Abstract
This chapter examines what people talk about in virtual worlds, employing protocol analysis. Each of two scenario studies was developed to assess the impact of virtual worlds as a collaborative environment for a specific purpose: one for learning and one for designing. The first designed a place in Active Worlds for a course on Web Site Design, having group learning spaces surrounded by individual student galleries. Student text chat was analyzed through a coding scheme with four major categories: control, technology, learning, and place. The second studied expert architects in a Second Life environment called DesignWorld that combined 3D modeling and sketching tools. Video and audio recordings were coded in terms of four categories of communication content (designing, representation of the model, awareness of each other, and software features), and in terms of synthesis comparing alternative designs versus analysis of how well the proposed solution satisfies the given design task. Both studies found that people talk about their avatars, identity, and location in the virtual world. However, the discussion is chiefly about the task and not about the virtual world, implying that virtual worlds provide a viable environment for learning and designing that does not distract people from their task.
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Acknowledgments
I acknowledge Steve Clark who collected and analyzed the data for the learning environment study as part of his PhD research and Ning Gu who designed the virtual learning environment in Active Worlds for this study. I also acknowledge the major contributions that Figen Gul and Zafer Bilda provided in designing the studies for DesignWorld and the collection and analysis of the data from the DesignWorld studies. The DesignWorld study was partly funded by the CRC Construction for Innovation Program, Project 2002-024-B “Team Collaboration in High bandwidth Virtual Environments.” The collaborators and research reports are available on http://web.arch.usyd.edu.au/∼mary/CRCWeb/.
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Maher, M.L. (2010). What People Talk About in Virtual Worlds. In: Bainbridge, W. (eds) Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. Human-Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-825-4_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-825-4_16
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