avatars performing actions on artifacts or through its parameters, e.g. by leaving records on the artifact with the information on who changed it and when or positioning it in one’s house. Appearance and functionality. Artifacts can have different appearance and look like everything from whiteboards, 3D models of human body to documents and virtual furniture. Artifacts can also have different functions, such as serving as a web link or moving when activated. The appearance can in many cases be connected to the functionality. For example, in Active Worlds, an artifact that looks like a sign, has the ability to display text.
The artifact dimension can therefore support social awareness in following ways: •
•
Resources: • Short-term awareness is not very relevant in this context as examining and creating artifacts reflecting resources (e.g. a sign with corresponding information) is rather time-consuming and thus ineffective in the shortterm perspective compared to e.g. direct communication. • Long-term awareness. Artifacts can mediate long-term awareness of the resources (identity, knowledge, skills etc.) of the learners who own or change the artifact by reflecting their identity and activities. It can for example be done through user identification on the artifact such as user name (reflecting learners). It can also be done through the appearance of the artifact (picture of a UML diagram, indicating some expertise in UML), attached text (stating the programming skills explicitly), web links on the artifact to project documents or summer jobs (reflecting activities). Social network: • Short-term awareness is not very relevant in this context as examining and creating artifacts reflecting social network (e.g. teleportation links connecting friends) is rather time-consuming and therefore not very effective in the short-term perspective compared to e.g. taking a glance at grouping of the learner avatars. • Long-term awareness. Artifacts can mediate long-term awareness of the social network around the owner/creator by reflecting his/her identity and activities (thus indicating collaboration partners). It can e.g. be done by the artifact’s position (for example, located in the working group 5 area), the contained links (to friends and partners) and by traces of several people
30
•
•
collaborating on it (such as user names of the students creating a virtual project presentation together). Activities: • Short-term awareness. Artifacts can mediate short-term awareness of activities performed by the learners in real-time by synchronously changing their status and parameters such as shape, size, text. For example, one user can watch as another user creates a virtual house wall (and thus is building a house at this moment), thus reflecting his activities. • Long-term awareness. Artifacts can convey long-term awareness of activities by keeping traces of activities in terms of permanently changed status and parameters. A user can find a new message on a white board left by another user before, for example “Who knows the answer to exercise question 2?”, indicating that this user is working on this question. Artifacts can also contain explicit references to activities such as links to projects in progress and logs of group discussions (reflecting learners and activities). Secondary mechanisms for social awareness support. Artifacts can provide functionality for a number of learning and social tasks. Examples include an online textbook or a set of lecture notes, a sign where a student can leave a question to the teacher or a picture holder to put in a party picture from the scenario in Chapter 2. Artifacts can encourage to collaborative and more effective usage by indicating what tasks they can support: for example, signs for filling in text or leaving messages with attached explanatory text (“put your comments here”) or links indicating by appearance what they are leading to (a “computer” with a link to computer science project).
3.3.4 Awareness mechanisms: summary Table 3.1 summarizes the discussion above and gives an overview of the role of different aspects of CVEs for supporting awareness of resources, social network and activities in short-term and long-term perspective. The most important components are listed for each category. 3.4 Place metaphors in educational CVEs This section builds on Section 3.3.2 and considers place metaphors, focusing more in depth on the place dimension. This focus is justified by the importance of place for social life and learning. For example, the existence of an environment where learners can have and share experiences is acknowledged as one of the main requirements for learning (Maher et al., 2001). Also, as stated in (O’Day et al., 1998), “the practices people develop are crucially dependent on where they take place”. A place metaphor denotes an underlying concept behind the design of the system of places in a CVE. To provide more understanding for how place can convey awareness and to provide a background for our design, this section will consider the classification of place metaphors in educational CVEs. The metaphors are characterized along the dimensions of resemblance of physical place and roles, as discussed in more details in Paper 2. The former dimension relates to the outlook and structure of virtual places, while the latter corresponds to place roles: Resemblance of physical place. Place metaphors can be characterized in relation to their intent of creating a virtual place that resembles a real one, implying that the 31
virtual environment provides an analogy to a part of the real world. Only two of these metaphors are here considered because of their relevance in education. Learner Resources Social network
Activities
Secondary mechanisms Place Resources Social network
Short-term
Long-term
• • • • • • • • • • •
Avatar Communication Avatar and body language Social presence Communication Avatar and body language Social presence Communication Navigation Observation Personal and environmental presence
• • • •
Created artifacts Communication records Created artifacts Communication records
• •
Created artifacts Communication records
• •
Not relevant Role
Activities
•
Secondary mechanisms Artifact Resources
• •
• Outlook • Outlook • Structure Role • Outlook • Structure • Role Structure and outlook provide indications of possible usage Facilities associated with different roles facilitate corresponding tasks
•
Not relevant
Social network
•
Not relevant
Activities
•
Reflecting activities
Secondary mechanisms
• •
Functionality associated with artifacts Appearance of artifacts, indicating possible usage and functionality
• • • • • •
Reflecting activities Reflecting learners Reflecting activities Reflecting learners Reflecting activities Reflecting learners
Table 3.1 CVEs and awareness mechanisms
•
•
CVEs as buildings and campuses. Several universities and schools introduced virtual representations of themselves (eCollege, Virtual Campus, Diversity University, Active Worlds Educational Universe etc.) providing an analogy of the corresponding place in the real world (Maher, 1999). The rooms and the buildings of the campus give an idea about the social environment, personal office space, and available equipment. CVEs as frontiers. Frontiers can be thought of as land to claim and conquer, and horizons to extend. Many systems use this metaphor and are based on the idea of the virtual environment as landscapes to create and territories to claim, providing a significant amount of control on the place structure (Hudson-Smith, 2002; Schroeder et al., 2001).
CVEs and their roles. In many CVEs virtual places represent an abstraction designed to serve specific purposes, for example, allowing people with similar interests to talk together or providing access to certain information. Therefore, CVEs can play a
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number of roles: meeting places, information spaces, virtual stages, demonstrations and exhibitions, and shared workplaces. •
•
•
•
•
CVEs as meeting places. A meeting place in a CVE is an electronic container where meetings and related activities happen continuously over time (Snowdown et al., 2001), containing a number of artifacts for facilitating the meetings, e.g. whiteboards. Examples include graphical 2D rooms for class parties (WorldsAway, (Neal, 1997)) or 3D meeting places for online designer classes in ActiveWorlds (Dickey, 1999). CVEs as information space. There have been a number of attempts to combine information visualization and navigation with collaborative virtual environments, often using 3D. In such CVEs, users can observe what data are accessed by other users and how it is done. An example that combines the principles of hypermedia together with the traditional campus metaphor is Virtual syllabus from Business Computing Skills Class (Dickey, 1999). CVEs as virtual stages. A virtual stage is a virtual place where some kind of acting takes place, either by the users themselves or by artifacts created by them. An example is Teatrix, a virtual environment that allows children to collaboratively create stories on a virtual stage (Machado et al., 2000). CVEs as demonstrations and exhibitions. Due to the increasing possibilities of multimedia and VR technology, 3D CVEs are to a greater degree used to demonstrate concepts that are difficult to represent efficiently enough in real life. Examples include complex physical phenomena or 3D geometry, arts, physical experiments, historical places etc (Youngblut, 1998). CVEs as shared workplaces. A virtual shared workplace is a virtual place where the users work on a common task using shared artifacts, synchronously or asynchronously, often geographically separated. There exist a number of worlds in Active Worlds Educational Universe (Vetumini, VanGogh) where students work collaboratively to create pieces of art, demonstrations, and exhibitions.
As shown above, virtual environment provided by any CVE system can be classified according to the metaphor(s) it adopts. Some systems combine more than one metaphor along the same dimension in order to provide a richer arena for collaboration. For instance, the workplace metaphor is often used together with the stage metaphor. For example, in Theatre of work (McGrath & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1999), the workplace is represented as a stage where actions, interests and documents users work on are depicted in a symbolic way. Combining different metaphors in educational CVEs is therefore necessary because none of the described metaphors alone is sufficient for supporting learning communities and groups (Paper 2). 3.5 Related work: discussion This chapter has provided analysis of different educational CVEs and the associated social awareness mechanisms along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact. This chapter has also presented a classification of different place metaphors in educational CVEs. The understanding of how CVEs can support social awareness along major dimensions in a real-life educational situation will provide a background for a set of requirements, a place metaphor and design for a CVE for social awareness support, as described in the next chapter. The related work presented here will also provide a framework for evaluation of the results in Chapter 6. 33
4 Requirements, design and empirical evaluation: phase I 4.1 Initial requirements (Requirements I) Based on the understanding of learning communities and groups presented in Chapter 2, this section presents a list of requirements for a CVE supporting social awareness. The major goal behind is primarily to create an environment where members of a learning community (e.g. students taking the same course) could communicate, have common activities, share resources and identify potential cooperation partners by increasing their social awareness. An additional goal is to enhance cooperation and awareness within groups by providing places where groups could have meetings, keep common resources and display information about their activities and group members. The initial requirements (Requirements I) are based on the definition of social awareness in Section 2.5 and the awareness mechanisms associated with the three dimensions of CVEs in Chapter 3. In this way, the requirements show how different dimensions of CVEs can provide awareness of the learning and participation trajectories, thus providing a preliminary answer to RQ3. The details are presented in Paper 3. Requirements are presented in the table 4.1 below: Requirement Learner L1 Representation of user L2 Communication L3 Navigation and observation L4 Awareness provided by environment Place P1 Framework for activities and structure P2 Dynamic structure P3 Outlook P4 Different roles Artifact A1 Repertoire artifacts
of
A2 Association of artifacts to learners A3 Association of artifacts to activities
Description The representation of each individual learner must evolve with and reflect the movements of the learner along the learning and participation trajectories as well as the learner identity and activities. The construction of identity, activities and recognition of communicational patterns should be supported by providing necessary communication and artifact manipulation facilities. The embodiment of a learner must offer effective navigational and observational possibilities, to allow collection of awareness information and performance of activities. The environment should make the learners aware of other learners, their trajectories, activities and mutual relations. The place(s) should provide a framework for the activities performed there and be structured, possibly hierarchically, to reflect the structure of communities and groups. The structure must be dynamic, to reflect and facilitate the changing needs, structures, activities and trajectories of the communities and groups involved. The outlook can be static, but it must reflect the spirit and identity of the communities and groups. The environment should support a flexible usage of different parts of the place for playing different roles. There should be a collection of artifacts to facilitate mediating of communication, learning, task completion and other activities, and comprise a shared repertoire for the community. It must be possible to associate artifacts to learners, to provide the awareness of their personality, participation and learning trajectories. It must be possible to leave traces of learner activities on the artifacts.
Table 4.1 Requirements I
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4.2 Viras: design I To investigate the feasibility of the requirements, a virtual world, Viras, was developed (Paper 3, 4). See Appendix A for details. Viras is based on the metaphor of archipelago (Paper 2), with islands connected to other islands via teleportation links, bridges, and roads. Islands are populated by users and various types of artifacts. The overview below shows realization of Requirements I: Learner • • • •
In Viras, users are represented by avatars, artifacts they create and the history of communications. The avatar is chosen from a predefined list, with a set of gestures attached. Users leave their traces where they “live”, participate or just visit (L1). Users can communicate by text chat, messages, creating and changing artifacts and places, making gestures, changing avatar position etc (L2). The user can navigate through the environment by walking, flying, or by following teleportation links left by others and observe the environment from different perspectives (L3). The in-built list of users online, as well as avatars present, their position and mutual orientation, provide the awareness of other learners present (L4).
Place •
•
•
•
The outlook of Viras, which is partly static, is chosen to be an Archipelago in order to support an informal atmosphere. This metaphor was adopted after analyzing various place metaphors used in educational CVEs, trying to combine different features in order to achieve a high degree of flexibility. An island defines clear territorial boundaries, but without the closeness of e.g. rooms and buildings. Also, islands connected to form an archipelago can serve as metaphor of the way communities and groups can be combined, reflecting the social structures and relations within them: for example, each person lives in a building or a part of it; each group owns one or more islands, forming an archipelago representing the community. See Figures 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 (P3). All islands and buildings are hierarchically connected by teleportation links, roads or bridges, in this way providing an overview, especially from the “bird’s-eye view”, of the existing structures by clear distinction of borders and units of community building against the “sea” background, thus promoting awareness of the community development (see e.g. Fig. 4.4) (P1). The structure is fully dynamic, since users can freely modify all constructions that are public or their own property, such as rooms, houses, islands, bridges. The indention was to create an informal atmosphere for socializing and to ensure a higher degree of flexibility for community development by providing enough open space (sea) for building and building blocks. A number of house and islands templates are provided for customization (P2). The environment can be used both for socializing and work. The main island provides users with a common meeting place, a transportation node and a collection of artifacts necessary for their activities (P4).
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Artifact •
• •
Artifacts for different purposes are provided everywhere so the users can fill in their parameters, copy and create new ones, such as templates for message boards, document links, teleportation links, picture and text holders and examples of buildings (see templates in Fig. 4.1) (A1). The users can leave their traces by creating and changing their own artifacts with a name and time stamp on it, copying and destroying of public artifacts (A2). The users also may leave explicit information about themselves and their activities in the description fields of the artifacts or by attaching signs with comments to them (A2, A3).
Design features and their correspondence to requirements are summarized in table 4.2 below. Requirements L1 Representation of user L2 Communication L3 Navigation and observation L4 Awareness provided by environment P1 Framework for activities and structure P2 Dynamic structure
Design features • Users are represented by avatars, artifacts they create and the history of communications • Leave their traces where they “live”, participate or visit • Avatar is chosen from a predefined list with a set of gestures • Users communicate by text chat, messages, creating and changing artifacts and places, making gestures, changing avatar position etc. • User can navigate by walking, flying in 3D space, or by following teleportation links left by others and observe the environment from different perspectives. • In-built list of users online • Avatars show who is in the world •
All islands and buildings are hierarchically connected by teleportation links, roads or bridges, providing overview of social network
•
The structure is fully dynamic, since users can freely modify all constructions that are public or their own property A number of house and islands templates are provided for customization The outlook of Viras is chosen to be an archipelago in order to support an informal atmosphere and to serve as metaphor of the way communities and groups can be combined The environment can be used both for socializing and work The main island provides users with a common meeting place, a transportation node and a collection of necessary artifacts Artifacts for different purposes are provided everywhere so the users can fill in their parameters, copy and create new ones The learners can leave their traces by creating and changing their own artifacts with a name and time stamp on it
P3 Outlook
• •
P4 Different roles
• •
A1 Repertoire of artifacts A2 Association of artifacts to learners A3 Association of artifacts to activities
• • •
The users leave explicit information about themselves and their activities in the description fields of the artifacts or by attaching signs with comments to them
Table 4.2 Requirements I and corresponding design features
4.3 Viras: implementation I The prototype described in the previous section is developed using the Active Worlds (AW) technology (see Appendix A for details). According to Dickey (1999), who 36
evaluated 3 3D systems for educational use (Onlive! Traveler, Blaxxun Interactive (Colony City) and AW), AW provides a richer context and greater variety of tools, and had the greatest support for user extensibility and building, though limited possibilities for control of embodiment. This platform also allows a quick creation and development of a community (Hudson-Smith, 2002). In addition, Active Worlds is widely used for educational purposes (Active Worlds Educational Universe). Though this platform does not support some features typical for groupware applications (shared calendars, collaborative document editing etc.), these disadvantages had to be weighted against advantages offered by the 3D (as discussed in Chapter 1) and the flexibility of construction and structuring of the virtual environment. AW provides a number of basic features for virtual world creation and running (see Appendix A), such as: •
A library of pre-built avatars, artifacts (such as panels, signs, desks etc) and textures. • The possibilities for artifact manipulations, such as copying and moving, and programming artifact characteristics and behavior (such as teleporting, showing text or pictures) by writing scripts. Each artifact carries the timestamp of creation and the name of the owner. • Features like chat, contact lists showing online status, messaging, joining (instantaneous teleportation to selected users), making gestures and moving.
Viras, described in the previous section, is developed by using this functionality. A number of basic constructions and artifacts have also been added to be used as building blocks or templates for community development: •
Houses of different sizes and designs, islands with houses, roads and bridges. The intention was to allow the students to either “inhabit” or copy these construction, for further customizing (See Fig. 4.1, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 and A.1). • Pre-made artifacts with attached scripts for various purposes. There are artifacts for facilitating communication and transportation, such as templates for message boards, document links, teleportation links and portals. There are also templates for artifacts facilitating personal expression, containing pictures and text. The users can just put in their individual parameters such as a web-link to a picture of a girlfriend. Also artifacts representing useful resources such as links to student information are provided.
Students inhabiting the world could build in following ways: • • •
Build everything “from scratch”, by using standard Active Worlds facilities “Taking over” or “inhabiting” a certain template (a house) and modifying provided pre-built artifacts Creating new constructions by copying provided templates or their parts.
4.4 Cooperative scenario I This section illustrates the intended usage of Viras for cooperative work and social awareness support. 37
Initial preparation. Every student group collaboratively creates a group house or island where they put information about group’s resources, members, activities etc. In such a house or island they can have meetings, parties and other activities, keep links to their working documents and leave messages for each other. They can also have links to groups or persons they cooperate or are friends with. In addition, students create a number of personal houses and areas with information about their interests, personality, resources, activities, and social connections, which can be compared to 3D homepages (see Fig. 4.1). Such houses may contain pictures of friends, links to friends’ houses in Viras, a list of summer jobs held, a link to a leisure club, etc. Example of use 1. A group has a meeting in the group house where they discuss a learning task, refer to documents contained there, possibly have a brainstorming (by using chat), which they can log and use later to solve their tasks. They can leave a link to a working document and a note to a group member absent on the meeting, e.g.: “Olav, could you please look at question 3 here”. Group members visit each other houses, where they can be aware of new dimensions of the persons who “live” there, such as ability to play guitar (which may be useful in social activities) or a summer job as software developer (which can be useful in projects). Example of use 2. A person struggles with a task and does not know whom to ask for help. First he “flies” around the world and sees the overall structure of community from “an altitude”. For example, groups and persons are represented with islands, social and working connections between them as bridges etc (Fig. 4.2). The user explores different group houses and in one of them finds a description of a project similar to his own. He follows bridges or links to group members’ houses and bumps into one of them in his house, starting a conversation and asking for help. Alternatively, if nobody is at “home”, he can follow links in the houses to friends or partners of this group or person and find other users or useful information there, for example how different users can be contacted, what group they are on, what they are doing. There are also possibilities for activities involving the whole community (e.g. a class taking a course together), such as discussions, parties and consultations with the teacher. One can also leave various kinds of information in common areas: links to useful resources, lectures, questions to the teacher, announcements such as “meeting here on Friday at 14.00”.
Figure 4.1 A personal house, created from a pre-built template
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Figure 4.2 Personal islands connected by bridges with the group island
Figure 4.3 Viras at the beginning: view from above
Figure 4.4 A basic set with a big and two small islands and 5 house types
Figure 4.5 One of the basic house templates with associated artifacts
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4.5 Case study I Context. Viras has been used in a fourth year CSCW course (course code sif8058) at our department in Autumn 2002. It was decided to design a mandatory exercise of the course involving the usage of Viras. The form of the exercise was chosen since CVEs were a part of curriculum. The topics covered included different types of CVEs, their major elements, functionality, communication and collaboration modes. The introduction of Viras allowed therefore to give the students a practical experience of using a CVE and evaluating its elements in the context of student tasks. There have also been a number of practical issues, such as the need for control of the distribution of user licenses and coordination of common activities (class meetings). The exercise was done in groups that were formed in the beginning of the course according to students’ choice. Students worked in the same groups in other exercises as well, and these groups did not change, with very few exceptions, until the end of the course. Goals of the study. The goal of the first case was to explore the limitations and benefits of the system for social awareness support and partly for learning. Therefore, the environment was evaluated among the students at our department taking a course together. This implies that they had a need, at least theoretically, for cooperation, sharing of experiences and knowledge and social networking, for better performance in course-related tasks and for improving general social climate in the class. They were in other words in a situation where there is a need for acquisition and maintenance of social awareness. The fact that the groups were established at the beginning of the course could imply a certain degree of previous knowledge and social awareness concerning members of the same group. However, as discussed in Chapter 1, there is a need for cooperation across groups. An additional motivation was to let group members getting awareness about new sides of their group mates, provide them with an own group place and thus improve group cooperation. As the used approach has a number of limitations (varying degree of participation, limited time, etc, as discussed in more details in Chapter 6), this case study is mostly meant as an exploration of to what extent different parts of the system and therefore underlying principles are suitable for social awareness support. Design of the study. During the exercise students where asked to perform some mandatory building tasks (described in more detail below) plus they had to answer to some theoretical questions on CVEs in general, topic that was lectured in the classroom, and Viras in particular. The exercise has been satisfactory completed by all 15 groups (of 3-5 students), for a total of 51 students. All groups of the course completed the exercise, though not every single student was logged in personally. In some cases, the whole group was logged in as one user or only some of the group members were logged in and worked on the exercise. The world was open for a period of 41 days. User training and help. Before the start of the exercise, a 1-hour tutorial to Viras was given during a lecture. Also, a written summary of essential Active Worlds and Viras facilities in Norwegian was provided. During the whole period, the designer was available on line for 3 meetings for building lessons and generally helping with the system, though she was connected most of the working hours for further clarification.
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Student tasks. The practical tasks the students had to perform included building of personal and group houses/islands, containing awareness-related information about themselves, “3D homepages”. These included personal info, description of skills, links to web-pages of interest, links to friends, including those in other groups, pictures, etc. These constructions should after original intention be used to reflect the resources, social network and activities of the creators and facilitate collaborative activities, such as group meetings. To fulfill these tasks, the students could either use ordinary Active Worlds facilities or use (“occupy” or copy) provided pre-built templates, as described in the previous section (Fig. 4.1, 4.4, 4.5). At the end, the students were asked to put links to their creations in the main house of the world. They should also explore other people’s constructions and vote the best house and island of the Archipelago. The intended workload for the required building tasks and exploration of environment was approximately 4 hours provided the students used the pre-built templates (see Fig. 4.1, Section 4.3 and Appendix A) with minor modifications and customizations. However, if the students had a higher level of ambition then the required minimum and wanted to create original, “hand-made” constructions, the amount of required time could be much higher. Also, as appeared in the results, the provided facilities did not always function as intended. Data collection. The details of data collection and different research tools use can be found in Appendix B. An overview is presented here. After finishing the practical part of the exercise, the students delivered a compulsory written report/essay with the answers to the theoretical part. After the delivery, the students have been asked to participate in a collective interview with the system designer. During this meeting students have been asked to fill in a 1 page long questionnaire. The approximate time required to fill the questionnaire was 5 minutes. The total interview lasted for about 1 hour and saw the participation of 10 students. The questionnaire was later distributed to the course mailing list and was filled in by 14 more students (2 of them answering only 2 additional questions since they have already filled the questionnaire during the interview), taking the total up to 22 completed questionnaires (out of 51). Also, the interactions have been logged, adopting the logging facilities available through Active Worlds and Xelagot bot. The results that are presented in the next section are coming from all these sources: logging, interviews, questionnaires, observations of the participants, examination of their constructions online, and answers to the exercise. There have been a number of limitations in connection with the data collection. This includes low response rate to the questionnaires and varying quality of different data sources. For example, due to the limitations of the used logging facilities, it was quite difficult to identify the exact duration of users’ online sessions. These limitations are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. The questions on Viras asked in the questionnaire and the exercise were structured in accordance with RQ4 and aimed at identifying the benefits and limitations of the system for social awareness support. This included identifying usage patterns in connection with social and learning activities, the impact of introduction of Viras on social awareness and learning in the class and associated potentials. In addition, by answering the questions the students were supposed to evaluate a CVE as a part of their curriculum. See complete listing of questions in Appendix B. Data analysis. This case study has been exploratory in its goals. The analysis of data was based on triangulation of results from different data sources: chat logs, online
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observations, interviews, students’ essays, questionnaires and examinations of students’ constructions. The validity associated with these sources, varies, as discussed in Chapter 6. 4.6 Results of Case study I This section presents an extract of the results from Case I, thus addressing RQ4. The results are presented in more detail in Paper 4. The results are categorized along the 3 dimensions and requirements identified by RQ3. In accordance to RQ4, we identify benefits and limitations in connection to each category. General aspects (applicable to all 3 dimensions) are structured along dimensions usage, awareness and potentials. 4.6.1 Learner •
•
•
•
Representation of the user. • Benefits. Viras provided alternative possibilities for identity construction and personality expression through created places and artifacts, according to students, as shown by pictures and direct student feedbacks in Paper 4. • Limitations. Avatars were by a majority of students considered problematic and on the average ranked less important to awareness than places and artifacts in the questionnaire. The limited selection, the constant rotation of avatars and user names among users and difficulties with association to a concrete person were pointed out in the exercise essays and the interview. Communication. • Benefits. The observed patterns of communication were often similar to the ones that are triggered by chance encounters in the real world. See chat fragments in Paper 4 for examples. In some cases, students communicated their activities and cooperation patterns (e.g. on-going conversations) through grouping, movement and positioning of avatars, as appears from online observations (e.g. example with a couple hanging in the air in Paper 4). Communication through chat, especially during common meetings, allowed discussions and consulting peers and the designer, as appears from chat logs. A number of students also noted that artifacts allowed an indirect form of communication in their exercise essays. • Limitations. Several times no actual movement/positioning of the avatar was observed during the conversation. There have also been different opinions about the effectiveness of communication. Among hindrances, there was mentioned necessity to type, complexity of movement in 3D space and limited means for non-verbal communication. Navigation and observation. • Benefits. Observations, logs and student essays showed that students used various navigation means to fulfill their tasks and get an overview of the world: walking, such as following other avatars, flying, looking at the world from the above and teleporting. The effectiveness of the latter method was ranked high compared to corresponding “real life” possibilities. • Limitations. Almost all students mentioned some problems with overview and navigation of the world such as limited view angle, slowliness and sometimes awkwardness of movement. Awareness provided by environment.
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•
•
Benefits. The environment provided an overview of other users by means of avatars (clues such as the presence, grouping and activities in the shared workspace, emotions, identity) and information in the contact list and chat window. Limitations. The effectiveness of these mechanisms was limited as on a number of occasions users expressed frustration concerning lacking overview of who is present and where they can be found.
4.6.2 Place •
•
•
•
Framework for activities and structure. • Benefits. The islands and houses often served as “shared working areas” for group activities (such as building) where “every group member knows where to find relevant information”, as shown by observations and student essays. In the majority of cases the group island/house and individual constructions were “geographically” close, though not in “satellite” fashion, with roads/bridges to group members (see Fig. 4.2), thus visualizing group membership. Almost all the islands contained links and/or bridges to the friends and acquaintances in other groups, thus providing some indication of the social structures. • Limitations. At the same time, casualty was according to the questionnaire the most important factor for the choice of the building place, followed in the order by proximity to friends and working partners, and other houses/islands for easier copying. This limited awareness of social network. Dynamic structure. • Benefits. Flexibility has proved to be important for development of the infrastructure, which is shown by several examples of house and island reuse. Neighboring houses often looked similar, with some personal adjustments. • Limitations. Building “from scratch” using in-built Active Worlds facilities was by the majority of students considered rather time-consuming, so in some cases users “settled” near constructions suitable for copying and not social contacts. Outlook. • Benefits. The chosen outlook and metaphor could in certain cases be beneficial for group work and socializing (own group places, informal atmosphere), as mentioned during the interview and in the essays (Paper 4). • Limitations. At the same time, it was mentioned that Viras could not be used in “serious” context, only for fun. During the interview, students came with a number of alternative suggestions for metaphors, depending on the usage situation, mostly resembling places from real life, such as city and campus. Different roles. • Benefits. For socializing and working, students considered it positive to have their own, “private” or group places in the world, like islands. This appears from both higher than average ranking of such possibility in the questionnaire and opinions expressed in the essays. These places were mostly used for selfexpression and collaborative building activities, as shown by examination of constructions and online observations. • Limitations. The degree to which central and group places in the world were used/ were appropriate for common meetings, has been limited.
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4.6.3 Artifact •
•
•
Repertoire of artifacts. • Benefits. Building with available 3D artifacts, though sometimes timeconsuming, was considered “fun” and important for creating “atmosphere” in a personal house beyond just being a 3D homepage, as shown by for example following student feedbacks: “the use of houses, signs, other artifacts is a funny and efficient way to share information” and another: “you can easily leave traces after yourself that the others will see”. • Limitations. However, almost all student groups indicated in their essays that there is a need to integrate Viras with some “traditional” tools such as e-mail and mobile. Association of artifacts to learners. • Benefits. Examination of the world revealed a number of examples where artifacts created by the students could express information about the owner: pictures, signs with explicit facts about interests, biography, links to favorite web pages. 3D houses were on a number of occasions used in an artifact-like manner for expressing the personality of the owners: castles, underwater houses, abstract futuristic constructions etc. (see pictures in Paper 4). • Limitations. The awareness of identity and personality of those manipulating artifacts was limited by information put there by the user. Additional information was provided by automatic user name stamps, but this name could be changed several times, thus making identification of a user difficult. Association of artifacts to activities. • Benefits. Examination of Viras shows that artifacts could reflect activities either explicitly, such as a picture from a party, or implicitly, by for example their spreading pattern. Artifacts were usually mostly spread in the area where the owner “lives”, but sometimes could also be scattered around in common areas and on property belonging to other users (see examples in Paper 4). • Limitations. Due to property sharing conventions in Active Worlds, one could not manipulate artifacts belonging to others, which limited possibilities for conveying awareness of collaborative activities.
4.6.4 General results •
•
Usage. The pattern of usage of Viras was directly dependent on the mass of users online at the moment, exhibiting the “critical mass” phenomena. Users usually logged in, checking if there were any more active users online. A response from other users usually initiated a conversation, mutual help, collaboration around building etc. Otherwise, the user either left the world immediately or stayed for some time building or exploring constructions created by others. Sometimes a whole group logged in at the same time, presumably after having planned a virtual meeting. During the announced common meetings, the number of participants was rising dramatically, up to about 10-15 at a time. The majority arrived at the meeting’s start, and then the amount of visitors gradually decreased during the next 3-8 hours. Also, during such meetings some of the users formed smaller groups for further communication and cooperation. There have also been registered 2-3 short group meetings at other times. Long-term awareness. The perceived increase in long-term social awareness at the end of the exercise, measured via the questionnaire and partly from the 44
•
•
exercise answers, is not high. On all the dimensions on the average the increase was medium-low. The highest increase was related to awareness on knowledge distribution and resources, middle for social network and lowest for activities. Generally, the students noted that they could have got much more out of the system if they spent more time on building and forming the world. Short-term awareness. Maintaining short-term awareness in Viras was generally problematic as the user mass online was most of the time small or non-existing, though rising dramatically during common meetings and days before the deadline. In these cases, communication and collaboration was supported by a number of clues, such as following an avatar or grouping (see examples in Paper 4). However, it could be problematic in such cases as well as on many occasions users did not have the browser window open and check the status in the chat and main window all the time. This resulted in misleading and failed contact attempts from other users. Potentials. Though it was generally agreed that there are a number of problems with technology, there was mentioned a number of potentialities for group work and socializing, as for example asking “stupid questions“ and contacting strangers. These potentialities are in line with the results in the questionnaire where students on the question about the usefulness of Viras in different learning situations gave highest scores to “presenting projects” and “group work”.
4.6.5 Summary of results for Case I Table 4.3 summarizes the results from Case I. The first column lists the major results. The second column indicates whether the result is a benefit or a limitation (“+” for benefit, “=” for neutral and “--” for limitation). The third column shows the predominant data source(s) for this result. The last column shows how much we have anticipated the result (“+” for anticipated, “=” for partly anticipated and “--” for more unexpected). 4.7 Intermediate case In an additional case (hereafter called the intermediate case) the system was used in a more real-life educational situation, in order to evaluate the impact of social awareness on student learning. Viras was offered to the students in a project-based course in computer science in Spring 2003. 9 student groups participated in the course. The intention was to create an environment where learners could present their projects, exchange experiences and have social and educational activities, as there was no lectures or common meetings in real life in the course. There were provided following facilities for learning and socializing: • • •
A “library” house with links to lecture notes and other educational resources; A “meet the teacher and teaching assistants” house with pictures, contact info and possibilities to leave questions and messages; A central house with course info, text, picture and link holders, list of the 9 participating groups and links to provided templates for 9 group islands;
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Main results
Limitations/ benefits
Learner • Viras provides rich possibilities for conveying of awareness information and identity expression through creation of places and artifacts • Limited selection and rotation of avatars makes identification of users and conveying of short-term social awareness difficult • 3D communication and navigation provide a number of mechanisms for conveying social awareness • Complexity of movement and communication in 3D space limits the use of existing awareness mechanisms Place • Distinct and separated private and group places (islands) are beneficial for social awareness support and work • The Archipelago outlook can serve as a distraction for learning activities • Place structures are useful for visualizing social structure on the group level • Existing flexibility of building is insufficient for reflecting social structures on the community level •
3D places are used in artifact-like manner for communication and personality expression • Existing places do not provide an adequate framework for all student activities Artifact • 3D artifacts provide rich possibilities for conveying awareness information about learners and their activities in a way, resembling ”real life” • The functionality associated with 3D artifacts does not cover the whole range of user needs • The effort associated with expressing awareness information in 3D artifacts makes other tools more preferable in some cases General • Usage exhibits “critical mass” problem • Usefulness of Viras for long-term social awareness support depends on the extent of usage • Short-term awareness can only be supported with a relatively large amount of users online, and to a limited degree
Data source(s)
Comments
+
•
Student constructions, essays
+
--
•
Essays, questionnaires, interview, chat
=
+
•
+
--
•
Observation, essays, interview, chat Essays, observation, interview, chat
+
•
+
--
•
+
•
--
•
=
•
--
•
Essays, questionnaires, interview Essays, interview Student constructions, essays Student constructions, essays, questionnaires Student constructions, essays Student constructions, essays
+
•
--
•
--
=
-+ --
= =
Student constructions, essays, questionnaires Essays, interview
=
•
Essays, interview
=
-=
• •
Observations Essays, interview
= =
--
•
Observations, essays, interview, chat
=
=
Table 4.3 Summary of results for Case I
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• •
An “outdoor” place for socializing, with links to newspapers, text, picture and link holders; 9 Pre-built island/house templates with facilities (picture/text/link holders, short building tutorial, instructions, links to previous students constructions etc).
Two groups started using the system and putting personal and project info into the templates. They also created a number of mood-creating artifacts (pictures of the Royal family, a “gallery of freaks”, a big “middle-age” castle). However, after a while they abandoned the building. The students were offered a possibility to meet the teacher online for consultations, but this opportunity was not used. Also, one student said that he sees no point in using Viras in this course. The usage during this project course was not extensive enough to provide a broad analysis and to evaluate the connection between social awareness and learning outcomes. However, some of the traces of usage during the project course, such as two customized house templates, were a part of the environment during the second phase of evaluation. The main result of this case is, however, the identification of a certain mismatch between the actual user tasks and the facilities provided by the system. For example, the established working practices in the project-base course described in this case, included making paper/slides project presentations and face-to-face contact with the teacher while collaboratively viewing and discussing documents (project drafts). Though it was possible to present a project in Viras by the means of signs, pictures, web links and other artifacts, other means, not supported by Viras, proved to be faster and more familiar in a given situation. Also, Viras did not facilitate viewing and discussing documents (project drafts) with teacher, though the virtual environment provided possibilities for “asking stupid questions” as mentioned in the results of Case I. We can conclude that collaboration on the tasks in the project-based course was not fully supported. The implications of this experience are shortly discussed in the section below and further in Chapter 6. 4.8 Lessons learned in preparation for phase II The analysis of the results from Case I and the intermediate case led to the following major lessons learned for further research in this work (see Paper 4, 5, 6 for details): Learner •
•
More focus on places and artifacts and less on avatars. As the results have showed, virtual places and artifacts have been important for reflecting or “storing” awareness information, as opposed to avatars. This provokes the need to put more focus on the more permanent components such as created artifacts and places in the learner dimension. Better overview. The results of usage and students feedbacks show that the overview of the mutual relations between learners, resources and activities is not provided to a sufficient degree. Also, the existing methods for providing such awareness, such as positioning of avatars, were in some situations too complex. Limitations of navigational possibilities provided by the user dimension (too slow “walking”) and rather chaotic building pattern have also complicated collection of awareness information. Therefore, there is a need for a better overview and 47
visualization of students’ movement along the participation and learning trajectories. Place and artifact •
•
Better flexibility of building. The existing (though limited) flexibility of building and artifact manipulation has been important for the creation of constructions used for awareness acquisition (artifacts, houses, islands etc) as students often combined parts of existing constructions to relatively fast create new ones. This suggests that increased flexibility of building is necessary to provide a better social awareness support. Considering places as artifacts. The usage of Viras shows that the division of the place and artifact dimensions is rather fluid. Virtual places, buildings and landscape were used to mediate activities of learners, in an artifact-like manner (see discussion in Section 2.1 and Fig. 2.1). They do not just serve as containers for activities and artifacts, but are flexibly shaped by activities and persons. Therefore, as also shown in Chapter 3, they can keep awareness information and mediate activities. However, the flexibility of building has been limited. Both Case I and the intermediate case showed a certain mismatch between users’ tasks and provided facilities. This may imply that the available specter of places for playing different roles has been limited, thus impairing flexibility of building and usage for different purposes even further. One of the causes behind this limited flexibility for the place dimension could be too narrow understanding of the nature and role of virtual places. Therefore, to achieve greater flexibility, it is necessary to take into account that virtual places in many situations are used to mediate user activities and therefore can be treated like artifacts. Also, as shown by the usage, it is in many cases not natural to differentiate between a place (a house) and the corresponding system of artifacts, such as pictures, furniture, signs and links. They all often function as one unit when representing the personality of the user or mediating a task, such as a meeting. Therefore, it is more appropriate to consider the whole interconnected system of a virtual place and associated artifacts as a whole. Figure 4.6 below builds on Figure 2.1 and illustrates this discussion by providing an example of the role of places in mediation of activities.
A virtual house with meeting locations, furniture, working documents, announcements etc.
Student group
Exercise delivery Figure 4.6 Mediating activities with virtual places
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General •
More focus on long-term awareness and awareness on activities. The awareness of activities has been lowest along the dimensions of social awareness. This is not satisfactory as the activity has been central in the discussion concerning learning communities and groups in Chapter 2. This suggests greater emphasis on presenting and capturing/crystallizing traces of activities. Also, the prevailing pattern of usage (leaving and examining of artifacts) suggests that the system should be in a greater degree used for supporting long-term awareness.
The lessons learned presented here provide a basis for revision and updating of the requirements and the following redesign of Viras. The next chapter will therefore describe the evolution of requirements, Requirements II, with the following re-design and re-implementation of Viras, and finally, the results of the user evaluation of the redesigned system. The limitations of the described case studies (limited usage, previous student knowledge of each other) imply that the construct validity of the proposed measurement method is limited and the method should be revised. This includes differentiation between expressing and retrieving awareness-related information, since these processes were often dependent on different factors (e.g. easiness of building and time spent on exploring the world). Also, these limitations, especially the low participation in the intermediate case, prevented a deeper investigation of the impact of social awareness on learning and the usefulness of Viras for learning facilitation. It makes it necessary to focus on a more limited identification of limitations and benefits of different aspects of Viras for social awareness support and thus revision of the research question.
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5 Requirements, design and empirical evaluation: phase II 5.1 Revised requirements (Requirements II) The lessons learned presented in Section 4.8 suggest a number of modifications, to overcome the shortages identified in the previous chapter. Some of these modifications lead to the revision of certain requirements while others suggest revision of design where requirements are unchanged, but need to be realized better compared to design I. The lessons learned provide therefore implications for requirements (IR) and implications for design (ID): •
•
•
•
•
More focus on place and artifacts and less on avatars o Implications for requirements (IR1). Due to the encountered usage patterns, it is emphasized that created artifacts and places are an integral part of the user representation. o Implications for design (ID1). If it is for practical reasons not possible to satisfy all requirements equally well, the “permanent elements” such as places and artifacts should be prioritized in the new design of Viras (as opposed to avatars). Better overview o Implications for design (ID2). As the requirement L4 (Awareness provided by environment), is not fully realized, the redesigned system should contain features for enhancing overview and awareness of learners and their trajectories. Better building flexibility o Implications for design (ID3). As the original requirement P2 (Dynamic structure), is not fully realized, the redesigned system should provide possibilities for more flexible building. Considering places as artifacts o Implications for requirements (IR2). The analysis of the usage of virtual places as “spatial artifacts” in Viras, along three chosen theoretical perspectives (Activity theory & Learning communities, Distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995) and Coordination mechanisms (Schmidt & Simone, 1996)), revealed a number of shortcomings with the original design. The detailed presentation of the theoretical background and discussion can be found in Paper 5. The results suggest extension of requirements for artifacts and the corresponding revision of requirements for places. Therefore, the requirements for artifacts should be modified in accordance to the additional theoretical approaches: distributed cognition and coordination mechanism. The requirements for the place dimension should be modified based on the revised requirements for artifacts and original requirements for places. More focus on long-term awareness and awareness on activities o Implications for requirements (IR3). There should be more emphasis on reflecting and mediating user activities in the requirements. o Implications for design (ID4). The new design of the system should be to a greater degree directed at storing and exhibiting of virtual constructions with a longer-term perspective then for real-time meetings and interaction.
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The requirements are revised in accordance with the lessons learned. The new requirements set is denoted as Requirements II. Both Requirements II and Requirements I are based on the definition of social awareness in Section 2.5 and the awareness mechanisms associated with the three dimensions of CVEs. Requirements II are also based on additional theoretical approaches and empirical results. This requirement set is the most complete and full one. In this way, these requirements provide a revised answer to RQ3. The following table 5.1 provides an overview of Requirements II: Requirement Learner LL1 Representation of user LL2 Communication LL3 Navigation and observation LL4 Awareness provided by environment Place PP1 Framework for activities and structure PP2 Dynamic structure PP3 Outlook PP4 Different roles and repertoire PP5 Place structure PP6 Association of places to learners Artifact AA1 Repertoire of artifacts AA2 Association of artifacts to learners AA3 Association of artifacts to activities AA4 Representing cognitive system AA5 Objectifying coordination protocol
Description The representation of each individual learner, including created artifacts and places, must evolve with and reflect the learner’s place on and movements along the learning and participation trajectories as well as the learner identity and activities. The construction of identity, activities and recognition of communicational patterns should be supported by providing necessary communication and artifact manipulation facilities. The embodiment of a learner must offer effective navigational and observational possibilities, to allow collection of awareness information and performance of activities. The environment should make the learners aware of other learners, their trajectories, activities and mutual relations. The place(s) should provide a framework for community and group activities performed there and be in a flexible way shaped by them/left traces on, to provide awareness of the activities. The structure must be dynamic, to reflect and facilitate the changing needs, structures, activities and trajectories of the communities and groups involved and allow propagation of representational states The outlook can be static, but it must reflect the spirit and identity of the communities and groups. The environment should support a flexible usage of different parts of the place for playing different roles and have various sets of virtual places with associated facilities. The collection of such places should represent the shared repertoire. Places should be structured, possibly hierarchically, to provide awareness of the structure of communities and groups, the cognitive system of the community, and of the adopted coordination protocol. Places should in a flexible way be associated to and shaped by learners who uses or creates them, to provide the awareness of their personality, participation and learning trajectories. There should be a collection of artifacts to facilitate mediating of communication, learning, task completion and other activities, and comprise a shared repertoire for the community. It must be possible to associate artifacts to learners, to provide the awareness of their personality, participation and learning trajectories. It must be possible to leave traces of learner activities on the artifacts. The system of interconnected artifacts should represent the cognitive system of the community and allow propagation of representational states. The material format of the artifact should objectify the adopted coordination protocol and provide a shared space for mediated changes to the state of the protocol. Table 5.1 Requirements II
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Table 5.2 below provides an overview of the differences between Requirements I and II. The first column lists the revised requirements from the second requirements set. The second column explains how they are derived from other requirements and the implications for requirements from lessons learned (IR). The last column highlights the difference between the two requirements sets. Revised or requirements
new
How requirements derived
are
LL1 Representation of user
Based on L1, according to IR1
PP1 Framework for and association to activities
Based on P1 and AA3, revised according to IR2 and IR3 Based on P2 and AA4, revised according to IR2
PP2 Dynamic structure
revised
PP4 Different roles and repertoire
Based on P4 and AA1, revised according to IR2
PP5 Place structure
Based on P1, AA4 and AA5, revised according to IR2
PP6 Association places to learners
of
AA4 Representing cognitive system AA5 Objectifying coordination protocol
Based on AA2, according to IR2
added
New, added according to IR2 New, added according to IR2
What is new/different The revised requirement emphasizes that artifacts and virtual places are an important part of learner representation The revised requirement has more emphasis on activities and association of places to them The revised requirement demands the place structure to allow propagation of representational states The revised requirement demands existence of various sets of virtual places with associated facilities as the shared repertoire of the community The revised requirement implies that the place structure should reflect the cognitive system of the community and the adopted coordination protocol This new requirement requires places to be associated to people in an artifact-like manner This new requirement is inspired by distributed cognition approach This new requirement is inspired by the coordination mechanisms approach
Table 5.2 Comparison of Requirements I and II
5.2 Viras: design II The new design of Viras is based on Requirements II and the lessons learned from Case I for redesign of Viras where the original requirements have not been fully realized implying that some of the unchanged requirements in the new set are realized better than in design I. For practical reasons it is impossible to focus equally on the improvement for all dimensions. Therefore, in accordance with the lessons learned from Case I, we focus on supporting long-term awareness (ID1) and “storing” and “exhibiting” places and artifacts (ID4). The importance of place for a social life in a community and therefore for supporting social awareness is already discussed in Section 1.2.2 and 3.4. Therefore, we suggest a redesign of Viras as a repository of virtual places. Each place in the repository is considered together with artifacts contained there, as discussed in Section 4.8. The revised requirements focus on associating persons, their activities and social network to virtual places and their structure. In real life, such association is realized
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when people leave traces of their personality and activities in places. These traces include announcements on the walls, a poster with a project presentation, photos of social activities (parties), a painting, an article in the local student periodical etc. Such traces may also reveal the resources a person possesses and possibly a way of contacting him, such as an ad with e-mail and phone number. Such traces are normally present in a university environment and are used by students to maintain their social awareness. They can also be used in educational activities (for example, an old poster with a project presentation can be useful for a student working with a similar project). However, real-life places cannot always serve as a permanent reference for community members since they cannot be accessed any time (opening hours, physical distances etc). Also, the traces of persons and social activities they keep have to be replaced regularly due to the limited amount of available space. Sometimes this is a necessary process, as it allows to remove “garbage”. However, in many cases, useful traces can get lost. The use of virtual places, on the other hand, allows such places with traces to be “saved” before they are cleaned up or removed. This consideration is in line with the requirement of a collection of different virtual places as a shared repertoire of the community. This motivates the idea to “save” virtual places containing traces of persons and activities and associated facilities in a virtual repository. Such a repository can be used for learning and social purposes. In a virtual world like Viras, users can leave their traces in virtual buildings and islands in a number of ways. They can alter the design (outlook) and structure of the place and put messages, pictures, links to web-pages, project presentations and other items there. Other users can then visit the places, unconstrained by time and distances, and use the traces left there to achieve better social awareness or utilize them as resources and tools in their activities. However, it is known that such repositories are often not used as much as intended, or not at all (Ackerman & Halverson, 1998). Our task will therefore be to investigate the feasibility of “saving” and “retrieving” virtual places in the context of user needs. The overview below presents a redesign of Viras as a repository of virtual places. This design builds directly on design I presented in Section 4.2, so only new features are presented here, either corresponding to revised requirements (Requirements II) or better realization of unchanged requirements. The latter are motivated by implications for design (ID) in the beginning of this chapter. Details can be found in Paper 6. Learner •
•
In Viras, users are represented by avatars, artifacts and places they create and the history of communications. The avatar is chosen from a predefined list, with a set of gestures attached. Users leave their traces where they “live”, participate or just visit (LL1). The world will contain an online construction with a graphical overview and visualization learners’ trajectories. This construction, a “catalogue” island, provides an overview of all the places in the place repository that represent the learners and connections between them. The various places are represented with indexing artifacts (“stones”, “chess pieces”, “signs”). Related artifacts are connected by scripts, so when activated they highlight (by rotation) a “path” of the person’s trajectory through different activities and memberships. The former will provide an indication 53
of a person’s expertise and the latter of his social belonging. Each indexing artifact has some relevant information attached to it (LL4, ID2). For example, on Figure 5.1, the blue “chess piece” representing the personal place of the designer, is connected to the place templates she has created (represented by “stones”) by small rotating signs of the same color.
Figure 5.1 The catalogue island with indexing artifacts
Place •
•
•
•
Viras II is designed as a repository of places. There are 3 types of places in the repository: templates, personal places, and activity places. The repository starts as a set of templates for different roles (personal houses, meeting rooms) with associated sets of facilities and artifacts (see Fig. 5.2 and 5.3 with a starting set of central meeting areas, the catalogue island and house/island templates). As the users modify the basic constructions to suit their needs (or create new constructions “from scratch”), they create activity places (with traces of their activities, see Fig. 5.4) and personal places (with traces of personality). Together activity places, personal places and templates constitute the shared repertoire of the community (PP4). There are places in the repository that represent activities (activity places). An activity place can be a place containing an explicit project presentation or a place where some activities have happened over a certain period of time and therefore reshaped it and left traces there (PP1). There are places in the repository that represent one or more persons (personal places). A personal place can be a house, an island or a collection of them reflecting the personality of person(s) who created and developed it. Personal places may include personal links, pictures, description of interests, and other personal info. Personal places are more static than activity places and can be compared to people’s houses and offices but the former can also be considered as the latter when containing a lot of activity traces (PP6). All islands and buildings are hierarchically connected by teleportation links, roads or bridges, in this way providing an overview, especially from the “bird’s-eye view”, of the existing structures by clear distinction of borders and units of community building against the “sea” background. In this way the places promote awareness of the community development, structure and cognitive system and the adopted coordination protocol (directions for growth, empty places to take) (PP5).
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•
The structure is fully dynamic, since users can freely modify all constructions that are public or their own property, such as rooms, houses, islands, bridges. Flexibility for development of community and repository is supported by providing enough open space (sea) for building and templates and an additional toolset for easy and flexible downloading of places: a software agent that builds various items (e.g. a template in Fig. 5.3) from the repository after verbal commands from the users (PP2, ID3).
Figure 5.2 New Archipelago with a central island, adjoining catalogue island and basic island templates
Figure 5.3 A “basic“ student “house“/island divided into a “working“ and “leisure“ part
Artifact • •
The system of artifacts, such as the interconnected system of teleportation links, represents to a certain degree the cognitive system of the community (social and group structure) (AA4). Certain artifacts, such as a to-do list or a wall to put messages on can objectify the coordination protocol (for coordinating student activities) and provide a shared space for changes to it (AA5).
Design II and corresponding requirements are summarized in Table 5.3. New design features and revised requirements are shown in italic.
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Requirements LL1 Representation of user LL2 Communication LL3 Navigation and observation LL4 Awareness provided by environment PP1 Framework for and association to activities PP2 Dynamic structure
PP3 Outlook PP4 Different roles and repertoire PP5 Place structure PP6 Association of places to learners AA1 Repertoire of artifacts AA2 Association of artifacts to learners AA3 Association of artifacts to activities AA4 Representing cognitive system AA5 Objectifying coordination protocol
Design features • Users are represented by avatars, artifacts and places they create and the history of communications • Users leave their traces where they “live”, participate or visit • Avatar is chosen from a predefined list with a set of gestures • Users communicate by text chat, messages, creating and changing artifacts and places, making gestures, changing avatar position etc. • User can navigate by walking, flying in 3D space, or by following teleportation links left by others and observe the environment from different perspectives. • • •
In-built list of users online Avatars show who is in the world Catalogue island
•
“Activity places” to mediate activities and keep their traces
•
The structure is fully dynamic, since users can freely modify all constructions that are public or their own property A number of house and islands templates are provided for customization Building agent for downloading templates after commands from users. The outlook of Viras is chosen to be an archipelago in order to support an informal atmosphere and to serve as metaphor of the way communities and groups can be combined The environment can be used both for socializing and work The main island provides users with a common meeting place, a transportation node and a collection of necessary artifacts A number of templates for different purposes with associated set of facilities All islands and buildings are hierarchically connected by teleportation links, roads or bridges, providing overview of social network, cognitive system of the community and the coordination protocol. “Personal places” to serve as “3D homepages” and keep personality traces
• • • • • • • •
• •
Artifacts for different purposes are provided everywhere so the users can fill in their parameters, copy and create new ones The learners can leave their traces by creating and changing their own artifacts with a name and time stamp on it
•
The learners can leave explicit information about themselves and their activities in the description fields of the artifacts or by attaching signs with comments to them
•
The system of artifacts, such as the interconnected system of teleportation links, represents to a certain degree the cognitive system of the community (social and group structure)
•
Certain artifacts, such as a to-do list or a wall to put messages on can objectify the coordination protocol (for coordinating student activities) and provide a shared space for changes to it
Table 5.3 Requirements II and associated design features.
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5.3 Viras: implementation II Provided places. The implementation of Viras has been revised as a repository of virtual places. The redesigned world contains a number of constructions designed by last-year students. It also contains some pre-built constructions that can be “occupied” and modified and the “catalogue” island with the links to constructions created by last-year students and available building templates. Templates and the building agent. The design of the most building templates is based on the students’ constructions, with smaller or greater modifications (Fig. 5.3, 5.4). Personal pictures, texts, links are removed and general facilities such as picture, link and text holders, as well as links to useful resources, are added. The templates (at the moment 14) consist of houses and islands for group and individual use, party templates and a starting toolkit with the map of the central area, help info and picture/link/text holders. They can be downloaded/built on the free spaces in the world by giving verbal commands to the building agent, Byggebot (implemented within the Xelagot framework). Byggebot also regulates where in the world users can build, gives some simple instructions to the users and lists available constructions. Implementation is described in more detail in Appendix A. Catalogue island and indexing artifacts. There are 3 types of indexing artifacts on the catalogue island: “chess pieces” representing persons/groups, signs representing activities and stones representing templates (Table 5.4). Related artifacts are grouped together, have similar design and color. They have small signs attached, where the related ones rotate when activated, highlighting the connections between different items. All artifacts belong to one virtual user “public”, to make such connections possible. For example, a little sign with the name “Gunnar” on it may be attached to the chess piece representing the group Gunnar is a part of, templates he has created and activities he has participated in (Fig. 5.1). In addition, there is a map of the central areas of the world with teleportation links to different locations on it, one big one at the world entrance and several small ones other places. Virtual place An individual or group house with personal/group information: pictures, bio, links etc. A place where an activity took place, leaving traces: screenshots, conversation logs, artifacts left by participants etc. An “empty” construction with necessary facilities
Personal place
Activity place
Template
Associated functionality
Building agent
Indexing artifact A “chess piece”, containing link to the virtual place + pictures, info, links to other indexing artifacts etc A sign with info, link to the activity place, the participants, possibly chat logs, etc. A “stone block” with links to an example of the template, creators, other templates used in the design etc. Connecting scripts/highlighting of user trajectory
Table 5.4 Virtual places, indexing artifacts and associated functionality
5.4 Cooperative scenario II A possible scenario of usage of such a repository is as follows: 57
Initial preparation. A group of students is assigned a project in computer science and wants to create a virtual presentation. As real-life builders put temporary homes at the construction place, the students decide to create some personal places. They visit the “catalogue island”, choose an island or a group of islands among the available templates presented there and download them on a chosen location in the world. The users can also add roads and bridges to connect group members and other people in the community. The group also downloads a template for a meeting place and a “party” place, to facilitate cooperation and to get to know each other better. They may also want to download a pre-built “project-exhibition” template to present their project, if they do not want to create everything from scratch. Customization and usage of places. After the constructions are in place, they can be further customized. The users can put personal texts (“My name is Lisa”) and pictures in their personal houses. To create the required project presentation, they collaboratively put relevant project info in the exhibition template, such as UML diagrams, lists of requirements and links to files with source code or the project report. During their work with the project, the members of the group can use a meeting room (Fig. 5.4) with associated facilities (message boards, links to educational resources, etc.) to coordinate their activities. They can for example leave messages to group members there, put announcements stating meeting times and distribution of tasks. They can also leave links to finished parts of the project report, links to chat logs and records of the discussions that can be later used to write project report. All these artifacts and traces of their activities can be referenced during the meetings held in this room and thus be a source of social awareness information for both group members and persons outside who visit the meeting place. For example, a sign with division of tasks can say something about expertise division and social structure in the group. Retrieving other places from the repository. While working on the project, the students may encounter difficulties and need some help. They can go to the catalogue island and look for places that contain similar project presentations, made by other students. They find one and either follow teleportation link to it (if it is in the world) or download the corresponding file on an empty space in the world. The “connected” artifacts on the catalogue island also show who participated in the project of interest and therefore who may have the required expertise to help. Also the group belonging of the participants is highlighted. After examining the project place to see “how things were done”, the students may want to contact one of the participants, the project leader. From the catalogue island they can see what group he is on. They can therefore follow the links from the catalogue island to either the group house or personal house of this “expert”. In these houses, they can meet the person, leave a message to him or find information how he can be contacted in the “real world”. “Storing” own places in the repository. The project is finally presented to the class and the teacher. This is celebrated in the “party” place, where traces of activities can be left: screenshots of the party, links to the chat log, messages and artifacts (such as virtual beers) created by the participants. All these places: personal houses, meeting rooms, project presentations, can be saved, either as files or online constructions. If
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the students want others to see their constructions, they can index them according to adopted rules on the “catalogue island” so new generations of students could use their project presentation. Students can also “save” templates they have created, possibly on basis of existing ones so that other students can use them later. Personal places (“3D homepages”) that display interests and resources and provide links to other persons or activities can be actively used also after the end of the projects. Learners can update these places and be visited by friends there. Activity places such as meeting rooms can be used by the group members for other projects.
Figure 5.4 A place template, based on a last-year student construction, used as a meeting place
5.5 Case study II Context. Viras as a repository of virtual places has been used in a fourth year CSCW course (course code sif8058) at our department in Autumn 2003. This course is the same as the one described in Case I, with only minor curriculum changes. As in Case I, the form of the exercise was chosen since CVEs were a part of curriculum. The introduction of Viras allowed therefore, as in Case I, to give the students a practical experience of using a CVE and evaluating its elements in the context of student tasks. As the Case I and the intermediate case showed, evaluation in a real-life educational settings of the impact on social awareness and learning outcomes has been limited. Therefore it was decided to focus on the social awareness issues and the limitations and benefits of Viras in this context in Case II. There have also been, as in Case I, additional practical issues, such as the need for control of the distribution of user licenses and coordination of common activities. The exercise was done in groups that were formed in the beginning of the course according to students’ choice. The context and the conditions of Cases I and II are therefore roughly the same, though concerning different student generations. The main differences are the new utilization pattern and the revised Viras design. Also, in Case II the students had access to a repository containing a number of constructions created by last year students, being in a similar situation and having similar tasks. Goals of the study. The goal of Case II was to explore limitations and benefits of the system for social awareness support. Therefore, the environment was tested among the students at our department taking a course together. This implies that they, as in Case I, had a need, at least theoretically, for cooperation, sharing of experiences and knowledge and social networking. The used approach has, as in Case I, a number of limitations (varying degree of participation, limited time, etc). For example, some 59
students started to use the system just before the deadline. The time limitation is especially significant in the second case as a creation and a very thorough evaluation of a repository of virtual places may require a longer time perspective. Also, as shown by the results, the have been differences between the intended usage (as shown in the scenario) and the actual one. This is discussed in more details in Chapter 6. Design of the study. The design of the case study to a significant degree resembles the one from last year, described in the previous chapter. In this exercise the students where asked to perform some mandatory building tasks (described more in detail later). In order to overcome some of the limitations of Case I, such as uneven pattern of participation, the students were to a greater degree encouraged to participate in organized activities online. Such participation was made compulsory as one of the exercise requirements. Other tasks included answering some theoretical questions on CVEs in general, and Viras in particular. The exercise has been satisfactory completed by all 15 groups, for a total of 67 students. All groups of the course completed the exercise, though not every single student was logged in personally. In some cases, the whole group was logged in as one user or two users shared an account. The world was open for a period of 44 days. User training and help. Before the start of the exercise, a 1-hour tutorial to Viras was given during a lecture. Also, two written summaries of essential Active Worlds and Viras facilities in Norwegian were provided (short help and “survival guide”). In order to overcome some shortages of Case I and make the usage of the system more user-friendly, more user help was provided in Case II. This includes both guidance provided by building agent and more frequent (weekly or oftener) meetings for building lessons and general helping with the system. In addition, the designer was connected most of the working hours for further clarification. Student tasks. The tasks the students were asked to perform, were directed towards creating different types of items for the repository. These items included personal and group places with a presentation of themselves and the group, a template for presentation of a typical computer science project, a party place and a place with activity traces (for example, party or meeting room with links to chat logs) and indexing these constructions, sometimes with references to the existing ones. They were also encouraged to participate in organized group activities online, leaving traces of their participation. The students were also asked to explore other constructions in the world, including those from last-year students, and vote for the best constructions. The intended workload for the required building tasks and exploration of environment was approximately 4-5 hours provided the students used the building agent and prebuilt templates (see Appendix A) with minor modifications and customizations. However, the amount of time spent depended, as in Case I, on the level of ambition the students had concerning originality of their constructions. That is, whether students preferred to spend time to create unique, “hand-made” constructions or quickly download pre-built templates. Also, as appeared in the test results, the provided facilities did not always function as intended, for example in terms of limited precision of building by the agent and too big templates, as discussed later. Data collection. The details of data collection and research tools used can be found in Appendix B. An overview is presented here. After the delivery of the exercise students have been asked to fill inn a 2 page long questionnaire, which was filled in
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by 27 students (1 incomplete). The questionnaire was in advance tested with a student familiar with Viras. The approximate time required to fill the questionnaire was 5-10 minutes. Two students and one student group logged as one user, agreed to meet the designer online and answer a number of additional questions. One of the students sent his additional comments to the designer. The interactions have been logged, adopting the logging facilities available through Active Worlds and Xelagot bot. The results presented in next section are coming from all these sources: logging, online interviews, questionnaires, observations of the participants online, examination of student constructions, and answers to the exercise. As in Case I, there have been a number of limitations in connection with the data collection. For example, the used logging facilities (Xelagot) still made it difficult to identify the exact duration of users’ online sessions. However, the use of this tool was justified as it was necessary for the building agent to work properly. As in Case I, we decided it as not appropriate to make the questionnaire as a compulsory part of the exercise due to the limited didactical value of some of the questions. Therefore, the response rate to the questionnaires was still low. Limitations in connection with the research method are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. The questions asked on Viras were structured in accordance with the revised RQ4 and aimed to identify the benefits and limitations of the system for social awareness support. This included identifying usage patterns in connection with social and learning activities, the impact of introduction of Viras on social awareness in the class and associated potentials (see Appendix B for details). The form and focus of the questions is slightly changed compared to Case I due to revision of the RQ4. The difference to the questions in Case I, inspired by the original RQ4, include more focus on limitations and benefits, less focus on direct impact on awareness and no questions on connection between social awareness and learning. In addition, by answering the questions the students were supposed to evaluate a CVE as a part of their curriculum. As explained in Section 4.8, measurement of subjective awareness increase has limited validity. Also, expressing and retrieving of awareness information should be considered separate. Therefore, in this case the students have been asked to evaluate how effective different elements in Viras are for expressing and retrieving social awareness information. The effectiveness has been evaluated along the major dimensions of social awareness: resources (knowledge, skills etc), social network (friends, working partners etc) and activities (working projects, hobbies etc). In accordance with the lessons learned from Case I, avatars are only to a very limited degree considered here. Data analysis. This case study has been exploratory in its goals. The analysis of data was based on triangulation of results from different data sources: chat logs, online observations, interviews, students’ essays, questionnaires and examination of students’ constructions. The validity associated with these sources, varies, as discussed in Chapter 6. 5.6 Results of Case study II This section provides the major results from Case II, thus addressing RQ4. The details can be found in Paper 7. The results are categorized along the 3 dimensions and the requirements identified by RQ3. In order to answer RQ4, we identify benefits and 61
limitations associated with each category. Questions, concerning general aspects (applicable to all 3 dimensions), are structured along dimensions usage, awareness and potentials. 5.6.1 Learner • •
•
•
User representation. The results concerning embodiment (avatars) and associated aspects of the user dimensions mostly resemble those from Case I. They are therefore not repeated here. Communication. The communication pattern follows the major trends from Case I and are not repeated here. • Benefits. The use of 3D artifacts and space for coordination and communication has been more prominent than in Case I. The examples include a 3D to-do-list as a yard divided by a fence with signs representing different tasks, moved from one side to another as the tasks were completed (Fig. 5.5). (See additional examples of such communication in section “Communication and collaboration” in Paper 7). These examples illustrate the benefits and alternative “visual” and symbolic possibilities provided by 3D artifacts in terms of communication and activity mediation. The available communication means also allowed a new interesting pattern of collaboration around the theoretical part of the exercise, not registered in the previous case. At least 3 student groups discussed the exercise questions online while logging their conversation, and then submitted either a reworked “plain-text” answers or fragments of the chat with comments of the moderator (one of the students). • Limitations. The provided facilities could not support all user needs, so a number of students preferred to communicate and coordinate their activities by going outside Viras, such as with MSN, e-mail, course forum or face-to-face meetings. Navigation and observation. The findings concerning 3D navigation and observation mostly resemble those from Case I. • Benefits. As an additional example of benefits associated with 3D navigation and observation, a student acknowledged the advantage of 3D navigation and overview, allowing to “quickly sort out places of interest by flying around as opposed to the traditional read-and-click method of the web”. • Limitations. As in Case I, there have been reported a number of problems with the overview and navigation: limited view angle, visual occlusions due to “walls” and other artifacts in the line of sight, the necessity to turn to look around, the feeling of being “lost”. Awareness provided by environment. • Benefits. The environment provided a number of mechanisms for conveying awareness of users, such as grouping of avatars and bridges between friends as in Case I. These mechanisms have on a number of occasions been explicitly mentioned by students (in exercise essays) as helpful to creating awareness of social relations. Considering the catalogue island, about half of the student groups in their exercise essays recognized that the proposed conventions such as grouping of related artifacts and using connected/highlighted artifacts created awareness of group memberships, with different degree of effectiveness.
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•
Limitations. At the same time, the majority agreed that the mechanisms on the catalogue island were not very effective to provide awareness of skills and expertise. This can be attributed to the fact that the amount of relevant projects and activities in the world was limited, plus that users had to update the information about themselves. Also, most of the students considered targeted search for collaboration partners to be complicated.
Figure 5.5 A 3D to-do list
5.6.2 Place •
•
Framework and association to activities. • Benefits. Activity places, both pre-built and created by students, were successfully used for mediating of a number of activities, such as meetings and parties (as appears from logs and examination of constructions). An example is a 3D meeting room with links to exercises, links to documents drafts laying on a virtual table, whiteboard, to-do-list, chat logs of the discussions etc. (Fig. 5.4). In this room, the students had real meetings (documented in chat logs), with working patterns resembling those in real life, for example: “Gunnar R: Now I have put the first part of exercise 4 delivery on the table”. Such places could reflect activities with a number of traces, including chat logs, screenshots of parties or the building process, signs announcing meetings, agenda, list of the participants, answers to exercise tasks, etc. As one student put it, the traces were considered to provide “a repository of information on the groups' work“. • Limitations. The traces had to be left explicitly by the user. Also, on a number of occasions students found it easier and more effective to meet face-to-face or use alternative tools, as shown by for example 3 postings on the class forum. Dynamic structure. • Benefits. Dynamic structure proved beneficial for awareness as the majority of the student groups (10 of 15) recognized the importance of building flexibility for increased awareness in their exercise essays. The building agent introduced in Case II was widely used by most of the groups (12 of 15). Its introduction generally led to a more extensive building (in terms of the amount of houses/islands and the covered land area) in the typical group areas compared to those from the Case I. • Limitations. There have been expressed opinions that the uncritical use of these facilities might lead to too much homogeneity in the constructions and
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• •
•
•
therefore loss of awareness information that can be expressed through the design. There have been registered complains that the present facilities have limited accuracy in positioning of constructions. Also, they do not facilitate major alterations after the building was finished, for example moving an island if the group membership changes. Outlook. The findings here mostly resemble those from Case I and are therefore not repeated here. Different roles and repertoire. • Benefits. Online observations and logs showed that the provided set of templates allowed quick creation of an initial set of places and mediation of a range of activities. Most of the student groups evaluated (in exercise essays) the division of roles between personal places and activities as beneficial for awareness. Summarizing their exercise answers, the reason for that is that these place types provide different types of awareness information: personal interests, activities, knowledge versus group activities, social relations, division of responsibilities. • Limitations. The provided places did not cover all users’ tasks and needs. Therefore, almost all groups chose to create additional places to satisfy their needs, also because some of the provided templates were considered too big and complex. Place structure. • Benefits. The place structure reflects social structures on the group level as students in a group settle near each other and connect their constructions by links and bridges, as shown by the analysis of the building pattern and student feedbacks. • Limitations. The connections between groups are much less evident. The overall pattern of “settlement” is therefore getting more influenced by the available empty area and less by the structure and the cognitive system of the community with the increasing size of the world. For example, the effectiveness of place structure for extracting awareness information on the social network in the questionnaire is low. Also, a student noted that teleportation hyperlinks in the constructions become the best and easiest way to connect friends rather than bridges and roads. However, obtaining the overview of the network of such links demands more effort than just taking a glance at the “landscape”. Therefore, the degree to which the place structure can provide overview of community and coordination of settlement decreases when the world grows bigger and contains constructions created by different generations of students. Association of places to learners. • Benefits. Personal places provided a wide range of mechanisms for expressing information about learners. They were according to questionnaire results considered the most important elements for awareness support by the students. Traces of personality in the student constructions, as found by inspection of these places, included both explicit info, such as age, interests, programming skills, and implicit info, such as pictures of friends, links to friends, web pages of interest etc. One’s personality was also expressed through design and artistic means: furniture, flowers, pictures, music, even a “jumping” wedding couple created by a girl who recently got married (see Paper 7).
64
•
Limitations. On several occasions students noted that the usefulness of the personal places highly depends on what information users choose to express. Also, on a number of occasions students complained that it was difficult to associate places to concrete people.
5.6.3 Artifact •
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•
•
•
Repertoire of artifacts. • Benefits. Among the advantages for using 3D artifacts there was mentioned their spatial and visual potentials for coordinating building activities, allowing visual expressions of thoughts and ideas (“wedding couple”, see Paper 7). Artifacts, including spatial ones, were also successfully used for communication and coordination of activities on a number of occasions. An example of such usage in a “real-life”-like manner is partition and labeling of the building area, for example signs like “Lisa will build an exhibition area here” put at the relevant place. • Limitations. Users complained that the provided repertoire still limited expression means, is time- and effort consuming and does not provide support for important features such as document sharing. Association of artifacts to learners. The findings here mostly resemble those from Case I. Following results are added: • Benefits. Some of the students claimed (in the essays) that one can express information and personality in 3D artifacts in a different and easier way than in reality or with other communication tools, for example one student noted that “…one can show more about oneself in such a 3D way than on an ordinary 2D homepage…”. • Limitations. Usage of such artifacts was associated with a certain complexity, as it was claimed that it is possible to express the same on a web page, but in a simpler way. Association of artifacts to activities. The findings here mostly resemble those from Case I. Following results are added: • Benefits. 3D artifacts were used more prominently for activity mediation and capturing of activity traces in Case II, showing additional examples of associated benefits. These examples include 3D meeting room (Fig. 5.4) and 3D to-do-list (Fig. 5.5). • Limitations. The awareness of activities was mostly limited by information put in the artifacts explicitly by the user. Representing a cognitive system. • Benefits. The system of teleportation links reflected to a certain degree the social and cognitive system of the community, as can be seen from for example links to friends and partners in most houses, as well as comments in student essays. • Limitations. The changes in this system were updated manually and propagation of the changes was limited to artifacts belonging to a certain user. Objectifying the coordination protocol. • Benefits. The artifacts provided for coordination purposes in the community were used regularly by the designer for common announcements (Fig. 5.6). Examples include walls and pre-programmed signs where users were encouraged to put questions or comments to the designer or fellow students. 65
•
Students used such pre-programmed signs on other occasions, such as putting announcements (“Party in the party house at 17.00 Friday)”, an overview of tasks to be done, a list of meeting attendants etc. Another example of such coordination via artifacts is a 3D to-do-list (Fig. 5.5). Limitations. These artifacts were not used regularly and systematically as there were no mechanisms for enforcement of the coordination protocol.
Figure 5.6 Announcements on the wall of the central house
5.6.4 General •
•
• •
Usage. The participation pattern exhibited the “critical mass” problem as in Case I, but has been more “even” and active. For example, in this case the students had at least 14-15 group meetings (meetings documented by 10 of 15 groups themselves in form of chat-logs, screen shots of parties etc.). About 3 groups had such meetings on a regular basis during the exercise period and used the provided facilities to support their collaboration. Approximately 5-6 of these group meetings were online “parties”, which were enough to satisfy the exercise requirement to have an organized activity online. Other meetings included also coordination of tasks, discussion of the theoretical issues in connection with the exercise and building cooperation. Long-term awareness. The majority of the students claimed that awareness has been greatest for students from the same group and generally current users. On the average, Viras has been most useful for supporting awareness on social network (as appears from the questionnaire), though the average ranking is not very high. The effectiveness for awareness on activities was on average ranked slightly less, with resources ranked lowest. For practically all dimensions, expressing of awareness information is more effective than retrieval. When asked about the usefulness of different places or tools for increasing social awareness in the class taking the course in the questionnaire, the students ranked highest lecture/classroom, then computer lab and course forum, Viras, and It’s learning (learning management system), in that order. Short-term awareness. Findings mostly resemble those from Case I. Potentials. In addition to potentials identified in Case I, there have been identified some potentials in connection with a repository of virtual places, as appears from the questionnaire and student essays. These include possibility for saving student constructions, thus allowing preserving knowledge and experience, further reuse
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and development, collaboration across distances and time, personal expression and establishing new contacts. Among disadvantages, as in Case I, users mentioned rather high threshold for “ordinary users” and time- and effort consuming building. 5.6.5 Summary of results from Case II Table 5.5 summarizes the results from Case II. The results identical to those from Case I are not repeated. The first column lists the major results. The second column indicates whether the result is a benefit or a limitation (“+” for benefit, “=” for neutral and “--” for limitation). The third column shows the predominant data source(s) for this result. The last column shows how much we have anticipated the result (“+” for anticipated, “=” for partly anticipated and “--” for more unexpected). 5.7 Comparison of Case I and II and improvement suggestions This chapter presented an experience of usage of Viras redesigned as a repository of virtual places. The results show that a repository of virtual places like Viras is to a certain degree effective for expressing and accessing information about resources, activities and social network. However, the created environment has a number of problems that influences the effectiveness of expression and retrieval of awareness information. The comparison between two cases shows some recurrent phenomena, though Case II exhibits a number of new ones, as shown in the discussion below: Similarities. The same platform was used in both cases. Also, the case study context was very similar, though with different generations of students. This can explain the identified similarities between Case I and Case II: • •
The experiences of usage of Viras II in Case II still reveal some “old” problems that are connected to the characteristics of the Active Worlds platform. Examples include slow response time, difficulties with navigation and artifact manipulations. Pattern of usage in Case II exhibited a number of phenomena from Case I, such as “critical mass” problem and generally low amount of users online.
Differences. There are a number of differences between cases. Some of them can be attributed to the revised design and utilization pattern: •
Places for different purposes. o Last year student constructions, introduced in Case II, were to a certain degree used for exercise tasks and thus illustrate a general possibility for reusing of resources across generations of students. However, they contributed to additional complexity of the world, making overview by place structure more problematic than in Case I. o A greater extent of activities online in Case II can be partly attributed to a broader repertoire of places for different purposes, such as personal and activity places. Though these activities were to a certain degree provoked by the corresponding exercise requirement, their extent were higher than the required minimum. However, the provided repertoire of places was not extensive and varied enough to support all users’ tasks. 67
Main results
Limitations/ benefits
Data source
Learner • Alternative means of communication through “chat brainstorming” and manipulation of artifacts and places
+
•
•
=
•
--
Indexing on the catalogue island and map of the world to a certain degree provides awareness of social structures and facilitates navigation • Search for collaboration partners with needed resources is complicated Place • Flexibility of building proved beneficial for awareness and allowed fast development of the world • Uncritical use of provided facilities for flexible building may limit creativity and thus awareness expression •
Existing flexibility of building is still not fully sufficient for reflecting social structures on the community level with the increased size of the world • A repertoire of places of different types is beneficial for social awareness, allows a quick creation of an initial set of places and mediation of a range of activities • 3D places can convey awareness of activities and learners by keeping traces and by mediating activities in a way, similar to real-life • The additional complexity associated with leaving traces explicitly and still limited repertoire of places makes other tools more appropriate in a number of tasks Artifact • 3D artifacts provide rich possibilities for conveying awareness information about learners in a visual and symbolic way • 3D artifacts provide rich possibilities for communication and coordination of activities in a symbolic and “real-life” way General • Usefulness of Viras for long-term social awareness applies to active users only • Usefulness of Viras for social awareness support is lower than of “real” classroom and course forum
Comments
Observation, student constructions, essays, chat Essays
=
•
Essays, questionnaires
--
+
•
+
--
•
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+
•
Student constructions, essays Student constructions, essays, interview Student constructions, essays, questionnaires Student constructions, essays, questionnaires
+
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Student constructions, essays, chat
+
--
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Essays, chat
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+
•
=
+
•
Student constructions, essays, interview Student constructions, essays, chat
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Essays
--
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•
Questionnaires
--
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--
--
+
=
Table 5.5 Summary of results for Case II
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•
•
Increased flexibility of building. More extensive building in Case II can be partly attributed to the increased flexibility of building. It also proved to be beneficial for awareness if used in accordance to intentions and with some improvements. The uncritical use of these facilities have in some cases led to too much homogeneity in the constructions and therefore loss of awareness information that can be expressed through the design. In this context, there has been more original building in Case I as things had to be built mostly “by hand”. Overview and the “catalogue island”. The results concerning awareness increase in Case I and effectiveness of Viras for awareness support in Case II are not directly comparable. However, there are indications that redesigned Viras provides more focus on support for awareness on activities and social network and less on resources compared to Case I. The introduction of activity places and visualization of group memberships provided by the catalogue island can to a certain degree be reason for that. However, the mechanisms on the catalogue island and generally increased complexity of the world in Case II did not contribute to a sufficient degree to effective search for people with required resources.
Based on the results, we present some suggestions for possible improvements. As the facilities provided by Active Worlds are nearly exhausted the realization of the improvements assumes to a greater degree use of additional tools. Learner •
•
Better overview. As mentioned before, the attempt to improve the awareness support by of the catalogue island was not fully successful, as the provided overview appeared quite chaotic. The users had to make an effort to put the connected links on the indexing artifacts representing people, groups, activities and templates. Also, there have been too few activities presented there to provide awareness on expertise. A way to solve these problems could be flexible combination of 2D and 3D facilities as well as stricter rules for indexing and cataloguing of constructions. As a way to ease navigation and retrieval of awareness information stored in places, there should be a customizable overview/map accessible all the time, showing current position and a selection of relevant information (such as position and houses of friends). Customization of avatars. Generally, for better support of short-term awareness, there should be greater possibilities for use of custom-made avatars.
Place and artifact •
•
Building flexibility. The results show that we need to compromise between the possibilities for creativity expression, regulation of building patterns and ease of building. Therefore, we need a greater choice of templates, greater modularity and variety of these and more precision in building (positioning, orientation). Also, we need a greater flexibility in the building facilities, for example “undo”-function and flexible moving of already built constructions. Quality of information. For a more effective presentation of awareness information, the design of templates and associated artifacts should encourage to 69
•
and ease filling of awareness-related information, such as “virtual CV forms”, making leaving and retrieving of traces easier. Support for a wider functionality range. There should be a wider range of artifacts and places, and they should to a greater degree support “traditional” groupware features, such as sharing of documents and notification/messaging.
General •
Organizing common activities. As activities online leave traces important for awareness and allow students to explore new working forms, there should be to a greater degree encouraged to community and group activities (discussions, project presentations, class parties). This is supported by Bannon (1989), emphasizing the importance of “creating a social activity through which learning can occur”. • Integration. To ensure better correspondence to users’ tasks and more extensive usage (which is important for the system’s value for social awareness support), there should be a better integration with existing learning practices and educational infrastructure. Examples include usage by different courses across classes, one-time activities (e.g. seminars) facilitated by easy creation of appropriate virtual places, assigning permanent places to students, combining local and distant ones etc.
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6 Evaluation The goal of this chapter is to provide an overall evaluation and discussion of the results from the case studies. Section 6.1 evaluates the results from the empirical case studies against the requirements and original assumptions while Section 6.2 discusses these results in the context of related work. Section 6.3 summarizes the evaluation of the empirical results. Section 6.4 evaluates the research method and Section 6.5 discusses how well the research questions have been answered. 6.1 Evaluation of results against original assumptions This section summarizes and puts together the results from all the empirical cases (Case I, Case II and the intermediate case), thus providing a summarized answer to RQ4. These results are evaluated against the original assumptions concerning usefulness of 3D CVEs for social awareness support. These assumptions are operationalized in the requirements. Requirements II are used for evaluation since this requirement set is most extensive and complete one and therefore provides a background for a more detailed evaluation. General results are evaluated against assumptions described in the presented usage scenarios. 6.1.1 Learner: summary of results and evaluation Table 6.1 provides a summary of the results for all the empirical cases for the learner dimension and their evaluation against the corresponding requirements. The results, especially the first one, have to a certain degree been affected by the technological limitations of Active Worlds. The results are also affected by the prevailing usage and deployment patterns and the nature of the tasks performed by the users during the case studies. 6.1.2 Place: summary of results and evaluation Table 6.2 provides a summary of the results for all the empirical cases for the place dimension and their evaluation against the corresponding requirements. The results are to a certain degree affected by the prevailing usage and deployment patterns, existing social structures and the nature of tasks performed by the users. 6.1.3 Artifact: summary of results and evaluation Table 6.3 provides a summary of the results for all the empirical cases for the artifact dimension and their evaluation against the corresponding requirements. The difference between the results and the requirements is to a significant degree due to the lack of support for a number of important features, supported by classical groupware tools. Examples include collaborative document editing, automatic messaging when an artifact of interest changes status or is accessed/manipulated by another user, thus providing awareness of possible collaboration partners. Therefore, the provided repertoire of artifacts did not cover the whole specter of students’ collaborative and learning tasks or for certain tasks introduced too much complexity compared to other tools.
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Results User representation. • Benefits. Viras provided alternative possibilities for identity construction and personality expression. • Limitations. Limited selection and rotation of avatars and user names different from those in real life, made the identification of and contact with users problematic. Communication. • Benefits. 3D communication allowed extraction and expression of visual cues about social situation. Viras was successfully used for consulting peers, discussions and creative personality expression. • Limitations. The usage of the mentioned mechanisms was not extensive due to restricted repertoire of nonverbal communication, additional complexity of movement in 3D space and few users online. Also, on a number of occasions users found it more adequate to use other communicational tools. Navigation and observation. • Benefits. 3D navigation and observation (e.g. looking at the world from the above) provided alternative means for collection of awareness information • Limitations. The relative slowliness and limited user friendliness decreased the motivation to use these mechanisms. Awareness provided by environment. • Benefits. The environment allowed visualization of certain relationships between users (e.g. grouping of avatars and linking between persons on the catalogue island). • Limitations. These mechanisms require direct involvement and updating by users to function properly. Targeted search for collaboration partners has been complicated.
Evaluation LL1 User representation. Only part of user representation (created places and artifacts) could reflect users’ trajectories, while avatars were practically useless for this purpose. Therefore, the requirement demanding user representation to provide such reflection is to a little degree realized. LL2 Communication. The requirement of effective communication is partly realized, as the provided facilities could support various communication modes. However, there is a certain mismatch between the facilities and the actual needs of the users.
LL3 Navigation and observation. The requirement of effective navigation and observation is partly realized as the required navigation and observation possibilities have been provided, though not as easy and user-friendly as intended. LL4 Awareness provided by environment. The environment did provide some facilities for collection and presentation of awareness information to the users but they were not automated and not effective enough. Therefore, the requirement demanding provision of such facilities is to a little degree realized.
Table 6.1 Learner
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Results Framework and association to activities. • Benefits. 3D places could convey awareness of activities by keeping traces of and mediating activities in a way, similar to real-life. • Limitations. In some cases the mentioned mechanisms introduced additional complexity. The traces had to be left explicitly by the user. Also, on a number of occasions, it was more adequate for students to use traditional groupware tools and face-to-face cooperation. Dynamic structure. • Benefits. Flexibility of building proved to be beneficial for awareness and allowed fast development of the world. • Limitations. The provided facilities did not facilitate making subsequent changes.
Outlook. • Benefits. The outlook of Archipelago provided framework for informal communication and socializing. • Limitations. The outlook could serve as a distraction for learning activities. Different roles and repertoire. • Benefits. A repertoire of different places allowed a quick creation of a set of places and mediation of a range of activities. • Limitations. The provided places did not cover the whole specter of user needs, so users had to create additional places to perform their tasks. Place structure. • Benefits. Place structure visualizes social structure on the group level and in some cases connections between groups. • Limitations. The degree to which structure of places could visualize social structure on community level, the cognitive system and the coordination protocol, varied and diminished with increased world size. Association of places to learners. • Benefits. Virtual places proved to have a significant potential for reflecting personality of learners. Virtual places can keep traces of personalities and be shaped in a more flexible and creative way than in real life. • Limitations. Users choose themselves how much and what awareness information they provide.
Evaluation PP1 Framework and association to activities. Leaving traces of activities was possible, but not fully flexible, and the virtual places could provide adequate framework for some, but not all user activities. Therefore, the requirement demanding provision of such framework and association to activities is partly realized. PP2 Dynamic structure. The requirement of dynamic structure is partly realized as additional building flexibility was provided. However, the restricted ability to alter place structure limited propagation of representational states and reflection of changes in the social structure such as moving to another group. PP3 Outlook. The requirement of adequate outlook is partly realized as the outlook provided informal atmosphere but did not to a sufficient degree reflect everyday student activities. PP4 Different roles and repertoire. The requirement demanding a repertoire of places for different roles is partly realized as the existing repertoire of places is sufficient to perform some, but not all required functions in accordance to user tasks. PP5 Place structure. The structuring of places to a certain, but limited degree reflected the structure of the community. The overview provided to the user was complicated. Therefore, the requirement demanding the place structure to provide such overview is partly realized. PP6 Association of places to learners. As there is no control on and standards for the quality and type of information users can express, the association between places and learners is provided, but to variable degree. The requirement demanding association of places to learners is therefore partly realized.
Table 6.2 Place
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Results Repertoire of artifacts. • Benefits. Provided artifacts allowed alternative 3D and symbolic ways of expressing and visualizing awareness information and coordinating activities in a way that resembled practices from real life. • Limitations. Other tools were more adequate in a number of tasks. Association of artifacts to learners. • Benefits. Artifacts provided a range of possibilities for expressing awareness information about persons. • Limitations. This awareness was mostly limited by information put there by the user and user name, which could be changed several times. Association of artifacts to activities. • Benefits. Artifacts provided a range of possibilities for coordinating and expressing awareness of activities. • Limitations. The awareness was mostly limited by information put on the artifacts by the user. Representing cognitive system. • Benefits. The system of teleportation links reflected to a certain degree the social and cognitive system of the community. • Limitations. The changes in this system were updated manually and propagation of the changes was limited to artifacts belonging to a certain user. Objectifying coordination protocol. • Benefits. Artifacts provided for coordination purposes such as walls and pre-programmed signs were used regularly by designer and on a number of occasions by users for coordinating their activities. • Limitations. These mechanisms were not used consequently and regularly as intended as there were no explicit enforcement mechanisms.
Evaluation AA1 Repertoire of artifacts. The available functionalities provided a certain mismatch with student tasks and working practices, though conveying of awareness information and performance of some tasks was supported. Therefore, the requirement demanding a repertoire of artifacts for different purposes is partly realized. AA2 Association of artifacts to learners. There is no control on and standards for the quality and type of information users can express and therefore the association of artifacts to people exists, but is not very clear. Therefore, the requirement demanding association of artifacts to learners is partly realized. AA3 Association of artifacts to activities. Leaving of activity traces was in many cases possible, but was not automated. Therefore, the requirement demanding association artifacts to activities is partly realized. AA4 Representing cognitive system. Propagation of representational states was in some cases possible, but limited by insufficient flexibility, connections between artifacts and the existing conventions for property sharing in Active Worlds. The requirement demanding artifacts to represent cognitive system is therefore partly realized. AA5 Objectifying coordination protocol. The requirement demanding artifacts to objectify coordination protocol is partly realized as the provided artifacts were in some cases useful for this purpose, but there were no explicit mechanisms and strict rules for “enforcement” of the coordination protocol.
Table 6.3 Artifact
6.1.4 Summary of general results and evaluation Table 6.4 provides a summary of the general results for all the empirical cases and their evaluation against the original assumptions as expressed in the usage scenarios in Chapters 4 and 5. There are a number of considerations in connection with these results: •
The impact on social awareness could be assessed to a limited degree. The effectiveness of the awareness support for all dimensions (resources, activities, social network) is not very high, but is in most cases dependent on the extent on usage of the system. “Storing” of long-awareness information appears to be 74
•
•
feasible only for active users, suggesting that a repository of virtual places can be useful in a shorter time perspective than anticipated. Also, the results indicate that, with the present design, Viras is most suitable for providing awareness on social network and activities and less on resources. This is not quite beneficial as limited awareness of resources complicates effective search for collaboration partners. Therefore, there is a need for combination with alternative methods and tools, such as a database. Also, for practically all dimensions, expressing of awareness information is more effective than retrieval, suggesting the need for better overview and navigation. The limited usage, especially in the intermediate case, can be attributed to the discrepancy of the functionality provided by the system, existing pattern of deployment and actual needs of the students using it. The potentials for successful utilization of Viras for social awareness support depend therefore on such factors as persistence of the world, more extensive deployment and better integration with the existing infrastructure and other cooperative tools. Short-term and long-term awareness was in the beginning treated equally. However, since the empirical results showed that 3D CVEs are to a very limited degree suitable for short-term awareness support with the given pattern of usage, the focus has been switched to long-term awareness.
Results Usage. Usage was limited, with generally low user mass online, and most prominent on the group level.
Long-term social awareness. Usefulness of Viras for long-term social awareness support is not perceived high, is proportional to the extent of usage and is applicable to active users only.
Sort-term awareness. It can only be supported in situations with a relatively large amount of users online, and to a limited degree. Maintaining shortterm awareness in Viras imposes additional complexity on the user as one has to have the browser window open and check the status in the chat and main window all the time. Potentials. Users recognized potentials of Viras for exchange of experiences across student generations, personal expression, group work, establishing contacts and informal discussion. The realization of potentials depends on pattern of usage.
Evaluation These usage patterns show that the original scenario assumptions are partly valid as user mass was anticipated not very high, but higher than shown by results. It was also assumed more extensive community use than identified in reality. These discrepancies can be understood in the context of insufficient integration with the existing educational practices and social structures in the participating communities. This result show that the original assumptions are partly valid as anticipated usefulness was higher. Also, the value of constructions created by former student generations is lower than anticipated. This discrepancy can be seen in context of limited deployment and integration into educational practices compared to scenario assumptions. This result is mostly in line with the original assumption, but is more pessimistic.
These potentials are in line with the original assumptions, but depend on deployment and the integration into surrounding social and organizational infrastructure.
Table 6.4 General results
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•
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The prevailing usage pattern on the group level can be attributed by the existing social structure of the community using Viras. Students were divided into project groups and performed all their educational tasks within these, which might have decreased their motivation to contact persons outside. It was in practice not possible to assess the impact on learning among students using Viras as originally intended in Case I and the intermediate case.
6.1.5 Summary of results from case studies Table 6.5 summarizes the empirical results from the cases. The first column lists the major results. The second column indicates whether the result is a benefit or a limitation (“+” for benefit, “=” for neutral and “--” for limitation). The third column indicates how much we have anticipated the result (“+” for anticipated, “=” for partly anticipated and “--” for more unexpected). 6.2 Evaluation in the context of related work The goal of this section is to provide an evaluation of the results in the framework of related work. CVE and VR. A number of results of this thesis concerning the usage of 3D CVE for supporting social and learning processes are in line with the existing research in the CVE and VR field: •
• •
•
The identified potentials in educational context in connection with building and interacting in a 3D environment and the ability of 3D CVEs to express and visualize personality and other concepts in a richer 3D way are in line with the research by Dickey (1999), Talamo & Ligorio (2000) and Youngblut (1998). The identified issues in connection with the user friendliness of 3D CVEs, such as additional cognitive and visual load are considered in a number of sources, e.g. Hindmarsch et al. (2001) and Youngblut (1998). The results concerning socializing and working in 3D space are supported by the research by for example (Jeffrey & Mark, 1999) and (Harrison & Dourish, 1996), showing that 3D structure of space can be helpful for social behavior and human interaction. The ambiguity of the results concerning the effectiveness of 3D for providing overview and facilitating the retrieval of information is in line with dissension on this topic in the literature (e.g. Czerinski et al., 1999; Cockburn & McKenzie, 2002).
In this context, the major contribution of this work is the exploration of advantages and disadvantages of 3D CVEs for social awareness support, not as an isolated phenomenon, but in the context of the social and organizational infrastructure of a university. Therefore, the results of this work must be evaluated in a broader CSCL and CSCW perspective and take into account the complex interactions between the system and social environment and existing practices.
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Main results Learner • Virtual environment provides rich possibilities for conveying of awareness information and identity expression through creation of places and artifacts • Limited selection and rotation of avatars makes identification of users and conveying of short-term social awareness difficult • Virtual environment provides alternative means of communication and conveying of awareness through “chat brainstorming”, 3D movement and manipulation of 3D artifacts and places • Complexity of movement and communication in 3D space limits the use of existing awareness mechanisms • Search for collaboration partners with needed resources is complicated Place • Flexibility of building proved beneficial for awareness and allowed fast development of the world • Uncritical use of provided facilities for flexible building may limit creativity and thus awareness expression • Place structures are useful for visualizing social structure on the group level • Existing flexibility of building is still not fully sufficient for reflecting social structures on the community level with the increased size of the world • A repertoire of places of different types is beneficial for social awareness, allows a quick creation of an initial set of places and mediation of a range of activities • 3D places can convey awareness of activities and learners by keeping traces and by mediating activities in a way, similar to real-life • The additional complexity associated with leaving traces explicitly and still limited repertoire of places makes other tools more appropriate in a number of tasks • The Archipelago outlook can serve as a distraction for learning activities Artifact • 3D artifacts provide rich possibilities for conveying awareness information about learners and their activities, communication and activity mediation in a visual, symbolic and ”real life” way • The functionality associated with 3D artifacts does not cover the whole range of user needs • The effort associated with expressing awareness information in 3D artifacts makes other tools more preferable in some cases General • Usefulness of Viras for long-term social awareness support depends on the extent of usage and applies to active users only • Short-term awareness can only be supported with a relatively large amount of users online, and to a limited degree
Limitations / benefits
Comments
+
+
--
=
+
=
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=
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+
+
--
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+
+
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+
+
+
+
--
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--
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+
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--
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Table 6.5 Summary of empirical results
CSCW and CSCL. As discussed in Section 3.1, the successful adoption of cooperative tools requires an understanding of the organizational and working practices in the environment around the users, as well as the social interaction in the
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communities and groups. In the context of CSCL, it is also important to create a social activity around which learning can occur (Bannon, 1989). The results in connection with the usage of Viras and social dynamics in the communities and groups can be discussed along the framework suggested by (Grudin, 1994). According to Lehtinen et al. (1998), the same framework can be applicable for discussing CSCL applications: Critical mass. The limited usage of Viras can be partly evaluated in the light of the classical “critical mass problem”: when users are few, it is not very motivating to come online or build if there is nobody to talk to or nobody to look at your constructions. This is related to deployment issues such as uncertain persistence of the world, usage in one class only and the availability of alternative meeting places such as classroom. In this context it is relevant to refer to the Active Worlds based Virtual Campus of the university of Sydney (Maher et al., 2001), which is successfully used for teaching a number of classes, involving both local and distant students. This suggests that the results could be different in case of different deployment patterns. For example, the usefulness of the system could potentially be higher in distant education, where (due to the impossibility to meet otherwise) the virtual environment can provide the only place for joint activities and common reference and thus give students a greater motivation to visit the world. Work vs. benefit. The results concerning limited usage and the degree of assistance Viras could provide in terms of visualizing trajectories of learners and facilitating search for collaboration partners can be discussed in the light of the “work vs. benefit” problem of collaborative tools (Grudin, 1994). For example, the efforts in connection with putting out information about oneself, costs with the “codification of knowledge” (Ackerman & Halverson, 1998) and generally the costs of maintaining of a repository of virtual places according to the intended scenarios (Dingsøyr, 2002) can be significant due to complicated building. The information presented in virtual places may be of varying quality and give “a skewed”, “misrepresented” (Bannon & Schmidt, 1991) picture of the persons, activities and social network. Therefore, a potential successful functioning of such a repository may require a “human mediator” (Bannon & Bodker, 1997), to assist and standardize creation of the common information space and assure the quality of presented information, thus adding to the costs. These costs must be weighted against the benefits. These benefits could include helping or receiving help from other students, finding new contacts and collaborating partners and just “showing off”. They could however seem uncertain to the students using Viras due to shortness of usage and unsure persistence of the world and constructions in it after the end of the exercise/course. Also, establishing contacts and helping might in some cases be more efficient in real-life social settings, depending on the task (not related to 3D building) and personal preferences. Therefore, Viras could be more useful in cases where the student tasks directly involve 3D modeling, such as architecture, art and natural science. Also, the effort invested into presenting oneself could be more justified when students do not have the opportunity to know and meet each other in reality, such as in distance education. Social norms. The results concerning prevailing patterns of usage and limited collaboration and exchange of resources on the community level can be seen in the context of the existing social norms. The physiological barrier to reveal incompetence
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and ask a relatively unknown person for help might be too high, as shown by Ackerman & Halverson (1998) even if the possibilities are provided by the technology. The willingness to share and providing help might also be problematic due to limited time or competitiveness in the class, as exemplified by Orlikowski (1992). This discussion raises a number of issues in connection with the suitability of Viras and 3D CVEs in general for social awareness support and learning facilitation, compared to other tools. Though a number of CSCW and CSCL tools were used by the students in parallel with Viras, such as e-mail, MSN, web forum and It’s Learning (learning management system), a direct comparison of these tools and Viras has been difficult. This is because the functionalities provided and the usage areas of these tools were not quite the same. There are however indications that on a number of occasions CSCW and CSCL tools can provide a more direct and efficient support. For example, support for finding collaboration partners in Viras may for the moment appear less straightforward compared to the more traditional “yellow pages”/database approach (Ackerman, 1998). Also, simpler communityware applications such as Drehscheibe (Koch, 2003), described in Section 3.2, can in some cases be more efficient for exchange of information and “matchmaking” of community members. Learning management systems such as It’s Learning, can provide more efficient support for some learning tasks such as sharing of working documents. At the same time, as shown by our results and the related literature, 3D CVEs can provide possibilities the “traditional” tools cannot give. This includes 3D visualization of both awareness-related and educational information and an alternative arena for social and learning activities. There are also a number of successful examples of using such CVEs for learning and socializing, such as in the Active Worlds Educational Universe. In addition, the facilities provided by the “traditional” tools, can with some effort be integrated with the CVEs, such as more effective operations on documents. Therefore, 3D CVEs can potentially provide nearly all functionalities necessary for performance of central social and learning tasks. However, to be able to “compete” with “traditional” collaborative tools, these functionalities must be provided in a more user-friendly and effective way than is possible with Viras at the moment. 6.3 Evaluation of the empirical results: summary The major results of this work have been evaluated against the requirements and the original assumptions to identify whether 3D CVEs are suitable for social awareness support as claimed. Here we list major limitations and benefits of 3D CVEs for social awareness support: •
•
Learner. 3D CVE provide interesting possibilities for representation of the user and thus conveying of awareness information not available in “traditional” applications or reality. However, the usefulness of these features must be weighted against the effort associated with navigating and communicating in 3D as opposed to other available means. Place. 3D virtual places have a number of advantages for expressing information about persons and activities and providing a motivating and “natural” environment for working and socializing. These advantages must be weighted against the effort associated with creating such 3D places, increased system demands and certain 79
•
•
complexity associated with navigation and retrieving of information presented. This suggests softening of focus on 3D space and a flexible combination of 2D/3D for different tasks. Artifact. 3D artifacts can provide alternative possibilities for expressing awareness information and mediating communication and activities, such as 3D visualization. However, their usefulness for different tasks must be weighted against the efficacy and familiarity of “traditional” tools. General. The usefulness of 3D CVEs for social awareness support must be seen in the context of different learning situations, usage scenarios and user needs. For this support to be effective enough, CVEs should in some cases be integrated with additional cooperative tools. Successful utilization also assumes integration into the overall infrastructure to such an extent that provides motivation and opportunities for the users to visit and use the CVE on a regular basis.
It is not possible in this stage to provide an unambiguous answer to the question of suitability of 3D CVEs for supporting social awareness and generally learning. There are a number of factors that influence the success of utilization of 3D CVE for this purpose. The main consideration in this context is the simplicity and effectiveness of the provided support vs. the nature of tasks. This consideration will be decisive for the value and usefulness of 3D CVEs in this context. 6.4 Evaluation of the research method The goal of this section is to evaluate the research method. The research presented in this thesis, as mentioned before, is both theoretically and empirically based, following an iterative process and gradually refining the answers to the research questions. The empirical research strategy chosen was case studies. An alternative considered has been experiment, however, our final choice is justified by a number of considerations (Yin, 2003). The research question asked, RQ4, concerning limitations and benefits of 3D CVEs for social awareness support among university students, is exploratory in nature. Also, though the chosen form was an exercise, the degree of control we had on the studied behavior has been limited. This is because we could not control formation of student groups as well as factors such as other courses students took, existing administrative practices etc. Therefore, the choice of case study as research strategy in our case is justified, though this strategy has a number of well-known weaknesses, such as lack of rigor and limited basis for scientific generalization (Yin, 2003). These limitations are encountered in this work as well, as shown in the discussion below. The research process implied taking a number of choices. These choices were a result of trade-off between a number of practical considerations and the chosen research questions and sought, where possible, to overcome limitations of the chosen method. This includes using several sources of evidence to supplement student essays. Three cases were planned to identify the effect of different designs and to evaluate the system in different educational contexts. Though the restricted settings of the study prevented the identification of connection between social awareness and learning, it allowed exploration of limitations and benefits, which is the major focus of this work. Also, the chosen form of the two cases as exercises allowed to evaluate how Viras can be used in the context of certain learning activities (e.g. group discussion) and provide some form of control. As it was impossible to evaluate the whole range of CVEs and find a CVE tool supporting all the three dimensions equally, Active Worlds was 80
chosen for its extensive usage in education and its support for flexible manipulation of virtual places (which was our main focus in this work). The rest of this chapter discusses a number of issues in connection with the validity of the empirical findings of this work. The validity discussion is based on the “Case study research: design and methods” by R. Yin, (Yin, 2003). This work differentiates between following validity types: • • •
Construct validity: establishing correct operational measures for the concepts being studied. Internal validity: establishing a causal relationship, whereby certain conditions are shown to lead to other conditions. External validity: establishing the domain to which a study’s findings can be generalized.
6.4.1 Construct validity There have been a number of issues associated with finding appropriate operational measures for social awareness level and increase, as its perception is to a significant degree subjective. Two types of measurements have been used: •
•
Measuring social awareness increase in Case I. The increase in different elements of social awareness was measured by asking students to rank their subjective perception of awareness increase about other students using the system on a Likert scale. This measurement has provided an indication of the effect of using Viras for social awareness in the class. As additional sources (exercise essays, interviews) showed, the results provided by this measurement might be too low. This is because some of the students had previous knowledge of each other before they started using the tool and used the tool for shorter periods of time. Therefore, new, improved methods of measurement were used in Case II. Measuring effectiveness and usefulness of Viras and its parts for social awareness support in Case II. In the second case, it was decided to access students’ subjectively perceived effectiveness of Viras for supporting social awareness compared to other places or tools, such as classroom and forum. Also, the students were asked to (subjectively) rank different elements in Viras according to their effectiveness for expressing and retrieving information about resources, activities and social network (see Appendix B). The subjective perception of effectiveness of Viras and its features for social awareness support can be interleaved with a number of additional factors such as personal preferences and the amount of time students spent on using the system. However, taking into account the exploratory nature of the study, this approach is justified as it provides an indication of the effectiveness of different system aspects on social awareness. Also, this measurement is not affected by the initial social structure in the community and less affected by the extent of usage than the previous one.
6.4.2 Internal validity As discussed in Section 1.4, introduction of new IT tools may lead to unpredicted consequences due to their novelty and thus their influence on learning and
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collaborative patterns. Therefore, the results may be influenced by a number of factors, which must be taken into account when analyzing causal relationships between the results and the studied qualities of the system. On the overall, the internal validity is evaluated as satisfactory as the results were supported by a range of different sources (see Appendix B for description): •
•
•
•
•
Questionnaires and exercise answers. The results based on the exercise answers have satisfactory validity as the essays were written by all the participating groups. Whenever possible, direct student citations were used in presenting the results, to diminish possible interpretation bias. The results from the questionnaires were affected by the relatively low response rate in the two cases and to a certain extent the limited usage of the system, but could however indicate some tendencies. However, most of the questionnaire results could be supported by related exercise answers. Also, the respondents had a rather varied level of acceptance, the time spent in and experience with the environment. This, however, contributed to represent certain diversity in opinions of enthusiasts and opponents of 3D CVEs in this context. Interviews. The results from the interviews may be affected by the limited amount of students present, their potential bias (more than average interested in the system) and presence of the designer. However, as the interviews were used as a supplement to the main data sources and were meant as more in-depth discussions of selected issues, these biases are acceptable. Logging. The results from logging of conversations could to a certain degree be affected by the characteristics of the logging facilities: the impossibility to capture “whispers” by the main logging facilities, and thus possibly providing a skewed picture of some sessions. The validity of this data source is however considered satisfactory, as the logging made by the designer was made from two sources and also triangulated and supplemented by logs created by 10 student groups in Case II (see Section B.1.4). Online observations. The results from online observations by the designer (conversations and behavior) may be affected by the presence of the designer (which could function inhibiting) and the guidelines imposed by the exercise tasks. However, an observation without no intervention from the researcher was not an alternative as students on several occasions needed to get help and consultations. The interaction with the designer was also justified as it allowed exploring some issues of how teacher-student interaction can be supported in 3D CVEs. Examination of constructions and analysis of building pattern. The analysis of the constructions and building pattern in the world provided a strong indication of social relations and sometimes cooperation patterns on the group level, as such relations were indicated by several “overlapping” factors, such as bridges, roads, teleportation links, similarity in design and “closeness”. It also allowed to explore how students use virtual places and artifacts to leave traces of their personalities and activities. The use of this tool for indicating social relations is more limited on the community level as the positioning and design/content of houses and islands were affected by building limitations (proximity to other houses for better copying) and pure coincidence.
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6.4.3 External validity The environment has been tested among university students taking a course together since they had a need, at least theoretically, to share experiences and knowledge and cooperate around various tasks. Therefore, they had a potential need to increase their level of social awareness and provided an example of the target group for this research. The discussion below provides an overview of different issues and considerations in connection with external validity and generalization of results. •
•
•
Study settings. Due to practical and technical conditions the case studies were conducted as an exercise (except for the intermediate case), so the time-span in both cases was relative short. This imposes a certain limitation on external validity. For example, many participants might not have enough time (workload, short span of the study etc.) to achieve a significant improvement of their social awareness, which was acknowledged by the students directly. This limitation is dealt with by revising RQ4 and narrowing focus as mentioned earlier. At the same time, the design in the form of an exercise allowed to explore the limitations and benefits of 3D in terms of supporting some collaborative learning tasks such as discussions of exercise assignments. Also, for a development of a repository of virtual places of significant size, a longer period might be required. However, we do not think this consideration to be crucial in this context, since the majority of students considered “old” constructions created by inactive users as not important for awareness, making the time perspective less decisive. The benefits and limitations of reusing some elements in the repository such as templates were therefore possible to identify with the existing elements, such as last-year student constructions in Case II. Context and environment. Due to the participation of only one class in each case and short usage time, it was not straightforward to analyze the influence of a whole set of interconnected factors such as other courses students took, organizational issues and existing learning practices and culture. Therefore, usage patterns could to a certain degree be different under other organizational and practical settings, for example, in a pure remote learning course. We have however addressed this limitation by revising the original RQ4 and therefore narrowing the focus of our research. The evaluation of the system within a wide range of different educational contexts has not been feasible within the given practical constraints. However, the evaluation in the given restricted context allowed to identify the implications of the limited infrastructure integration for social awareness as one of the results. Characteristics of student population. o The actual students were taking courses in computer science, had CVE as a part of the curriculum (in cases I and II) and therefore had an increased interest for the subject. Therefore, the experience of usage, such as acceptance of the system, might to a certain degree be different if transferred to a different environment, for example literature students. However, the experiences from other Active Worlds based environments show a rather successful usage and acceptance from different populations of students. Therefore we do not consider this bias decisive for the results.
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•
o The results concerning the usage on group and community level may also to a certain degree be different in case of a different initial social structure (due to, for example, an alternative method of group formation). However, we do not see this consideration as crucial in the context of limitations and benefits of different elements of Viras, which is primary focus of this work. Limitations of the chosen technological platform. The choice of the technological platform and the associated technological affordances provided certain limitations. Active Worlds was chosen mainly for relative flexibility of building and the possibility for a quick creation of an initial set of places. It has some drawbacks, such as a relatively limited selection of the avatars, which may have influenced the findings concerning the importance of avatars for social awareness, and lack of some features for cooperative work, such as shared document editing. However, since the main focus of this work is on virtual places, the choice of the tool is justified. Also, as the principle of an avatar chosen from a fixed list is rather common in CVEs, the corresponding results can to a certain degree be generalized to other systems. The results on the importance of avatar are in addition strongly influenced by the limited usage and the “critical mass” problem. Since also this problem is quite common in the CVE field, the generalization of these results is to a certain degree supported.
6.4.4 Research method: conclusion The discussion above reveals some limitations with the used research method. A consequence of this has been the need to revise the original RQ4. Though the chosen method has in certain cases limited validity in terms of identifying social awareness increase and associating learning outcomes (as in the original research question), we can conclude that the validity is satisfactory in terms of the revised research question and the exploration of limitations and benefits of 3D CVEs. Therefore, the results of the empirical evaluation are valid within the constraints identified above. 6.5 Answers to research questions The answers to the research questions are a way to see whether goals of research have been met. The main research question of this dissertation, as indicated in Chapter 1, is: MRQ: What are the limitations and benefits of 3D collaborative virtual environments for social awareness support among university students? The main research question is answered by identifying limitations and benefits in connection with using a 3D CVE, Viras, for social awareness support, resulting in 6 contributions. To summarize, 3D CVEs provide alternative and in some cases effective means for conveying social awareness. This includes possibilities for flexible and creative construction of identity and representation of the user, flexible creation and modification of virtual places and the mechanisms for mediation of communication and activities and visualization provided by 3D artifacts. However, the complexity associated with using these mechanisms may in some cases prevent effective and extensive usage. Therefore, these limitations and benefits must be seen in the context of user tasks and the overall social and educational infrastructure, which 84
is discussed earlier in this chapter. It is also discussed to what extent the usage experiences of Viras can be applicable for 3D CVEs in general and different educational situations and contexts. To answer the main research question, it has been necessary to provide answers to 4 related sub-questions: RQ1: What are the limitations of social awareness mechanisms used by university students, in accordance with the adopted definition? Answering to the first research question, this thesis has provided an operational definition of social awareness as stated in Chapter 1. Based on this definition, the thesis has provided an overview of existing mechanisms for supporting social awareness and their limitations in Paper 1, which is the first contribution of this thesis. A short overview of these is also presented in Chapter 1. To summarize, the “traditional” tools place too much focus on established groups rather than fluid communities. They do not support “weak ties” and chance encounters, cannot provide visual clues about social situation in a community and do not provide sufficient awareness of social structures, activities and resources. Acquiring awareness in the physical space can also be complicated due to distances, different schedules, social fears and inhibitions, as well as limited flexibility and availability of such space. This Contribution 1 is based both on the literature study and on the empirical data collected among students of our department. It allowed us to identify the need for alternative support mechanisms and provided a motivation for using CVEs for such support. This overview is not exhaustive and is mostly meant as a starting point for exploration of alternative means for social awareness support. It can be extended and generalized to be valid for a broader specter of educational and working environments. RQ2: What mechanisms do 3D CVEs offer for support on major dimensions of social awareness among university students? This research question is answered by analysis of the literature and exploration of some CVEs. CVEs, mostly educational, and the associated awareness mechanisms, are classified along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact. Within each dimension, both short-term and long-term time aspect is considered. Learner dimension can convey social awareness in terms of presence, embodiment and identity. Place dimension can facilitate awareness support through its outlook, structure and role. The artifact dimension can support social awareness by reflecting activities and their performer and through associated functionality and outlook. These results constitute Contribution 2. The place dimension is analyzed more in depth by providing an overview of different place metaphors in educational CVEs. This overview is presented in Chapter 3 and Papers 1 and 2 and is, together with the Archipelago metaphor, Contribution 3 of this thesis. These mechanisms provide an understanding of how CVEs can support awareness along major dimensions in real-life educational situations and therefore constitute a background for requirements for a CVE for social awareness support. This overview is however not meant as a final one since it is based on a certain theoretical background and the chosen definition of social awareness and can therefore be modified and extended.
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RQ3: What are the requirements for 3D CVEs supporting social awareness, based on the identified mechanisms? The requirements for a 3D CVE supporting social awareness have been derived both from theoretical background and empirical data, in an iterative fashion. They are based on the mechanisms identified in RQ2 and the definition of social awareness reformulated to take into account the needs of learning communities in groups according to the chosen theoretical approach. The requirements are presented in Chapters 4, 5 and Papers 3, 5 and 6 and constitute Contribution 4 of this thesis. The final set of requirements is revised in accordance with the empirical data and therefore puts more emphasis on the place dimension and long-term awareness compared to the original set. The requirements can be summarized as follows. The representation and embodiment of the learner should reflect his/her place on and movement along the learning and participation trajectory, facilitate communication and artifact manipulation (and thus identity construction), provide navigational possibilities, and make the learner aware of the learners, their trajectories, activities and mutual relations. The place should provide framework for activities and be in a flexible way shaped by and associated to activities and persons. Place should have a dynamic structure and have a repertoire of places for different purposes with associated tools, thus supporting a flexible usage of different parts for playing different roles. The outlook (possibly static) should reflect the spirit of the community and groups, while the structure should reflect the structure of the community, its cognitive system and adopted coordination protocol. Artifacts should comprise a shared repertoire of the community, with different types available to allow accomplishing of various tasks. It should be possible to associate artifacts to people and leave traces of user’s activities on them. The system of interconnected artifacts should represent the cognitive system of the community and allow propagation of representational states. The material format of the artifacts should objectify the adopted coordination protocol. This contribution provides a background for designing a CVE for social awareness support, which is necessary to answer the last research question. The requirements are, however, influenced by a number of factors, such as the choice of the theoretical approaches. Therefore, the resulting list of requirements is not final and can be extended and updated further. RQ4: What are the limitations and benefits associated with using a 3D CVE designed according to these requirements for social awareness support in university student communities and groups? To answer this question, the requirements identified by RQ3 have been realized on the basis on the chosen CVE platform. The design and corresponding implementation constitutes Contribution 5 of this work. The realization of all the presented requirements has been complex due to the limitations of the technology, especially chosen Active Worlds platform, and different scenarios of possible usage, imposing different demands on the system.
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Due to practical conditions and empirical results, the research question had to be revised before the final case study. The limited usage in the intermediate case study in a project-based course prevented the original intention to evaluate the impact of the system on learning in student communities in a real-life educational situation. The evaluation of the impact on social awareness has been possible to a limited degree. Therefore, the research question was revised to focus on the limitations and benefits of different elements in Viras for social awareness support. Also, based on the experiences of usage, more emphasis has been put on long-term awareness support. The answer to this research question is given by providing a discussion of limitations and benefits in Chapters 4 and 5 (as well as in the Papers 4 and 7), which constitutes Contribution 6. This discussion is summarized in Chapter 6, by providing a list of limitations and benefits associated with different aspects of 3D CVEs for social awareness support (Tables 6.1-6.5). To sum up, 3D CVE provide interesting possibilities for representation of the user and thus conveying of awareness information not available in “traditional” applications or reality. 3D virtual places have a number of advantages for expressing information about persons and activities and providing a motivating and “natural” environment for working and socializing. 3D artifacts can provide alternative possibilities for expressing awareness information and mediating communication and activities, such as 3D visualization. However, the usefulness of these features for different tasks must be weighted against the associated effort, system overhead as well as efficacy and familiarity of “traditional” tools and the associated effort. Generally, the usefulness of 3D CVEs for social awareness support must be seen in the context of different learning situations, usage scenarios and user needs. The results are evaluated against requirements, original assumptions and the related work.
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7 Conclusions 7.1 Summary of contributions The contributions of this thesis are both theoretically and empirically based. As the main goal of this work has been to contribute to a better understanding of the problem of supporting social awareness among university students and not to provide a final solution, the major objective of the thesis has been achieved. The contributions therefore include: C1. An overview of existing mechanisms supporting social awareness among university students, such as shared workplace and traditional technical tools (ICQ, e-mail, mobile phones, etc). This overview takes starting point in the operational definition of social awareness, derived from the analysis of the corresponding literature. This contribution is based both on the literature study and on the empirical data collected among students of our department. The conclusion is that these mechanisms are not sufficient. The provided overview is not exhaustive and is mostly meant as a starting point for exploration of alternative means for social awareness support, in this case by means of collaborative virtual environments. The overview can be extended and generalized to be valid for a broader specter of educational and working environments. This contribution is related to RQ1. C2. A characterization of CVEs and associated awareness mechanisms along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact. This characterization is done on the basis of literature analysis and exploration of Active Worlds Educational Universe. The classification is inspired by the Activity theory and its main components and therefore follows the Activity Centered approach in CSCL design. This puts less emphasis on the individual learner, tutors and the learning content, and more on the social activities in the community of learners. This may imply that this approach may have varying appeal in different educational contexts and situations. This characterization mainly focuses on the educational CVEs, but can with some modifications be transferred to other situations. This contribution is related to RQ2. C3. A characterization of place metaphors in educational CVEs along the dimensions of physical place resemblance and roles and Archipelago, a place metaphor for a CVE for social awareness support. This characterization is done on the basis of literature analysis and exploration of Active Worlds Educational Universe. The intention behind the Archipelago metaphor has been to combine features of different place metaphors and resemble the way in which communities and groups are created. The choice of the metaphor has to a significant degree influenced the design of the virtual environment. This metaphor is not the only possible one, and in different learning situations and contexts other metaphors can be more appropriate, such as campus, city etc. This contribution is related to RQ2. C4. A set of requirements along the dimensions of learner, place and artifact for a 3D CVE supporting social awareness in learning communities and groups. This contribution is originally based on the characterization framework for educational CVEs and the theoretical background. The set of requirements has been revised in an iterative fashion, according to the results of empirical evaluation of the 88
environment. The requirements are to a certain degree influenced by the choice of the theoretical platform. Though these requirements provide a good background for designing a CVE for social awareness support, there is a need to focus more on the integration of the system with the existing working practices and social structures. Therefore, the resulting list of requirements is not final and can be extended and updated further. This contribution is related to RQ3. C5. Viras: Design and implementation of a 3D virtual world, for social awareness support. The design has been influenced by the choice of the metaphor (Archipelago) and the choice of the platform (Active Worlds). Also, there can be different designs and metaphors based on the given requirements, according to the demands of specific learning communities and groups. There have been taken a number of design choices that have been successful to varying degrees. The realization of all the presented requirements has been complex due to the limitations of the technology, especially chosen Active Worlds platform, and different scenarios of possible usage. The primary aim of this design and the implemented system has been to look at the principles, potentialities, limitations and further directions for research for supporting social awareness with CVEs. This contribution is related to RQ4. C6. Evaluation of Viras by empirical case studies. The first case study has focused on how a CVE like Viras can help to foster community relations among students taking a university course, creating more awareness on the existing relationships and knowledge distribution. This case study provided directions for revision of requirements and redesign of the system. The limited usage in the intermediate case study in a project-based course prevented the evaluation of the system in a realistic educational situation and thus the evaluation of the connection between social awareness and learning. Therefore, the goal of the second case study was to evaluate the limitations and benefits of different elements in Viras for social awareness support. The results have suggested some modifications to the design and utilization of the system. The case study also indicated the potentials of a repository of virtual places in different situations, pointing out directions for further research. This contribution is related to RQ4. The overview of contributions presented in research papers is shown in Table 7.1. The relation between contributions and research questions is described in Table 7.2. Related tables for the papers, chapters and associated research questions can be found in Chapter 1. C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6
Paper 1 X X
Paper 2
Paper 3
Paper 4
Paper 5
Paper 6
X
X X
Paper 7
X X X X
X X
Table 7.1 Papers and contributions
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RQ1 RQ2 RQ3 RQ4
C1 X
C2
C3
X
X
C4
C5
C6
X
X
X Table 7.2 Contributions and research questions
7.2 Directions for further research The results presented in this thesis show some limitations with realization of the requirements and integration of the 3D CVE into the existing educational practices. However, our results indicate that the idea of supporting long-term social awareness with CVEs, as well as of capturing awareness- and education-related information in virtual places has certain potential. Further research is necessary to overcome the limitations pointed out in this thesis. The experiences presented in this work and the literature (Hudson-Smith, 2002), show that the technological possibilities offered by commercially available tools (in this case Active Worlds) allow a rather fast creation of a virtual environment for socializing, learning and community building. However, the mentioned tools may lack the flexibility necessary for fully dynamic development of a community and effective acquiring of social awareness. Also, 3D nature of such environments has both advantages and disadvantages in this context. This suggests a need for a greater flexibility of environment construction and more flexible combination of different media for various tasks, depending on the situation. An example could be a world containing 3D constructions, but with a 2D customizable map/radar view, showing current position, overview of users and constructions in the world with the information contained there. Also, users may use a pure text-based window in cooperation tasks that do not require immediate sense of 3D presence in the world. These tasks include those that do not concern 3D building and manipulation of 3D artifacts, such as discussions. There is in addition a need for a wider repertoire of functionalities used by students in their daily activities, such as shared editing of documents, and integration with tools already used (learning management systems, BSCW, e-mail etc). Also, there is a need to elaborate further on the possibilities for integration of Viras and similar systems and their usefulness in different learning situations and practices. Examples of possible usage areas include discussions and brainstorming, teaching, collaboration across student generations, creative expression and flexible creation of places for various educational purposes. It is especially interesting to explore the potentials of systems like Viras in connection with learning activities where the use of 3D CVEs is already established and justified, such as distance education and 3D modeling. However, such integration requires exploration of a number of social and organizational issues. These include emergence and development of learning communities and groups, their needs and context around them. Another important issue is how virtual environments can support these needs and generally practices established in physical spaces and thus serve as an adequate supplement to such. 90
Glossary Active Worlds (AW): a platform for creation of 3D CVEs. Activity place: a virtual place that provides a framework for activities and contains traces of them. Artifact: a tool for mediating human activities (as defined within Activity theory). Avatar: a graphical representation of the user. Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE): A computer-based, distributed, virtual space where people can meet and interact with others, with agents or with virtual artifacts (Snowdown et al., 2001). Learning: to acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience, to become informed of or acquainted with. (Webster, 1989). Personal place: a place that serves as a virtual “house” or “office” and contains traces of persons. Social awareness (SA): Social awareness is awareness of the social situation in a group or a community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both. This awareness includes knowledge on learners’ resources, activities and social network. Short-term: Short-term (synchronous) awareness is awareness of a social situation at a certain moment. Long-term: Long-term (asynchronous) awareness is awareness of the social situation in general and over a certain period of time. Template: an “empty” place with certain facilities that can easily be adjusted by the user to his current needs Trajectory: a continuous motion through successive forms of participation, connecting the past, the present and the future (Wenger, 1999). Virtual place: a virtual container, possibly with content, where activities happen over time, shaped by activities and persons and containing their traces.
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Appendix A: VirAS and Active Worlds A.1 Active Worlds Active Worlds (AW) offer a platform for efficiently delivering real-time interactive 3D content over the web. Active Worlds host a Universe of over 1000 3D virtual reality worlds for educational, commercial and entertainment use. These virtual environments are developed by Worlds, Inc. using a variant of VRML called VRML+. The virtual worlds are accessed through Active Worlds Browser (Fig. A.1). The company also provides facilities to enable developers to create their own worlds and link them to any other made with the Active Worlds' technology. These include 3D environment servers, tools to modify objects, and a library of avatars with articulated motions. This chapter will provide a short overview of the basic features of the Active Worlds browser for the Active Worlds Educational Universe. These include movement, tabs, contacting other users, as well as the provided building and programming facilities. Details can be found in the authorized Active Worlds help files and on the official webpages of Active Worlds, www.activeworlds.com.
Figure A.1 Active Worlds browser
A.1.1 Movement One moves in AW after roughly the same principles as in a computer game: • •
With keyboard (recommended): arrow keys are used to move in all directions, +/- for up/down. With mouse: moving the mouse after pressing the middle mouse button. 101
•
Teleportation: one can move “momentously” in the world by clicking on numerous objects containing teleportation links, which can also be collected in personal bookmarks.
A.1.2 Menus The upper side of the browser window contains a set of menus, which mostly resemble the standard set for Windows applications (Fig. A.1). The overview below presents shortly the most important menu functions: • •
•
• • • • • •
File: contains only “Exit” option. Teleport menu: back, forward and home commands work as in an ”ordinary” browser. With "to"-command one can be teleported to a certain place by giving exact coordinates. Commands Make this my home and Remember are used to make personal ”bookmarks” for different places. View menu: allows choosing between different visual angle. Options menu: allows to set different options for users, such as privacy and performance-related issues, user name, ordinary and privilege passwords etc. Administrators can set different features and rights for the world, such as who is allowed to enter and build, the default webpage, the outlook of the sky and the ground, the possibility to build on other people’s property Show menu: here one can choose what is shown in the browser window, such as Position, Altitude, Toolbar, Gestures, Tabs, Web, VRT clock, Whisper. Login menu: allows logging as a different citizen and acquiring privileges of another user. In his way, users can freely manipulate (change, delete, move etc) property belonging to other users. Avatar menu: here one can choose an avatar to represent oneself, which can be changed anytime. See Fig. A.2 Visibility menu: allows to regulate visibility radius Web menu: allows to control the Web-window to the left and includes “ordinary” browser commands. Help menu: includes links to the original Active Worlds help files.
A.1.3 Tabs On the left side of the browser, there are 5 tab-windows: Worlds, Contacts, Help, Teleports, Telegrams (Fig. A.1). The overview below presents shortly the most important tab functions: • Worlds: includes the overview over all the worlds in Active Worlds Educational Universe, with the number of users online at the moment. • Contacts: includes a list of the friends and partners who also use Active Worlds, with an indication of their online status. • Help: includes an index of original AW help files. • Telegrams: includes a list over telegrams, or messages, received from other users. • Teleports: includes a list over personal "bookmarks” to different places in AW.
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Figure A.2 An example of an avatar and associated actions
A.1.4 Contacting other users A user can perform a number of actions on other users and their representations, such as chatting, whispering, muting, sending files and telegrams, joining and making gestures at. Most of these actions assume that the respective users are in each other contact lists. These actions are chosen by right-clicking on avatars or respective user names in the chat or contact list, as shown in Fig. A.2. Chat and whisper comments can be written directly in the respective fields (Fig. A.1). Gestures such as waving, dancing, jumping, depending on the chosen avatar can be chosen from a row of buttons under the menu line (Fig. A.1). A.1.5 Building and simple object scripting Active Worlds has a library of pre-defined objects (.rwx files) of different kinds, sizes, forms and functions, such as walls, panels, signs, furniture, trees etc. It is possible to introduce custom-made objects, but it is up to the administrator to add such objects to the object directory used by a particular world. The building process is quite straightforward. First, a user chooses any object by right-clicking to get the Object Properties dialog box (Fig. A.3). Now the user can either manipulate this object (if he has rights to it, either personal or acquired through privilege password) or copy it and work further with the copy (which now belongs to the builder). Multiple objects can be chosen at once by holding down Shift or Ctrl. The object(s) can be moved and rotated by pressing corresponding arrow buttons in the dialog box, or dragging it with the mouse. In the “Object”-field the user can write the file name of the wanted object from the AW library, for example “sign4.rwx”. In “Description”field the user can write the name of the object, in this case the text on the sign. In “Action”-field the user can write simple scripts defining characteristics and behavior of the object, such as showing pictures and text, serving as web or teleportation links when activated, rotating, moving, lighting up etc. The example below shows a sign object with two scripts: "create sign" and "activate url www.dinlink.no". The first script makes the sign to display the text in the Description field, in this case “Skriv din tekst and url her” (“Write your text and url here”). The second script makes the web page with the url www.dinlink.no to appear in the in-built web-window when the object is activated (clicked on).
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Figure A.3 Object Properties Dialog Box
A.1.6 Advanced programming In addition to object action scripts, Active Worlds provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for programming of more advanced features. The kit includes a library of events and routines, with the C as the default language. By using this kit, one can create software agents, or bots that can log into a world and perform a number of tasks. There exists also a number of other tools and programming environments based on the Active World SDK, such as Hambot and Xelagot. They use other programming languages than C, both established such as Visual Basic and new ones, such as Xelagot scripting language. The Xelagot environment and language is used extensively during the work presented in this thesis, so it is natural to introduce this tool. It has a simple graphical interface as shown in Fig. A.4, providing a number of functions, such as: • • •
•
Showing some world and user statistics, such as the users currently in the world Providing logging functionalities Proving building functionalities: o Sampling of constructions in a given area of an AW world and saving the sample as a file o Possibilities for editing of such files: translation/rotation of objects, filtering after various criteria such as user number on the objects or their type o Quick building of object collections from files Running of scripts written in the Xelagot language.
The tool was extensively used for world administration and during the design/building. Examples include sampling of “hand-made” constructions, editing and modifying the resulting files and then building of several new constructions from these files. Some of such files were edited in Notepad as the editing possibilities of Xelagot are limited.
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Figure A.4 Xelagot interface
A.2 Viras Viras is a 3D world created with Active Worlds technology and can be entered through an Active Worlds browser described above. The description below applies mostly to the final implementation. It differs from the initial design by some new functionalities (catalogue island, building agent, map) and a number of constructions created by previous students. The world is divided into cells 10*10 meter, which are coordinate units. There are ca 55 units in each direction (S, N, W, E). All positions are therefore given with two coordinates, for example 10N 5W. The world consists of an “ocean” (water-like ground) and a number of islands with gardens, roads, bridges, houses, furniture and other objects (Fig. A.1). The persons are represented by about 33 different avatars. The users of the world can walk around, communicate, build their own objects etc. A.2.1 The world and its contents All property in Viras belongs to administrator, the virtual user “public” or individual users. There are following constructions in Viras: • • • •
“Empty” islands and house templates that belong to the public and can be occupied and modified by all users. A number of islands and other constructions created by former generations of students, which the new users can copy from when creating own constructions. A central island that is intended as a meeting point for all the students and teaching staff involved and includes a central house, meet-teacher-house, party area and a big map of the central areas with corresponding teleportation links. A "catalogue" island, containing an overview and links to the different constructions available in the world, together with available building templates.
Islands and houses. The empty islands and houses come originally with a number of pre-built facilities and templates: teleportation links, picture holders, signs, web-links, a mini-edition of the map etc. They have scripts attached to them for picture and text displaying, web and teleportation link activation, and simple instructions, such as “Put your text and teleportation link here”. The same in-built facilities are also provided in
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the houses on the central island. All such facilities are public property, i.e. belong to the fictive user “public”. All the users can (collaboratively) modify these by acquiring the privileges of public (as mentioned earlier). With such pre-programmed artifacts, the users can just put in their own values, such as text, url or teleportation coordinated without having to learn Active Worlds scripting language. Catalogue island. On the “catalogue” island there are indexing objects with links to different constructions, placed according to proximity of related items: “rocks” include links to building templates which can be used to build group and personal islands and houses, meeting places, party places etc. Big signs include links to constructions representing activities, for example a party area with traces of a party, or a result of a group's project work. “Chess pieces” include links to the personal constructions: houses, rooms etc. Sometimes one construction can be pointed at by all the three links types, for example a group’s house built using a certain template where group meetings took place. All the main indexing objects have smaller signs attached, with the information about persons participating in a certain activities, members of a group, one's friends, templates used, etc. When one clicks on any object, all related indexing objects will rotate for some time, showing for example a person's involvement in different activities, groups etc, i.e. the person’s learning and participation trajectory. This is achieved by attaching ”connecting” scripts to the related indexing objects: 1) assigning the same name to them and 2) assigning a certain visible action (in this case rotation) to all objects with the same name if one of them is activated. For example, let us consider the script ”create name eivind; activate rotate 10 time=10 reset name=eivind”. Such scripts are per default attached to the objects on the catalogue island, so the users can just put in their own names when creating new ones. If one clicks on an object (for example a chess piece) containing such a script, all the indexing objects that have to do with Eivind, will rotate. In this way, they highlight what group he is on, what friends/partners he has, the constructions he has created and activities he has participated in. If one clicks on the name sign on the ”chess piece”, one will be teleported to Eivind’s house. A.2.2 Advanced building facilities In Viras, it is possible to build in 3 ways: •
By copying single objects, one by one, and modifying object name, description and action in the Object Dialog Box. • By copying bigger constructions (a lot of them are available in the world) with some modifications. • By giving verbal commands to the building agent, Byggebot.
The first two ways are originally supported by Active World technology, but an effective and easy use of these assumes that there are provided constructions and single objects with corresponding scripts for copying and modifying. Such constructions are provided in both original and redesigned world. However, as this technology does not provide sufficient flexibility, especially concerning larger constructions, it was necessary to implement additional functionality. For administrative use, such flexible building was performed by using the Xelagot environment described earlier. The introduction of this tool to ordinary users is theoretically possible. However, this alternative is not adequate or user friendly 106
enough in this case as it will imply an additional cognitive load to master the tool and inconsequence in the building pattern. Therefore, it was necessary to implement a building agent, Byggebot, using the Xelagot language and running the code in the Xelagot environment. This agent is represented by an avatar and has a repertoire of 14 constructions. These are stored in files placed in a directory together with the agent script. The list of constructions is therefore easily extendable. At the moment they include 10 houses/islands for personal and group use, 3 “party” houses and a “toolset”, containing a set of picture, text and link holders, building instructions, a map of the central areas and some educational links. The building agent is governed by a set of simple verbal commands. To build, a user has to place himself in the desired place outside central areas (where building is prohibited), with the desired orientation (north/south etc) and height above “sea” level. Then the user whispers to Byggebot commands such as: • • •
“bot hjelp” (“bot help”, to get instructions) “bot meny” (“bot menu”, to get a list of possible constructions) “bot bygg ‘konstruksjonsnavn’” (”bot build ‘construction name’”), for example ”bot build trehus”
If the bot is outside the “hearing” range for whisper, the user has to call for it first by saying “aloud” in chat “bot kom hit” (“bot come here”). After the building command, the bot downloads and builds the wanted construction around the user’s current position, in corresponding orientation and height (in this case a “wooden” house), reports the success and the amount of downloaded objects to the user and returns to its position near the world’s entrance point. If the user attempts to build in central areas or uses an invalid construction name, Byggebot whispers to the user error message and recommends either building in a different place or checking the spelling. All constructions built by Byggebot are “public” property, which users can delete or modify by acquiring public privileges, as described earlier.
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Appendix B: Research tools and data The goal of this appendix is to provide a description of the used research tools and a part of the raw data used in the analysis.
B.1 Research tools Following research tools have been used during the case studies in connection with the empirical evaluation of Viras: • • • • • •
student reports/essays written as an answer to exercise questions to provide evaluation of different aspects of Viras; questionnaires to confirm and provide quantitative measures of some aspects evaluated in the essays; semi-structured interviews for in-depth discussions of selected issues; logs of conversations and some activities online to identify usage and communication/collaboration patterns; online observations to identify communication and collaboration patterns and associated visual clues; examination of constructions in the world to identify actual usage of virtual constructions for various tasks and social awareness support.
The following sections will present a description of these tools. This information is presented in addition to description in Sections 4.5 and 5.5. B.1.1 Exercise questions As already mentioned, Case I and Case II were realized as an exercise in a CSCW course, counting as ca 20% of the mandatory exercise load. The students were asked to: 1) perform some building tasks; 2) write an essay answering a set of questions. The students were evaluated on both parts. The questions had a pedagogical value, but at the same time allowed to evaluate the system in accordance with RQ4. As an answer to the exercise questions listed below, all student groups (15 in both cases, ca 3-5 students each) submitted an essay/report of approximately 4-10 pages each. The answers were given partly in English, partly in Norwegian, according to students’ preferences. The goal of the essays was to provide a qualitative evaluation and discussion in students’ own words of a number of issues in connection with limitations and benefits of Viras and CVEs in general for social awareness support. In both cases, the questions were divided in three groups: • • •
general questions considering communication and cooperation in CVEs related to the course curriculum effectiveness of different elements for supporting social awareness discussion of various design issues, potentials of CVEs in different areas, improvement suggestions etc.
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B.1.1.1 Exercise questions Case I Instructions given to the students: _____________________________________________________________________ As a basic requirement for this exercise, you have to complete at least the following tasks: 1. “Conquer” at least one of the small free islands and connect it to your group island with a bridge and teleportation links. 2. All participants should create their “homepages” as houses, with presentation of themselves, their work, personal links, links to other participants in the world etc. with teleportation links to the central island and the group island where they are not already provided. Templates for such houses are available on the islands and can be freely modified and copied. 3. All groups should create/customize a group house (facilitating group meetings and activities, as well as presenting their work) and a party place (possibly open-air). Templates for group houses are available and can be freely modified and copied. 4. Individual participants and groups should also leave links to their houses/islands on the central island of the world by modifying provided templates or creating new links. The links should be informative in order to make it easy for other people to find the right place/persons. 5. Build at least one teleportation link to the island of a group or the house of a person (that is NOT in your group) whose work or interests you feel are connected to yours!!! 6. Vote the best island and house of the archipelago. _____________________________________________________________________ Questions: _____________________________________________________________________ General questions 1. What kind of communication methods (for example chat, messages, artifact manipulation etc.) are provided in Viras? Discuss their importance. 2. What mechanisms for coordinating conversation and activities are provided, and which of them are the most important ones? 3. What are the social conventions or rules of behavior used in the world and how are they different from ones used in the real world? 4. Are there any social phenomena that occur specific to the context of the CVE that wouldn't happen in face-to-face settings (e. g. flaming)? 5. Does the communication and interaction seem natural or not? Explain your answer. Awareness 1. To what extent are you aware of the following factors in connection with other users when using Viras: • Who is present and what they are doing • What resources people possess (knowledge, skills) • What they are working on (in general, not only at the moment) • Their place in the social network (groups they belong to, their roles, friends etc).
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2. Discuss what features among listed below of Viras are most useful for achieving awareness about each factor identified in the previous question: • Chat • Space structure • Objects (houses, signs, pictures, links etc) • Avatars (gestures, position) • Telegrams • Other (explain what). Design issues 1. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Viras for meeting and socializing compared to the “real world” university environment. 2. How is information structured in Viras? Discuss whether such structuring is effective or not. 3. If you would be asked to design such an environment yourself, what would you have done differently? What features would you like to add? 4. Briefly discuss the potentialities and challenges of using CVE for supporting cooperation. Base the discussion on your experience with VirAS. _____________________________________________________________________ B.1.1.2 Exercise questions Case II Instructions given to the students: _____________________________________________________________________ As a basic requirement for this exercise, you have to complete at least the following tasks: 1. Explore the constructions already in the world (for example those created by lastyear students, follow the links from the catalogue island) 2. Create a group island/ a set of connected islands including: • A common meeting area/house for the whole group with information about the group and its members and links to the members' areas. • Individual houses/rooms/places for every group member (they should preferably be separated from each other, for example with walls, open space or water etc.) with information displaying interests, work-related knowledge, links to friends and working partners, at least 2 links to constructions already in the world which you have used in your design/just fancy (such as houses and islands created by last year students). • A party area. • An exhibition template for presentation of a typical computer science project, with necessary facilities (for example, a place where hypothetical students can just fill in their text/pictures/links/make minor adjustments and get an exhibition stand with a presentation of their project). 3. To accomplish this task, you can load constructions (islands, houses, meeting areas, party places) by giving commands to the building agent (Byggebot), occupy constructions available online (both empty and created by last year students) or create constructions "from scratch". 4. Participate in some organized activities (for example group meetings or a party) in the “activities” areas (such as the group's meeting place or party place) and leave
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there signs, links to the chat record files and other objects reflecting your activities. 5. Put links to the personal and group places, activities and created exhibition templates to the “catalogue” island by using the established conventions (chess figures, signs, buildings stones), putting related items close to each other. (Make sure to write correct names in Action-field for “connected” objects). Put smaller signs with your name (and "name scripts", see Help) on related items, such as those representing your friends, your group, an activity you have participated in or a template you have built. 6. Vote for the best island, house and exhibition template of the archipelago. _____________________________________________________________________ Questions: _____________________________________________________________________ General questions 1. What are the available modes of communication and personal expression provided, do they seem natural or not? 2. What mechanisms for coordinating communication and activities (for example building) are provided, and which of them are the most important ones? 3. How is navigation organized in the world (walking, following links, roads etc.) and is it effective/understandable? 4. What are the social conventions or rules of behavior used in the world and how are they different from ones used in the real world? Awareness 1. After using Viras, to what extent are you aware of the following factors in connection with other users taking the course: • What resources people possess (knowledge, skills) • What they are working on (in general, not only at the moment) • Their place in the social network (groups they belong to, whom they cooperate with, friends etc). 2. To what extent are you aware of the same factors as above in connection with “old” students who used the world before and left their constructions there? 3. Discuss to what extent the features of Viras listed below are useful for achieving awareness about each factor identified in the previous questions: • The overview on the “catalogue” island • “Personal places”: personal or group islands, houses etc. • “Activities”: places like meeting and party places, with traces of activities etc. • Space structure (where people build relative to each other, bridges between islands etc.) • Avatars • Other (explain what). 4. Is the distinction between “personal places” and “activities” useful for awareness? 5. Does the flexibility of building (such as via verbal commands to the building agent) contribute to the increased awareness?
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Discussion 1. To what extent have the “old students” constructions been useful (reuse for building purposes, extracted useful information about their activities, social relations etc.)? 2. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Viras as a repository of virtual constructions reflecting the personality, experiences and knowledge of different generations of students (repository of community memory). 3. Discuss whether the structuring of information in Viras, both in virtual constructions and on the “catalogue” island is effective or not. 4. If you would be asked to design such an environment yourself, what would you have done differently? What features would you like to add, especially with the possibilities provided by Active Worlds? 5. Briefly discuss the potentialities and challenges of using CVE for supporting community memory. For example, compared to “real life” possibilities, to what extent is it useful to be able to "save" places/ have a place repository? (potentialities, possible usage areas etc.). Base the discussion on your experience with VirAS. _____________________________________________________________________ B.1.2 Questionnaires Questionnaires were used to confirm and provide a quantitative measure to some issues discussed in the student essays. Also, they contained questions that did not have a pedagogical value and could therefore not be included in the exercises. B.1.2.1 Questionnaire Case I This questionnaire was originally distributed in Norwegian and is presented here in translation. The questions were structured to identify: • •
impact of Viras on social awareness in the class the role of different elements of Viras in this context, especially the place dimension • potential usefulness of Viras of learning and the link between the latter and social awareness. _____________________________________________________________________
Viras - Questionnaire Usage results 1. After using Viras, have you acquired greater knowledge of following properties of other students in the class: to a very little degree to a great degree a. Personality and interests |____|____|____|____|____| b. Knowledge and skills |____|____|____|____|____| c. Activities (working, hobbies etc) |____|____|____|____|____| d. Place in the social network (group belonging, friends) |____|____|____|____|____|
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2. To what degree have the following elements in Viras been useful in this context: a. Avatar the person uses |____|____|____|____|____| b. Where he/she ”frequent” i Viras |____|____|____|____|____| c. Where people build relative to each other |____|____|____|____|____| d. Bridges, roads and links |____|____|____|____|____| e. Design and interior of individual and group houses (design, links, pictures etc) |____|____|____|____|____| Building and space structure 3. What was the motivation behind the choice of the building place: to a very little degree to a great degree a. Closer to the central island |____|____|____|____|____| b. Closer to friends and partners |____|____|____|____|____| c. Random |____|____|____|____|____| d. Farthest possible from others |____|____|____|____|____| e. Thought to build on “islands” but could not do it due to the privilege password problem |____|____|____|____|____| f. Closer to other houses for easier copying |____|____|____|____|____| g. Other (specify).............................................. |____|____|____|____|____| 4. How often did you visit: a. In your own house/area b. In group areas c. In common areas d. In other people’s areas
never very often |____|____|____|____|____| |____|____|____|____|____| |____|____|____|____|____| |____|____|____|____|____|
5. If your compare space structure in Viras and ordinary university environment, how useful do you think are the following functionalities: totally useless very useful a. Possibility for space structure modification |____|____|____|____|____| b. Own group- and private “areas” |____|____|____|____|____| c. Clearly visible borders between group areas |____|____|____|____|____| d. Possibilities for momentous ”teleportation” |____|____|____|____|____| Learning 6. How useful can Viras be in the following learning situations: totally useless very useful a. Meeting with teacher/supervisor |____|____|____|____|____| b. Group work |____|____|____|____|____| c. Presentation of projects |____|____|____|____|____| d. Lectures/demonstrations |____|____|____|____|____| e. Other (specify)...................... |____|____|____|____|____| 7. To what extent will knowledge of following conditions in connection with other students contribute to better learning: to a very little extent to a great extent a. Projects and activities |____|____|____|____|____|
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b. c. d. e.
Resources (knowledge, skills etc) Social structure (who is friends with whom) Group belonging and division of roles Other (specify)...........................
|____|____|____|____|____| |____|____|____|____|____| |____|____|____|____|____| |____|____|____|____|____|
General comments: _____________________________________________________________________ B.1.2.2 Questionnaire Case II The goal of this questionnaire was to identify: • • •
(subjective) usefulness of different Viras features for expressing and retrieving information about different dimensions of social awareness (tables) usefulness and potentials of features in the revised design usefulness of Viras for social awareness support compared to other means.
(Numbers in the table link the questions to the corresponding entries in the data table in B.2.2). _____________________________________________________________________
Viras Please fill in this questionnaire and help us to improve Viras. Thanks for your time! 1. EXPRESSING INFORMATION: How effective are the following elements in Viras for expressing information about resources, social network, activities? Please insert a number from 0 (not effective) to 4 (very effective) into the corresponding cell, filling all the cells: Elements in Personal Viras→ places (personal/ group houses/ Awareness islands) factors ↓ 1.a Resources (skills, knowledge) 1.b Social network (friends, partners) 1.c Activities projects, hobbies etc)
Activities areas (party/ meeting areas)
Catalogue island (position/design of figures, “connected”/ rotating objects)
2.a
3.a
Space Other (specify) structure (proximity/ position of buildings, bridges/links) 4.a 5.a
2.b
3.b
4.b
5.b
2.c
3.c
4.c
5.c
2. GETTING INFORMATION: How effective are the following elements in Viras for getting information about other students’ resources, social network, activities? Please
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insert a number from 0 (not effective) to 4 (very effective) into the corresponding cell, filling all the cells: Elements in Personal Viras→ places (personal/ group houses/ Awareness islands) factors ↓ 1.a Resources (skills, knowledge) 1.b Social network (friends, partners) 1.c Activities projects, hobbies etc)
Activities areas (party/ meeting areas)
Catalogue island (position/design of figures, “connected”/ rotating objects)
2.a
3.a
Space Other (specify) structure (proximity/ position of buildings, bridges/links) 4.a 5.a
2.b
3.b
4.b
5.b
2.c
3.c
4.c
5.c
Please set a cross in the following questions: 3. How useful are the following facilities for constructing e.g. personal places or activities areas, and for improving usability: not useful very useful a. Automatic building (such as with Byggebot) |___|___|___|___|___| b. A set of templates (such as those built by Byggebot) |___|___|___|___|___| c. Empty pre-built constructions (islands on the big map) |___|___|___|___|___| d. Constructions created by former students |___|___|___|___|___| e. Pre-built figures with links on the catalogue island |___|___|___|___|___| f. Ordinary building facilities offered by ActiveWorlds |___|___|___|___|___| g. Map (of the central areas) |___|___|___|___|___| h. Other (specify) |___|___|___|___|___| 4. How useful is the virtual place repository for: not useful very useful a. Reuse of learning resources (projects, designs etc) |___|___|___|___|___| b. Personal expression |___|___|___|___|___| c. Establishing of new contacts |___|___|___|___|___| d. Collaborative work/learning |___|___|___|___|___| e. Flexible creation of places for different purposes (meetings, 3D webpage, project presentation etc) |___|___|___|___|___| f. Other (specify) |___|___|___|___|___| 5. How useful are the following places/tools for increasing your awareness about other students’ activities, resources, social network: not useful very useful a. Viras |___|___|___|___|___| b. It’s learning |___|___|___|___|___| c. Course forum |___|___|___|___|___| d. Lecture/classroom |___|___|___|___|___| 115
e. Computer lab f. Other (specify)
|___|___|___|___|___| |___|___|___|___|___|
6. To what extent have you used Viras for: to a very little extent to a great extent a. Building/participating in activities |___|___|___|___|___| b. Exploring other people’s constructions/activities areas |___|___|___|___|___| 7. General remarks/suggestions _____________________________________________________________________ B.1.3 Interviews The goal of the interviews was an in-depth discussion and brainstorming around some selected issues. Interviews in both cases were semi-structured, face-to-face in the first case and online in the second one. Both interviews lasted for about an hour. B.1.3.1 Questions interview Case I • • • • • • •
What place metaphors are appropriate for the purposes of socializing and working? How useful is the Archipelago metaphor in this context? How did cooperation work in Viras and how could Viras facilitate cooperation better? To what extent are pre-made constructions useful? How should information and user help be structured/presented better? How did you use avatars and to what extent were they useful for social awareness support? To what extent is the use of 3D justified in this context? How did 3D aspect affect your behavior online? How would you improve Viras and why? Name advantages and disadvantages.
B.1.3.2 Questions interview Case II • • • •
The effectiveness of pre-built constructions and the building agent, improvement suggestions. Advantages and disadvantages of Viras compared to other tools or physical places. Suggestions for better structuring of the catalogue island, and generally overview of the world. How did cooperation work in Viras and how could it facilitate cooperation better?
B.1.4 Logging In both cases, logging of conversations and certain activities (leaving/entering the hearing range of the Xelagot logging agent and building commands to the building agent in Case II) were logged. The goal was to identify communication and cooperation patterns in connection with usage of Viras. Students were informed of the logging on several occasions. Following sources were used:
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•
•
In-built Active Worlds facilities and Xelagot bot (see Appendix A), used by designer. The former allowed to capture “whispers” between designer and the students, while the other allowed a greater “hearing” range. Both logging facilities were used through the whole trial periods, with exception of some shorter periods of lost network contact. In Case II, these facilities were in addition supplemented by logs from 10 student groups made of their parties, discussions of exercise tasks and other activities. These included also to some degree “whispers” not available through other sources. The links to these logging files were left in the world, preferably in the places were the corresponding activities took place.
B.1.5 Online observations The designer has invited for 3 common meetings in the first case and weekly meetings in the second case, but was online for most of the working hours. The designer observed the grouping, navigation and communication of the avatars, to identify the mechanisms for expressing clues of the social situation (short-term social awareness). B.1.6 Examination of constructions in the world and analysis of building The designer has examined all constructions created by the students, to identify the mechanisms for expressing social awareness information, e.g. bridges between islands, teleportation links, pictures of friends, links to deliveries, division of tasks etc. This information has been compared to exercise answers of the corresponding groups and possibly logs of conversations, to identify how real activities were supported etc.
B.2 Research data As raw data, we present the results from both questionnaires. Presentation of other data is not feasible here due to the massiveness of associated documents. They are available upon request. The following tables are organized as follows: student rows represent individual questionnaire forms, while columns represent numbered questions from the questionnaires. B.2.1 Questionnaire Case I Notation: 5: to a great degree/extent, very often, very useful 1: to a very little degree/extent, never, totally useless
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Student nr.
1.a 1.b 1.c 1.d 2.a 2.b 2.c 2.d 2.e 3.a 3.b 3.c 3.d 3.e
3.f 4.a 4.b 4.c 4.d 5.a 5.b 5.c 5.d
1
1
2
3
1
3
1
1
1
1
3
3
5
1
3
3
3
2
2
1
2
3
2
4
2
3
4
2
2
4
4
4
4
4
1
1
5
1
1
4
4
4
3
2
3
3
3
4
3
3
2
3
5
1
2
3
5
5
1
5
3
2
1
5
3
5
5
4
2
5
5
5
4
2
1
1
2
2
2
3
3
3
3
1
4
1
4
2
5
4
4
2
4
4
4
4
5
2
4
3
4
2
3
4
4
5
2
2
3
4
1
4
2
4
3
5
4
4
5
6
3
3
4
4
1
2
2
2
3
4
2
4
3
2
4
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
7
2
2
2
2
4
3
4
3
4
4
4
4
3
3
3
3
3
3
2
3
4
4
5
8
2
2
3
5
5
4
5
5
5
3
3
4
1
1
1
3
3
3
3
4
4
4
3
9
2
2
3
1
2
1
1
2
3
2
2
5
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
2
3
4
10
3
2
2
2
2
3
2
2
4
3
4
1
1
1
3
4
3
2
2
1
4
2
4
11
1
1
1
1
4
2
4
3
2
4
5
1
1
1
3
3
3
1
3
4
4
5
12
2
3
2
2
3
2
2
2
3
2
1
1
4
1
1
3
3
2
4
3
4
4
5
13
2
3
1
1
3
5
5
5
3
4
4
2
1
1
4
4
3
2
2
4
4
2
3
14
1
2
1
2
1
1
4
3
3
1
4
3
1
1
3
2
2
2
3
5
4
4
5
17
3
2
4
4
3
4
3
2
4
3
5
2
1
1
2
2
5
5
3
3
3
4
5
18
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
3
1
1
5
1
2
3
3
2
3
3
3
19
1
2
1
2
2
1
1
1
2
3
3
5
1
1
4
3
2
2
4
2
3
4
4
20
1
2
1
1
2
5
4
4
5
2
4
5
1
3
4
2
3
5
4
3
3
4
4
21
2
3
2
1
1
3
2
3
5
3
1
5
1
1
3
4
4
2
4
4
4
5
22
2
4
2
3
4
3
5
5
4
3
3
4
1
1
4
3
4
4
3
3
4
4
5
23
2
2
3
1
2
4
5
3
4
1
1
5
4
1
1
4
4
2
2
5
5
5
5
24 Avg.
1
2
1
1
1
1
3
4
5
1
5
3
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
5
2
2
5
15 16
1,91 2,36 2,09 2,18 2,41 2,59 3,09 3,05 3,59 2,45 2,95 3,62 1,52 1,59 2,81 2,95 3,00 2,95 2,50 3,18 3,55 3,50 4,27
Table B.1 Questionnaire results Case I
118
Student nr.
6.a
6.b
6.c
6.d
7.a
7.b
7.c
7.d
3
4
3
4
2
2
3
1
2
4
3
3
4
4
4
4
3
3
5
3
4
4
2
4
4
2
3
6
2
2
2
2
4
4
4
3
7
3
4
3
4
3
4
3
4
8
3
3
3
3
5
5
4
3
1 2
9
1
2
4
2
3
4
3
4
10
4
3
1
1
4
4
2
2
15
2
3
4
2
3
4
2
2
16
2
2
3
2
3
3
3
3
20
1
3
2
1
3
4
2
3
21
3
2
4
2
5
5
2
4
22
4
4
2
2
3
4
4
3
2
2
3
3
5
5
2
2
11 12 13 14
17 18 19
23 24
Avg. 2,64 2,86 3,07 2,29 3,64 4,07 2,64 2,93
Table B.2 Questionnaire results Case I (cont.)
B.2.2 Questionnaire Case II Notation: 4: to a great extent, very often, very useful 0: to a very little extent, never, totally useless
119
Student nr.
1.1.a 1.1.b 1.1.c 1.2.a 1.2.b 1.2.c 1.3.a 1.3.b 1.3.c 1.4.a 1.4.b 1.4.c 2.1.a 2.1.b 2.1.c 2.2.a 2.2.b 2.2.c 2.3.a 2.3.b 2.3.c 2.4.a 2.4.b 2.4.c
1
3
3
3
1
2
2
0
3
0
2
0
0
3
3
3
0
2
1
0
2
0
0
0
0
2
3
2
3
2
2
1
0
3
0
2
3
0
3
2
3
2
2
1
0
3
0
2
3
0
3
3
2
3
2
3
2
1
1
0
0
3
2
3
2
3
2
3
2
1
1
0
0
3
2
4
2
2
2
2
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
5
3
3
3
1
2
3
0
2
0
1
0
2
3
3
2
1
2
3
0
2
0
2
1
1
6
4
4
3
2
2
3
0
2
3
0
2
1
2
4
3
2
2
3
0
1
1
0
1
1
7
2
3
3
1
3
3
1
2
1
1
1
1
2
2
3
2
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
8
3
4
4
3
3
4
3
2
3
2
3
3
3
4
3
2
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
9
1
2
1
0
2
1
2
0
0
2
2
1
2
2
1
0
2
1
2
0
0
1
2
1
10
3
3
3
2
2
3
1
2
1
5
1
2
3
3
3
2
3
3
1
2
1
2
2
3
11
3
4
3
2
2
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
1
3
2
2
2
2
2
3
2
4
3
12
2
1
1
1
3
2
2
1
1
2
2
2
1
1
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
3
2
2
13
1
0
2
1
1
2
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
2
1
0
0
0
0
0
0
14
2
3
4
2
3
2
3
2
1
2
1
0
4
4
4
4
4
4
0
0
0
0
0
0
15
3
3
3
3
2
3
1
2
1
0
2
1
3
3
3
3
2
3
1
2
1
0
2
1
16
0
3
2
0
0
2
0
3
1
0
1
1
1
3
2
0
0
1
0
3
1
0
1
1
17
3
2
3
2
1
4
0
0
1
1
3
3
3
3
3
2
1
3
0
0
1
1
0
2
18
1
2
1
0
1
0
2
2
2
0
1
0
1
2
1
0
1
0
2
2
2
0
1
0
19
3
3
4
4
3
4
1
1
1
1
2
1
4
4
4
2
3
3
1
1
1
1
2
1
20
2
2
2
1
1
1
0
1
1
0
1
0
2
2
2
1
1
1
0
1
1
0
1
0
21
2
3
2
1
2
2
1
2
2
0
2
0
2
3
2
1
2
2
1
2
2
0
2
0
22
1
2
2
1
1
3
0
2
1
2
1
2
2
3
4
1
2
2
1
1
1
2
3
2
23
2
3
3
2
3
3
2
2
2
1
2
1
2
1
3
1
3
2
1
3
4
2
2
2
24
1
2
2
3
4
3
2
2
2
2
3
2
2
2
3
4
3
2
1
2
2
3
3
2
25
2
2
3
2
1
2
0
2
1
0
2
1
3
2
3
1
2
3
1
3
1
0
1
1
26
3
4
4
2
2
1
0
1
0
1
1
0
2
3
2
1
2
0
0
1
0
0
1
0
27 1 1 4 0 2 3 4 3 0 2 2 1 Avg. 2,19 2,52 2,70 1,59 2,00 2,37 1,11 1,70 1,04 1,19 1,63 1,11 2,31 2,46 2,62 1,54 2,12 1,96 0,81 1,54 1,08 1,00 1,62 1,15
Table B.3 Questionnaire results Case II
120
Student nr.
3.a
3.b
3.c
3.d
3.e
3.f
3.g
4.a
4.b
4.c
4.d
4.e
5.a
5.b
5.c
5.d
5.e
6.a
6.b
1
4
4
2
4
3
3
4
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
0
0
1
2
0
2
1
3
3
2
3
2
3
2
2
2
1
2
3
2
1
3
3
3
3
3
0
2
1
4
1
1
2
2
1
3
1
2
1
2
2
1
2
4
2
2
3
2
2
2
4
1
2
1
1
2
1
0
2
2
2
2
1
5
3
3
3
2
1
2
4
2
2
1
1
2
2
1
2
1
2
3
2
6
2
2
2
1
1
4
3
2
4
3
2
3
2
0
3
3
1
4
4
7
2
2
3
1
4
2
2
2
2
1
2
2
1
2
1
3
1
3
1
8
4
4
3
2
3
2
4
2
3
2
2
3
4
0
1
1
1
3
3
9
3
3
2
2
2
1
1
0
1
0
1
1
0
2
2
3
2
2
1
10
4
4
4
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
3
1
1
1
2
3
0
1
11
4
3
3
2
3
3
3
2
4
3
1
1
3
1
3
3
2
4
2
12
3
3
4
2
3
2
2
1
1
1
1
2
2
1
1
2
2
2
2
13
1
1
3
3
3
2
2
0
0
0
1
1
0
1
2
3
2
1
1
14
4
4
3
1
2
1
3
2
1
1
2
2
3
0
0
3
1
0
3
15
2
2
3
1
2
3
4
2
2
0
2
1
2
1
1
2
1
3
1
16
0
0
0
2
1
4
1
0
2
0
2
1
0
0
2
4
3
4
1
17
2
2
3
4
0
2
4
1
3
2
3
4
3
1
1
3
2
4
3
18
1
2
2
1
3
0
2
0
1
1
1
0
0
1
2
2
0
0
1
19
3
3
2
3
1
3
4
2
2
2
3
3
2
1
1
1
1
3
1
20
1
2
4
3
2
3
4
3
2
1
2
2
2
1
1
3
2
2
1
21
2
3
4
2
1
3
3
2
1
2
3
2
1
1
3
2
3
1
22
0
0
0
1
2
3
1
2
2
0
1
2
1
3
2
2
1
2
1
23
4
3
3
2
2
1
2
2
1
2
3
2
2
1
3
3
1
1
3
24
3
4
1
1
2
1
4
1
3
2
3
2
2
2
3
2
2
3
2
25
1
2
2
3
3
2
4
1
3
1
1
3
2
1
1
3
3
3
1
26
3
3
3
1
1
3
4
1
2
0
1
3
1
1
2
4
3
3
1
27 Avg. 2,35 2,54 2,42 2,04 2,08 2,23 2,88 1,50 2,08 1,23 1,69 2,08 1,58 1,08 1,65 2,42 1,65 2,27 1,69
Table B.4 Questionnaire results Case II (cont.)
121
122
Part II: Papers
123
124
Paper overview Paper 1: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland. Supporting social awareness in education: overview and mechanisms. Proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Education (ICEE’02), Manchester, UK, 18-22 August 2002. 7 p. (CDROM). This paper considers the problems in connections with supporting social awareness among university students with traditional groupware tools. It also discusses the awareness mechanisms associated with CSCW tools in general and CVEs in particular, along the dimensions of learner, place and artifacts. Paper 2: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland & Monica Divitini. Supporting learning communities with collaborative virtual environments: Different spatial metaphors. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’02), Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia, 9-12 September 2002, eds. Valery Petrushin, Piet Kommers, Kinshuk, Ildar Galeev. IEEE CS Press, pp. 259-264, ISBN 0-473-08801-0 (best paper award). This paper considers the place dimension in CVEs more in depth as it is reckoned most important for social awareness. The paper includes the classification of different place metaphors used in educational CVEs and a discussion of their importance. The conclusion of the paper is that it is necessary to combine different metaphors for better learning and socializing. As a result, a metaphor for social awareness support, Archipelago, is proposed, which seeks to combine features from different metaphors. Paper 3: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland & Monica Divitini. Supporting Social Awareness: Requirements for Educational CVE. Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT’03), Athens, Greece, 9-11 July 2003, eds. V. Devedzic, J. M. Spector, D. G. Sampson, Kinshuk. IEEE CS Press, pp. 366-367, ISBN 0-7695-1967-9 (short version). Long version (6 p.) is presented here. This paper considers the needs of learning communities and groups with the background of Activity theory and communities of practice approach. The paper provides a set of requirements for an educational CVE supporting social awareness along the dimensions of learner, place and artifacts. It also presents a design of a virtual world, Viras, based on these requirements and the Archipelago metaphor. Paper 4: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland & Monica Divitini. Collaborative Virtual Environments for Supporting Learning Communities: an Experience of Use. Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP’03), Sanibel Island, Florida, USA, 9-12, November 2003, eds. K. Schmidt, M. Pendergast, M. Tremaine, C. Simone. ACM Press, pp. 58-67. ISBN: 158113-693-5. This paper describes the implementation of Viras and results of its usage by the students of our department together with the lessons learned for improvement.
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Paper 5: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland. Virtual Spaces as Artifacts: Implications for the Design of Educational CVEs. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cyberworlds (Cyberworlds’03), Singapore, 3-5 December 2003, eds. Tosiyasu, L. Kunti, Seah Hock Soon, Alexei Sourin. IEEE CS Press, pp. 396-403. ISBN 0-7695-1922-9. An extended version is invited to and will appear in “Cyberworlds in education”, a special issue of The International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (JDET), 2(4), October-December 2004, ISSN 1539-3100, pp. 94-115, Idea Group Publishing. This paper introduces the concept of virtual places as artifacts. The use of artifacts in Viras is considered along different theoretical approaches, such as distributed cognition and coordination mechanisms. The paper ends with a set of intermediate requirements for virtual places as artifacts from a broader theoretical perspective. Paper 6: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland. Repository of virtual places as community memory. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia (VSMM’03), Hybrid reality: Art, Technology and the Human Factor, Montreal, Canada, 15-17 October 2003, ed. H. Thwaites. Published by VSMM and 3Dmt Center, pp. 242-250, ISBN 1-895130-12-3. This paper builds further on the concept of virtual places as artifacts. The paper considers the importance of place for human memory and social activities and suggests using a repository of virtual places to support long-term social awareness. Based on the theoretical background and the lessons learned from the first case study, the paper presents a new set of requirements and a design for a repository of virtual places for social awareness support. Paper 7: Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland. A Repository of Virtual Places as Community Memory: an Experience of Use. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry (VRCAI’04), Singapore, 16-18 June 2004, 4 p., ACM Press (short paper). Long version (9 p.) is presented here. This paper describes the implementation of a repository of virtual places and the usage of the redesigned system, with lessons learned and directions for further work.
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Paper 1: Supporting awareness in education: overview and mechanisms ____________________________________________________________________________________
SUPPORTING AWARENESS IN EDUCATION: OVERVIEW AND MECHANISMS Ekaterina Prasolova-Forland Abstract This paper discusses awareness support in educational context, focusing on the support offered by collaborative virtual environments. Awareness plays an important role in everyday educational activities, especially in engineering courses where projects and group work is an integral part of the curriculum. In this paper we will provide a general overview of awareness in computer supported cooperative work and then focus on the awareness mechanisms offered by CVEs. We will also discuss the role and importance of these mechanisms in educational context and make some comparisons between awareness support in CVEs and in more traditional tools. Index Terms Awareness mechanisms, Collaborative Virtual Environments, Learning communities, Social awareness.
INTRODUCTION Learning is essentially a social activity [34, 35]. The social dimension of learning is of paramount importance in engineering project-based courses, where a high degree of cooperation is required. To be able to accomplish a task and maintain a comfortable social climate in the learning community or group, to be able to function effectively in both working and social activities, the students need to constantly maintain a high degree of social awareness. There exist a number of different definitions of social awareness in the literature. In a first group of definitions, (see e.g. [32, 25, 13]), social awareness is defined as awareness about the social situation of other people, i.e. what they are doing, whether they are engaged in a conversation and can be disturbed, and of who is around and what is up. All these definitions consider mostly events that happen at a certain moment of time. Definitions in a second group are more general and assume a broader context. An example is group-structural (structural) awareness defined by [13] as knowledge about people’s roles, positions, status, responsibilities and group processes. Similarly, according to [10] and [14] social awareness is awareness about the social connections within a group. Starting from the existing definitions we arrived at a new definition that takes care of both general concepts and concrete events: Social awareness is awareness of the social situation in a group or community in a shared environment, which can be physical, virtual or both: people’s roles, activities, positions,
status, responsibilities, social connections and group processes. Social awareness encompasses awareness of social situation in general and social situation at a certain moment. The knowledge about the general social situation can be achieved by answering among others following questions: • What is the structure of the group? • What are the relations between group members? • How to interact with the other group members? • What are the roles of group members, and what resources are associated with these roles (for example knowledge)? The awareness or knowledge of a general social situation is acquired by collecting and analyzing awareness information from social situations at a certain moment and answering questions like who is present, who is available and who is doing what and talking to whom at the moment. Social awareness in real world is often achieved by collecting different cues from the environment [3], for example, by looking at what other people in the same room are doing, their conversational patterns and emotional state. In empirical study that we conducted, described in Section 2, shows that university does not provide an optimal environment for extracting such cues and supporting social awareness. In Section 3, we will also show that existing tools, such as ICQ and BCSW, are not effective enough for supporting social awareness in education. Therefore, in Section 4, we will look at an alternative way of supporting social awareness by using collaborative virtual environments (CVEs). A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a computer-based, distributed, virtual space where people can meet and interact with others, with agents or with virtual objects [28]. CVEs have been widely used in educational settings of different types, ranging from K-12 to higher education. Mainly, they have been adopted for their potentiality of offering a new space for promoting socialization. In this paper we will discuss CVEs focusing on the awareness mechanisms that they make available and their importance in the educational context.
SOCIAL AWARENESS IN UNIVERSITIES In order to find out the role of social awareness in education and the ways and limitations in collecting social cues, we
127
performed an empirical study among computer science students. In this study we have distributed a questionnaire to the students residing in two major computer labs in our university. In the questionnaires the students were requested to indicate: • To what extent they are aware over a number of components of social awareness in their own and other classes sharing the same computer lab, such as: possessed resources (knowledge, skills), group membership, social relations, activities and responsibility division in groups. • To what extent different locations/virtual spaces in the university (computer lab, classroom, class party, canteen, newsgroups, library, “oasis”) are suitable for supporting social awareness. • What mechanisms they use to acquire social awareness (sitting next to friends, observing how other students behave and how they work, asking other students directly, using technical tools like ICQ and mobile). A detailed description of the results of this questionnaire is beyond the scope of this paper. Here we simply want to outline some major trends. • Students appear to be more aware about resources, and group membership, to a slightly less degree social relations, and to an even less degree on activities and responsibility division within groups in their own class. • All groups show a dramatic drop in awareness when other classes using the same computer lab are concerned. • In both computer labs students point out computer lab and class parties as the best places to get acquainted to new people and share knowledge, with the classroom and canteen on the second place. The places rated lowest are mailing lists/newsgroups, oasis and libraries. • All the groups point out sitting together near their friends/partners as the major way of achieving social awareness, with technical tools on the second place. • Use of technical tools is as follows: e-mail, mobile, ICQ in descending order. • Students generally agree that an increased social awareness will result in a number of positive consequences, such as better learning, social environment and meeting and working place. • All students generally agree that learning is more effective within a community. From this we may conclude that the students experience problems with acquiring enough social awareness in their everyday life and work. Many students appear not sufficiently aware on the activities and responsibility division in groups, though these are the central components of effective learning as discussed in [8]. In addition, this lack of awareness can result in poor information sharing and effort duplication, when the students are not aware of the
resources available in their own and other classes. When students try to acquire awareness, they mostly prefer to keep close to their friends/partners or use technical tools like ICQ, mobile and e-mail, and are more reluctant to observe other students or contact them directly. This indicates that the students often limit themselves to a narrow circle of immediate friends and working partners and feel more comfortable about using technical tools then contacting peers directly. These results indicate that even students that share a common working place (computer lab) fail to achieve a satisfactory level of social awareness. It is natural to assume that awareness acquiring is even more complicated for those students who for various reasons are unable to attend the workplace regularly. We can conclude that the “natural” mechanisms are not sufficient for supporting social awareness, therefore we will look at how technical tools, both traditional CSCW ones and CVEs, can contribute to increase awareness.
AWARENESS MECHANISMS IN TRADITIONAL TOOLS
General mechanisms for supporting awareness The field of CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) has since its beginning acknowledged the importance of awareness in cooperative work. Efforts have been devoted to the understanding of the social mechanisms that are used in everyday life to support cooperation as well as to the development of tools for increasing awareness when these mechanisms are not sufficient, e.g. when people are geographically distributed. Gutwin, Greenberg and Roseman in [13] identify following general mechanisms for maintaining awareness among people that share a common workspace: • Direct communication. People explicitly provide information about their interaction in the shared workspace. Most of the communication is verbal, though gestures are common as well • Indirect productions. Communication through actions or expressions. • Consequential communication. Listening or watching to others as they work. • Feedthrough. Observing the effects of other people’s actions on the artifacts in the shared workspace. • Environmental feedback. Perceiving of a higher-level feedthrough from the indirect effects of other people’s actions in the larger workspace. When supporting social awareness people use one or more these mechanisms. For example, to achieve awareness of the social structures in a class, students can both communicate directly to other students, observe their activities and behavior and analyze the effects of their
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actions on the artifacts and space structure (areas occupied by different groups, notes on the messages boards etc). The mechanisms for providing awareness, especially social awareness, can also be classified according to whether awareness information is provided actively by the user or collected passively by a system and then presented to its users [7, 32]. For example, some systems allow users to post information about themselves to make other users aware e.g. of their interests (active awareness). The system can also detect automatically whether a user is online or not, and make other users aware of it (passive awareness). In the next section we will look at how CSCW tools support social awareness and discuss their limitations. Supporting social awareness by CSCW tools The results of our empirical studies showed that students use different technical tools for achieving social awareness, such as e-mail, ICQ, and mobile phones, and that the use of tools was put on the second place after sitting next to friends and partners. However, we argue that these “traditional” tools are not sufficient for supporting social awareness the way we defined it. ICQ is an Internet tool for supporting communication (www.icq.com). It provides the awareness about whom from the user’s contact list is available for conversation, who is temporarily unavailable and who is off-line. However, ICQ does not provide support for “weak ties”, those contacts that are not in our primary list, but still important for our work [17]. ICQ users can exchange mails, text messages, and files; can chat with both persons from the contact list and random ICQ users. However, ICQ cannot convey the visual information about the users’ mimics and gestures, appearance, position and orientation relative to other users, as well as provide support for “chance encounters”, an important mechanism for supporting awareness. Huxor in [17] argues that such chance encounters are dependant on the spatial arrangement. Together with the possibility of meeting a person and initiating a conversation, the spatial arrangement of the meeting place provides a possibility for negotiating of communication, for example “looking busy” or stopping and saying “Hi” while passing a person in a corridor, depending on whether the conversation with this person is desirable or not [24]. ICQ and similar tools do not provide support for spatial orientation. In ICQ, it is possible to post different information about yourself, for example contact information, interests, birth date and so on. Nearly the same functionality is available in the @Work system by [32] for a research lab. The Web interface of this system represents a virtual “check-in” board, where the users place information about themselves (plans, phone numbers, in/out, announcements). However, such information does not always provide sufficient awareness about the social structures, relations and memberships, as well as activities and roles, something that appears in our empirical study.
E-mail provides even less functionality in this context, and the reason for it being more used for acquiring social awareness than for example ICQ seems to be that it is the tools students are most used to. Awareness can also be supported by portable personal devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs [21], so that users can receive notifications of various kind about the status and ongoing activities of other users. This approach provides mostly information about the social situation at the moment and requires more effort than just “taking a glance” at the people around or the user list. For the purposes of information sharing, many students use BSCW in their daily activities. According to [12], the awareness mechanisms in BSCW are very specialized for writing a document in a small group. It is very difficult to use these awareness mechanisms to gain awareness of activities of larger groups involving a larger number of folder and files. In addition, research shows [29] that human cognition and memory is essentially 3D, so according to [17] “it seems likely that one needs the full 3D sense for the spatial memory to be effective, and would provide 3D virtual environments with a distinct advantage over the lighter weight 2D and textual shared spaces” so the structuring of information could be more effective in 3D environments than in traditional applications”.
AWARENESS MECHANISMS IN CVES Awareness in a virtual community is supported by establishing human contact and providing evidence of presence in a virtual space. The social activities of the users in online communities should be supported in following ways [36]: • Representing the extent of the space • Representing the possibilities of particular places within the space • Showing the presence of individuals • Allowing activities of individuals to affect the appearance or the structure of the space • Offering social translucence (implying visibility, awareness and accountability [9]). According to this, the central elements in social activities in a virtual community are individuals and the space where the social activities take place. In addition, according to [34], social activities and communication are mediated by tools. Therefore, it appears natural to characterize collaborative virtual environments in terms of users, mediating artifacts and space, which provides a container for the artifacts, user embodiments and the social events [28]. We argue that also the awareness mechanisms offered by CVEs can be classified according to this framework. In the following subchapters we will therefore list the basic awareness mechanisms typical of CVEs and then provide an overview of high-level awareness
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mechanisms in the context of learning communities, according to the characterization framework we have chosen. Basic awareness mechanisms in CVEs CVE applications are based on the same general mechanisms as other CSCW applications, but because of their special nature, they have an additional set of basic mechanisms, especially in 3D CVEs. Greenhalgh in [11] classifies awareness management in terms of granularity and form. The items of granularity are the virtual world, the regions within it and artifacts. The author also mentions following basic forms of managing awareness: • Disjoint membership: the environment is divided in disjoint units, such as every member of each unit is aware of all other members of the same unit, but not of members of other units. • Topological distance: this approach requires that a topological relationship is established between different units of awareness management, for example links between artifacts. • Line of sight: applicable to graphical environments and derives from architectural walk-through. • K-nearest neighbors: the awareness is limited to a specified number of neighboring units • Explicit model of awareness: a potential range of approaches based on explicit reasoning about awareness, including effects of context and medium. An example is spatial model of interaction proposed by [2]. • Area of interest or aura: a participant’s awareness or interest is modeled as a volume of virtual space relative to their momentary position and orientation. Benford et al in [2] suggests introducing additional subspaces: focus and nimbus. The more an object is in your focus, the more aware you are of it. The more an object is within your nimbus, the more aware it is of you. Aura, focus and nimbus, and then awareness are manipulated by objects to manage interactions. They can be manipulated by movement, orientation, explicitly by changing key parameters and through so-called adapterobjects. Aura, focus and nimbus can also be manipulated through boundaries in space. Boundaries provide mechanisms for marking territory, controlling movement and for influencing the interactional properties of space. High-level awareness mechanisms in CVEs Space The notion of space is important for social awareness support for two main reasons. First, the world and region are units of awareness management, and many of the mentioned basic awareness mechanisms are tied to space, such as aura,
line of sight and k-nearest neighbor. Second, space has an important social function and provides a background for social events, user embodiments and artifacts [28]. The first group of awareness mechanisms includes those that apply to the “open landscape”, such as line of sight. These mechanisms allow the user to have the overview over the events in the intermediate neighborhood, within the “line of horizon” and are usually and integral part of the CVE system used. These mechanisms mimic the analogues mechanisms in the real world. In the second group we find the ways of creating awareness by structuring the space. By the structure we understand the mutual relations between different parts of the virtual environment, for example the mutual position of “rooms” within a virtual campus or the spatial organization of buildings in a 3D world. The structure can be predefined or might be created and modified by the users. For example, the students make their own rooms with a number of objects and links contained there, added to the global system of campus in 2D (the LambdaMOO environment of the Virtual Campus [22]) or in 3D (Euroland, AvtiveWorlds [1, 31]). In this way, the activities of users can influence the appearance and the structure of the space, providing visualization, or perceptualization of awareness [30] of the social structures and the activities themselves. Space can be structured both physically and topologically, providing different possibilities for awareness management. The awareness is generally propagated by the mechanism of the environmental feedback. To summarize, the space in CVEs contributes to supporting social awareness in education: • Space enhances awareness of who is around and what is up in a class, working group or community by providing for chance encounters and communication negotiation similar to what students can experience in physical shared spaces. • Space provides an arena where the mutual positions and orientations of the students provide awareness of their availability and mutual social relations. • Space provides the awareness on the ongoing activities, both social and educational, as these activities leave their traces in the space and form it (Euroland project, [31]). • Space structure visualizes the existing social structures and power relations in learning group and community (as shown in the DomeCity MOO experiment [26]) for example by showing the borders between different group areas. User Starting from the definitions of [6], we conclude that the user in CVEs is constructed along dimensions of presence, embodiment and identity. As we mentioned before, in order to support awareness in a virtual community, the system should provide indication
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about the presence of the individuals and visibility of individuals and their actions. Witmer et al in [33] defines presence as “the subjective experience for being in one place or environment, even when one is physically situated in another”. Hindmarsh et al in [15] distinguishes between personal, social and environmental presence. Personal presence is defined as the extent to which one feels as if they are in a virtual world [15], with the following components determining engagement in the environment: view, action point and the position in the environment [4]. All these components are connected to the person’s aura, i.e. what he can see and be aware of, as well as their region belonging and the people in the immediate neighborhood. The sense of social presence, on the other hand is defined as the extent to which other beings in the world appear to exist and react to the user [15]. The basic sense of social presence in most virtual environments is supported by for example providing a list of persons online (textually) and a group of avatars (visually), therefore indicating the persons present in the various regions of awareness. An additional dimension of social presence are the mutual distances (both immediate and topological ones) between users’ avatars, their position, orientation and grouping, due to the fact that the social behavior in CVE resembles that in real life [19]. Less important in the context of social awareness is environmental presence, which is the extent to which the user feels that the environment appears knowledgeable of their avatar’s actions [15] since it mostly depends on the technical possibilities of the system. This knowledgeability is often shown as feedback to the user’s actions, for example animation of user’s interactions with the environment [5]. In order to make others and themselves aware of their presence in a virtual space, users must have a representation or embodiment [23]. Dickey in [6] considers a number of issues in connection with analysis of how embodiment is supported in various virtual worlds: choice of avatars, emotional expressiveness, and navigational and observational possibilities. The appearance of avatars can to a certain degree mimic students’ appearance in the real life, clothes and make-up, which serve as indicator of status, occupation etc. The body language like gestures and body postures, facial expression, direction of gaze etc, which is an important part of human communication in the physical world [27], can also be partly reproduced in CVEs, for example by providing a repertoire of predefined gestures. Depending on the embodiment chosen, the user can have different possibilities for navigation and observation in the environment, but this is also up to the existing space structures. In most virtual worlds users can navigate by pressing the arrow buttons on the keyboard or manipulating the mouse, to move into new rooms and spaces or make the avatar turn and move in the right direction. In additional to the movement analogous to that in real life, the user can move along the topological ties in the space, for example following a link. In some systems the user is capable of observing the world from the 3rd person perspective, as well
viewing different parts of the world from various altitudes, zooming in- and out parts of the world, or acquire individually tailored views [20]. It is impossible to achieve an unambiguous representation of user without introducing the notion of identity. It is often tied to a user nick or an avatar, though some systems like ActiveWorlds [1] assign a unique number to each user, since the avatars are not unique. The identity is often associated with a reputation, a circle of acquaintances, a place in the social hierarchy in the virtual world [18]. Identity is tightly coupled to the objects or artifacts the user creates, for example as in Active Worlds. The awareness on the “user” level is achieved by the generic awareness mechanisms such as direct and consequential communication and indirect productions and, in some cases by feedthrough where there is a direct relation between user and his artifacts. To summarize, the user dimension provides following mechanisms for supporting social awareness in educational context: • Students can produce and attain awareness of the each other interests, levels of knowledge, group and community memberships, relations and roles by choice of embodiment, degree of presence and identity (choice of avatar, spatial position and orientation etc). • The sense of presence and embodiment also provide the social awareness of the moment, i.e. who is around, what they are doing, the emotional expressions etc (chat, gestures, orientation). • Students can create their identity through a history of communications and contacts, as well as created artifacts and thus provide awareness about their personality, place in the local social structures and resources possessed by them. • By choosing appropriate embodiment the students can easily move between different awareness regions and items of granularity and provide the overview unattainable in the real world. Artifacts An important aspect of interacting in the CVE is the manipulation of objects or artifacts. The objects can be everything from whiteboards, 3D models of human body to documents and virtual furniture. In general, we define artifacts as units, created and modified by users for the purpose of communication facilitation and task accomplishing. When artifacts are shared, they become both the subject and the medium for communication [28]. An artifact serves the communicational purposes by providing information about the actions performed on it and the identity of the person performing the actions. The joint use of artifacts needs coordination. Hindmarsh in [16] mentions shared view and user embodiment as possible coordination mechanisms in CVEs, connecting together the users, the place and the artifacts in one awareness management framework:
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• •
The shared view of the common virtual world allows access the shared artifacts, even though the users are separated by physical distances. The embodiment of users provides the awareness of users’ actions and manipulations of the shared artifacts.
The artifact is the smallest unit of awareness management, with all the basic awareness management forms applicable to it. Artifacts can provide awareness information in different ways. For example, the users can observe the modification of the artifact directly, either in real time (animation of other users’ actions on artifact, pointers with the name of the modifier, highlighting etc) or post factum, by reflecting on the change in the parameters (position, color etc). In addition to the information on how the artifact is changed, it is important to know who did it. This information can be provided directly by observing avatars or other representations of users performing actions on objects or leaving records on the artifact with the information on who changed it and when. Artifacts also can serve as transfer node between different awareness region and spatial structures, by for example containing hyperlinks. The awareness is propagated through mechanisms of feedthrough and environmental feedback. The artifacts can therefore provide social awareness in a learning community in following ways: • • • •
By reflecting the status and identity of the students who own or change the artifact (for example, user number on the artifact, the appearance of artifact) By revealing knowledge and skills the owner possesses (text, pictures, links put on the artifact) By reflecting activities performed by the students By revealing the social structure around and membership (who’s area it is located on, what links it contains, what people collaborated on it)
CONCLUSIONS We have looked at the mechanisms for supporting social awareness in the natural environments such as the shared workplace, traditional technical tools such as ICQ, e-mail and mobiles, and the mechanisms offered by collaborative virtual environments. We can conclude that the mechanisms offered by the natural environment of university, even supplemented by the usual technical tools, are not enough. We can also conclude that the mechanisms offered by CVEs provide a promising supplement to the mechanisms and tools already in use in the educational context. This is true for a number of reasons: first, CVEs present in some way a copy of the real world, so the awareness mechanisms available in CVEs are more similar to those people use in the real life, and that extraction of cues will be more natural and easy then in the tools that only provide abstract cues. Second, the structure of the university locations in the real life, as well as the artifacts available and the students’ ways
of expressing themselves, do not always facilitate the extraction of the social cues in the most effective way, as shown in our study so it is necessary to provide an alternative space, artifacts and user representation with the functionality unattainable in the real world. Since the students fail to achieve enough awareness of the complex phenomena such as group dynamics and community structure by using natural mechanisms and traditional tools, it is necessary to provide alternative ways of visualizing and presenting them, for example by building virtual places and objects. Our goal in the future will be to develop a virtual system that will provide an effective support for social awareness among university students.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The research reported here is financed by the Norwegian Research Council in the context of the project CAGIS II. Special thanks to Monica Divitini for valuable comments and feedbacks.
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[14] Gutwin, C., Stark, G., Greenberg, S. “Support for Workspace Awareness in Educational Groupware”. In proceedings of CSCL 1995. [15] Hindmarsh, J., Fraser, M., Heath, C., Benford, S., Greenhalg, C. “Fragmented Interaction: Establishing mutual orientation in virtual environments”. In Proceedings of CSCW 1998. [16] Hindmarsh, J., Fraser, M., Heath, C., and Benford, S. “Virtually Missing the Point: Configuring CVEs for Object-Focused Interaction”. In Churchill, E. F., Snowdown, D. N., and Munro, A. J. (Eds.) Collaborative Virtual Environments. Chapter 7, Springer-Verlag London Limited, 2001. [17] Huxor, A. “The Role of the Personal in Social Workspaces: Reflection on Working in AlphaWorld”. In Churchill, E. F., Snowdown, D. N., and Munro, A. J. (Eds.) Collaborative Virtual Environments. Chapter 15, Springer-Verlag London Limited, 2001. [18] Jakobsson, M. “Rest in Peace, Bill the Bot: Death and Life in Virtual Worlds.” The Social Life of Avatars. Springer-Verlag London Ltd. 2002. [19] Jeffrey, P. & Mark, G. “Navigating the Virtual Landscape: Coordinating the Shared Use of Space”. In Munro, A., Hook, K., and Beynon, D. (Eds). Social Navigation of Information Space. London: Springer, Chapter 7. [20] Jåå-Aro, K., and Snowdown, D. “How Not to be Objective”. In Churchill, E. F., Snowdown, D. N., and Munro, A. J. (Eds.) Collaborative Virtual Environments. Chapter 8, Springer-Verlag London Limited, 2001. [21] Liechti, O., Sifer, M., Ichikawa, T. “Supporting Social Awareness on the World Wide Web With the Handheld CyberWindow.” In proceedings of Workshop on Awareness, CSCW 2000. [22] Maher, M. “Designing the Virtual Campus as a Virtual World”. In proceedings of CSCL 1999. (December 12-15, Palo Alto, CA, 1999), Lawrence Elbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1999, 376382. [23] Mania, K., Chalmers, A. “A Classification for User Embodiment in Collaborative Virtual Environments”. “In Proceedings of the 4th International conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, 1998
[24] McGrath, A, Prinz, W. “All That is Solid Melts Into Software”. In Churchill, E. F., Snowdown, D. N., and Munro, A. J. (Eds.) Collaborative Virtual Environments. Chapter 6 Springer-Verlag London Limited, 2001. [25] Prinz., W. “NESSIE: An Awareness Environment for Cooperative Settings”. In proceedings of CSCW 1999. [26] Rayborn., E. M. “Designing an Emergent Culture of Negotiation in Collaborative Virtual Communities: The DomeCityMoo Simulation”. Collaborative Virtual Environments. Springer-Verlag London Ltd, 2001. [27] Salem, B., Earle, N. “Designing a Non-Verbal Language for Expressive Avatars”. In Proceedings of CVE 2000. [28] Snowdown, D., Churchill, E. F., and Munro, A. J. “Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Spaces and Places for CSCW: An Introduction.” In Churchill, E. F., Snowdown, D. N., and Munro, A. J. (Eds.) Collaborative Virtual Environments. Chapter 15, Springer-Verlag London Limited, 2001. [29] Spence, J. D. “The Memory of Palaceof Matteo Ricci.” New York: Viking Penguin, 1984. [30] Sohlenkamp, M “Supporting Group Awareness in Multi-User Environments through Perceptualization”. PhD dissertation, 1999. [31] Talamo, A., Ligorio, M. B. “Identity in the Cyberspace: The Social Construction of Identity Through On-Line Virtual Interactions”. In Proceedings of 1st Dialogical Self Conference, 2000. [32] Tollmar, K., Sandor, O., Schomer, A. “Supporting Social Awareness. @Work Design and Experience”. In proceedings of CSCW 1996. [33] Witmer, B., Singer, M. “Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire”. 1998. [34] Vygotsky, L. “Mind in Society: The development of Higher Order Psychological Processes”. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1978. [35] Wenger, E. “Communities of Practice:Learning, Meaning,and Identity:” Cambridge University Press, 1999. [36] Wolf, T. ”Creating Virtual Places for Community Involvement.” In proceedings of Workshop on Awareness, CSCW 2000.
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Paper 2: Supporting learning communities with collaborative virtual environments: Different spatial metaphors ______________________________________________________________________ Supporting learning communities with collaborative virtual environments: Different spatial metaphors Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland, Monica Divitini IDI, Norwegian University of Science and Technology E-mail: {ekaterip,monica}@idi.ntnu.no
Abstract In this paper we discuss the usage of Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVE) in educational settings. In particular we discuss the role that these systems can play in supporting learning communities. The focus of the paper is on the representation of space that underlies these systems. We present and compare different spatial metaphors presented in the literature and analyze how they support the needs of the learning communities.
1. Introduction A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a computer-based, distributed, virtual space where people can meet and interact with others, with agents or with virtual objects [24]. CVEs have been widely used in educational settings of different types, ranging from K-12 to higher education. Mainly, they have been adopted for their potentiality of offering a new space for promoting socialization. The first CVEs were text based and were strongly inspired by adventure games, as it is evident in the first examples of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon) and MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented). According to [21], MOOs allow for greater collaboration among students within and across classrooms. Bruckman [2] also points out that the presence of collaborators offered by these CVEs plays a key role in augmenting student motivations and in improving the learning process. In addition to the facilities offered by textual CVEs, graphical CVEs, either 2 or 3D, offer a richer collaborative arena for social encounters and community building [18]. Many authors have pointed out the importance of the space available to a community as a key resource for establishing and enabling an activity [9]. The existence of an environment where learners can have and share
experiences is also acknowledged as one of the main requirements for learning [16]. As stated in [6], “the practices people develop are crucially dependent on where they take place”. In this paper we therefore want to analyze the different spatial metaphors that underlie CVEs and see how they relate to the needs of learning communities. The paper is organized as follows. Next section describes the different roles that CVEs can play in supporting learning communities. Section 3 presents an overview of different metaphors proposed in the literature, their comparison and analysis. Finally, Section 4 concludes the paper.
2. Supporting learning communities The notion of community in education has often been underestimated. However, communities are a reality within any learning context and provide an invaluable support to learning. Students share and create knowledge not only with the persons that take the same class or that work on the same group. They rather rely on a complex network of communities that spontaneously emerge within any educational context, e.g. various communities of interest or communities of practice [26]. CVEs can be used to support communities in educational settings in many ways, as discussed in the following.
2.1 Supporting community building Communities are social aggregates that are fluid and emergent [26]. It is often difficult for community members to get an overview of the existing social structures. This is a problem because awareness on e.g., community membership, role distribution, available resources, and ongoing processes is essential for collaboration and learning. CVEs can support learning communities by increasing the awareness of the current
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social situation and the underlying social structures in general. This can be done, e.g., by providing awareness through graphical clues about different social aspects, such as membership status.
2.2 Supporting communication
information, others to modify it, and others to add new information, e.g. to bring into the virtual environment new documents or to create external links.
2.4 Providing an alternative space structure
Communication plays a key role in keeping a community alive. Particularly important is the communication that is triggered by casual encounters. This communication is reported to be essential for knowledge sharing [5] and strengthening the ties among community members. This communication is dependent on spatial arrangement, e.g. proximity of desks in a laboratory and attendance to the same classroom. A student that is not physically present in the “territory” of the community cannot take part in this communication. CVEs can help in overcoming this limitation since they allow communication independently by geographic location. Moreover, graphical clues can be used to indicate if someone is busy or is available for conversations. CVEs can also support intentional communication by providing users with a list of the other students with which they have strong ties and providing awareness on their availability.
Research in social science indicates that space plays an important role in social life. According to [9], space is a key resource for establishing and enabling an activity. The concept of boundaries in this context is of critical importance for constraining access, marking territory and identifying locations for specific activities. Space allows different modes of participation in activities and awareness of them. Space also allows for negotiation of common resources. However, the existing boundaries and structures of the physical space in campuses and schools do not always provide the optimal context for communication, group work and community development. CVEs can support learning communities by providing an alternative space structure. One that is more dynamic than the real one and that evolves with the community.
2.3 Supporting information sharing
Spatial metaphors can be characterized along two orthogonal dimensions: their resembling of a real space, and the intended purpose of the space that they provide. In the following we use these two dimensions to present different metaphors.
Any learning community relies on a patrimony of information that must be accessible as much as possible by all its members. CVEs can support learning communities by providing them with a space that can be enriched with artifacts conveying information, such as documents, folders, and postIts. This approach can have various benefits. First, the physical configuration of the space can be used to support navigation. For example, it is possible to put into a room all the documents connected to a certain topics and connect the room to other rooms that contains related documents. Second, the physical organization of the information can ease memorization. In fact, the spatial nature of memory is recognized in psychological theory. For example, the “method of loci” [25] is a technique for accessing information, where things are remembered by associating them with places or images. Third, according to Cicero (cited in [27]), when people visit a place, they not only remember what they did there, but also people they met there. Therefore, the support that space provides for the memory also provides the support for memory of encounters [11]. In addition, with a CVE is easy to provide support for the dynamic construction of the information space of the community, allowing the participation of all the members (if this is in accordance with the policies of the specific community at hand). Moreover, different levels of participations can be allowed. For example, some members can be allowed only to add comments in form of PostIs to the existing
3 The metaphors used in educational CVEs
3.1 Resemblance of physical space Along this dimension metaphors are characterized in relation to their intent of creating a virtual space that resembles a real one, implying that the virtual environment provides an analogy to a part of the real world. In the following we consider only two of these metaphors because of their relevance in education. Many others exist where the provided virtual space resembles e.g., planets, ecosystems, and cities. 3.1.1 CVEs as buildings and campuses. Many systems have used buildings as metaphor for the virtual space. In this case, the virtual environment is presented as one or more connected buildings where users can meet and work. In particular, in the educational context, this metaphor has been specialized to recreate the experience of being in a campus. Several universities and schools introduced virtual representations of themselves (eCollege, VHS, Flo, Virtual Campus, Diversity University etc.) providing an analogy of the corresponding place in the real world ([1], [15], [16]). The rooms and the buildings of the campus give an idea about the social environment, personal office space, and
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available equipment. The analogy with the physical campus allows creating a virtual environment that is familiar to users and where they can easily move to meet people, access learning materials, and retrieve information. 3.1.2 CVEs as frontiers. Frontiers can be thought of as land to claim and conquer, and horizons to extend. Many systems use this metaphor and are based on the idea of the virtual environment as landscapes to create and territories to claim [10, 23]. We can draw parallels between building a house in the prairies and creating a new virtual room [23]. Often the notions of power, status and competition are connected to the phenomena of frontiers as for example shown in the social experiment of DomeCityMOO, a text-based MOO, where the participating students have been assigned different building powers and possibilities for creating new places [20]. This metaphor is clearly present in the worlds of Active Worlds universes, among them also educational worlds of AWEDU (Active Worlds Educational Universe) where different groups of students “claim” land by building various objects (Euroland, Playgrnd) [1]. The metaphor of frontiers provides a significant amount of control on the structuring of space, which is often not present in the real world. Users get the opportunity to extend the limits of the space, acquiring new areas and establishing new places. The power of this metaphor is also in offering possibilities for interesting social simulation and experiments and creating an arena for exploration of power and identity, as in the case with DomeCityMOO.
3.2 Virtual places for specific purposes In many CVEs the virtual space represents an abstraction designed to serve specific purposes, for example, for allowing people with similar interests to talk together or for providing visualizations of people’s engagements in certain tasks or access to certain information. 3.2.1 CVEs as meeting places. A meeting place in a CVE is an electronic container where meetings and related activities happen continuously over time [24]. The meeting place can be everything: textual MOOs (MOOSE Crossing [2]) and IRC, graphical 2D rooms for class parties (WorldsAway) [18], 3D meeting places for online designer classes in ActiveWorlds [7], or a combination of different media, both text and 3D, as in Virtual Campus [15,16]. For example, the textual environment of MOOSE Crossing allows children to meet virtually in a text-based environment [2]. Graphical meeting places, like WorldsAway and the worlds of the AWEDU, provide more advanced meeting facilities since it is possible to communicate not only by the means of text, but also
through avatar movements, gestures and mimics. The design of such places varies strongly depending on the purpose of the meeting, from the more formal environment of work (Virtual Campus) to the more informal surroundings of the Palace and WolrdsAway for class parties. Generally, the systems based on this metaphor provide a virtual meeting place designed to satisfy specific needs (separation according to interests, overview of the activities by others, means of communication, etc.) that contains a number of artifacts for facilitating the meetings, for example whiteboards and bulletin boards. 3.2.2 CVEs as information spaces. Due to the increasing information load in everyday life, there have been a number of attempts to combine information visualization and navigation with collaborative virtual environments. In these cases the virtual space is seen as an information space where data are visualized, often using 3D, and users can observe what data is accessed by other users and how it is done. An example that combines the principles of hypermedia together with the traditional campus metaphor is Virtual syllabus from Business Computing Skills Class [7]. The course is represented by a virtual environment in Active Worlds, which serves as a place or context for learning so that the learning is “anchored” in a 3D environment. The success of these systems greatly depends on the navigation support that they provide. In particular, CVEs can support spatial, semantic and social navigation [8]. For example, in Virtual Syllabus the students walk around the physical landscape (spatial navigation) and follow various links to the parts of learning material (semantic navigation). In LEEP [22], social navigation is possible thanks to the support provided to users of offering and seeking advice for navigating the common information space. 3.2.3 CVEs as virtual stages. A virtual stage is a virtual place where some kind of acting takes place, either by the users themselves or by objects created by them. An example of educational systems using this metaphor is Klump, a 3D collaborative storytelling tool where children can manipulate a 3D object, called Klump, that can be assigned various shapes and properties to perform in the storytelling [3]. Another example is Teatrix, a collaborative virtual environment that allows children to collaboratively create stories on a virtual stage. The children prepare the scenes and the characters in a backstage and then collaboratively create the story in a 3D virtual world [14]. In the systems, based on this metaphor, people are represented by avatars or/and nicks. The audience can be TV-watchers [4], virtual worlds users or actors themselves who can watch their performance from the third person perspective.
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3.2.4 CVEs as demonstrations and exhibitions. Some CVEs focuses on providing a virtual place for the collaborative viewing and experimenting on various objects. Due to the increasing possibilities of multimedia and VR technology, 3D CVEs are to a greater degree used to demonstrate concepts that are difficult to represent efficiently enough in real life, for example complex physical phenomena or 3D geometry and arts. Even in cases where the material can be presented in 2D on paper, it appears more motivating to present it in 3D graphics and allow for collaborative exploration and modification of the material in a 3D CVE [28]. The Active Worlds educational universe includes a number of worlds based on this metaphor, for example VanGogh and GrMuseum for art exhibitions, and Awstruck demonstrating complex geometric concepts [1]. This metaphor is useful when it is necessary to exploit the media richness of virtual environments, mostly in 3D, since some concepts are better perceived when they are presented in three dimensions. It is feasible to use in the situations where it is for practical and safety reasons difficult to demonstrate the relevant phenomena in real life, for example certain physical experiments, historical places etc [28]. In such an environment the students can collaboratively manipulate objects in order to study complex concepts in a more direct and appealing way than just reading about them. 3.2.5 CVEs as shared workspaces. A virtual shared workspace is a virtual place where the users work in a shared context on a shared task using shared artifacts. The collaboration can be synchronous or asynchronous. In the systems adopting this metaphor the focus is on providing a space that can be used by people that are geographically distributed and cannot work together in a classroom, office, or laboratory. The main goal in this case is on providing access to working artifacts and on supporting the shared work that users have to perform. There exist a number of worlds in AWEDU where students work collaboratively to create pieces of art, demonstrations, and exhibitions. Similarly, in Virtual Physics and Physics laboratory worlds students can collaboratively perform experiments and study different physical phenomena [28]. In this perspective CVEs provide new possibilities for facilitating collaborative work because they provide a common place with shared objects as well as because 3D technology provides new possibilities for observation of the shared space.
3.3 Comparison The virtual environment provided by any CVE system can be classified according to the metaphor(s) that it adopts for resembling real space and of the metaphors that are underlying its intended purpose. For example, Virtual Syllabus, described in Section 3.2.2, combines the
building metaphor along the first dimension with the one of information space along the second. In fact, the different parts of the syllabus, i.e. the information space, are represented by buildings and places that are connected by paths and avenues, so the students are encouraged to “walk through” in a certain way and gather information as they move along. Some systems combine more than one metaphor along the same dimension in order to provide a richer arena for collaboration. For example, the workspace metaphor is often used together with the stage metaphor. For example, in Theatre of work [19,17], the workspace is represented as a stage where actions, interests and documents users work on are depicted in a symbolic way. Combining different metaphors in educational CVEs is necessary because none of the described metaphors alone can meet the requirements suggested by the roles of CVEs described in Section 2. For example, a constant meeting place provides a context for establishing social contacts and communication, as well as an alternative structure for having meetings. The quality and flexibility of this alternative structure depends on the possibilities of extension and modification of the structure by the users. The 2D or 3D structure of non-textual spaces (buildings or abstract places) often allows spatial structuring of information, for example by placing various links and signs in the meeting locations. The basic navigation is provided, usually in form of movements within a room or between different rooms. However, to provide a more advanced navigation and the possibilities for an effective information sharing, the system should include the functionalities of the information space metaphor. The “information space” metaphor alone does not always provide good possibilities for social engagement, establishing contacts and acquiring a general awareness of the social situation in the virtual environment, among others because the requirements of an information space itself often make it uncomfortable for all the users to share the same view of the space creating the need for “subjective” views [13]. In addition, in the CVEs employing this metaphor, the focus is often on the information itself, not the persons behind it, so it is important to strengthen the social aspect in such systems. However, this metaphor often offers a structure of the space, unattainable in real world and optimal for accessing a certain database or data structure of some kind. The stage metaphor has some similarities with the meeting place and often provides the same functionality. Both role-playing and collaborative creation of stories has a number of important functions, like promoting the communication and social relations between users and improving their writing, social and creative skills. The roles of the users may have various implications for the user’s place in the social hierarchies of the virtual communities [12]. The support for the alternative
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structure is also provided to some degree, but there is practically no support for information sharing. The workspace metaphor provides additional possibilities for communication and community building, especially for geographically distributed users. For example, in addition to textual and audio communication, the users may communicate by manipulating the shared artifacts in the common workplace, so that other users can track the changes. In some systems, like Nessie [19], the working space functions as a “theatre of work”, signaling people’s activities, interests and group memberships according the tasks they work on and the interests they have. The systems using this metaphor often provide an alternative working place, with the functionalities adjusted to user’s needs. The demonstration metaphor is often used together with the workspace metaphor in the same system and provides similar functionalities, but the accent on collaboration and communication is generally weaker in the former. Thus, one of the main challenges in such systems is not focus too much only on the demonstrational abilities of CVEs, without paying enough attention to facilitating collaboration. The metaphor that provides the best support for community building and alternative space is the frontier metaphor, as proved, e.g., in the trial “30 days in Activeworlds”, where a whole community was created during a month [10]. By allowing the whole system to develop and grow relatively free, it is possible to obtain indications about the structure and the relations within the community as well to explore its power and identity relations.
4. Conclusions and future work In this paper we have discussed the roles of CVEs in supporting learning communities. We have also looked at the various spatial metaphors used in the educational CVEs and analyzed their ability to address the needs of the learning communities. As discussed, no one of the metaphors alone is sufficient for the purposes of the learning community. Rather, it is necessary to combine the different features of the described metaphors into a new one, tailored to the specific needs of particular user groups. The future work will be therefore to develop such a metaphor.
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EnvironmentsCollaborative Virtual Environments. Chapter 10, Springer-Verlag London Ltd, 2001. [4] M. Craven, J. Wyver,, A. Oldroyd, T. Regan. “Ages of Avatar: Community Building for Inhabited Television.” In Proceedings of CVE 2000. [5] T. H. Davenport and L. Prusak, Working knowledge: how organizations manage what they know. Boston, Massachussetts: Harvard Business School Press, 1998. [6] V. O‘Day, D. Bobrow, K. Bobrow, M. Shirley, B. Hughes, and J. Walters, "Moving Practice: From Classrooms to MOO Rooms," Computer Supported Cooperative Work: The journal of Collaborative Computing, vol. 7, pp. 9-45, 1998. [7] M. D. Dickey. 3D Virtual Worlds and Learning: An Analysis of the Impact of Design Affordances and Limitations in Active Worlds, Blaxxun Interactive, and Onlive! Traveler; and a Study of the Implementation of Active Worlds for Formal and Informal Education. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 1999. [8] P. Dourish. “Where the Footprints Lead: Tracking Down Other Roles for Social Navigation”. Social Navigation of Information Space. Springer-Verlag London Ltd. 1999. [9] A. Giddens. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity, 1984. [10] A. Hudson-Smith. ”30 Days in Active-Worlds – Community, Design and Terrorism in a Virtual World”. The Social Life of Avatars. Springer-Verlag London Ltd. 2002. [11] A. Huxor. “The Role of the Personal in Social Workspaces: Reflection on Working in AlphaWorld”. Collaborative Virtual Environments., Springer-Verlag London Ltd, 2001. [12] M. Jakobsson. “Rest in Peace, Bill the Bot: Death and Life in Virtual Worlds.” The Social Life of Avatars. Springer-Verlag London Ltd. 2002. [13] K. Jåå-Aro and D. Snowdown. “How Not to be Objective.” Collaborative Virtual Environments, Springer-Verlag London Ltd, 2001. [14] I. Machado, R. Prada, A. Paiva. “Bringing Drama into a Virtual Stage”. In proceedings of CVE 2000. [15] M. Maher. “Designing the Virtual Campus as a Virtual World”. In proceedings of CSCL 1999. (December 12-15, Palo Alto, CA, 1999), Lawrence Elbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1999, 376-382. [16] M. Maher, S. J. Simonoff, S. Clark. “Learner-Centered Open Virtual Environments as Places”. In proceedings of CSCL 2001. (March 22-24, 2001, Maastricht, the Netherlands). Maastricht McLuhan Institute, 2001,437-444, [17] A. McGrath, W. Prinz. “All That is Solid Melts Into Software”. Collaborative Virtual Environments. SpringerVerlag London Ltd, 2001. [18] L. Neal. “Virtual Classroom and Communities”. In proceedings of ACM GROUP 1997. [19] W. Prinz. “NESSIE: An Awareness Environment for Cooperative Settings”. In proceedings of CSCW 1999. [20] E. M. Rayborn. “Designing an Emergent Culture of Negotiation in Collaborative Virtual Communities: The DomeCityMoo Simulation”.) Collaborative Virtual Environments. Springer-Verlag London Ltd, 2001. [21] R.D. Riner. “Virtual ethics
