Tagged education
Collaborating through Space and Time in Educational Virtual Environments: 3 Case Studies
Ali Arya, Carleton University
Peggy Hartwick, Carleton University
Shawn Graham, Carleton University
Nuket Nowlan, Carleton University
In this paper, we address the use of "virtual space" as a learning environment. With the advances in e-learning systems, the education community shows a growing interest in using online tools for educational purposes. The case studies presented in this paper demonstrate how a 3D virtual environment can be used as a learning tool by providing a virtual space that allows people in different locations to interact and gives users access to facilities, settings, and even people not available physically. These case studies are related to presentation of native dance styles, learning language for English as a Second Language students and simulation of archaeological excavation site for History students, all done through Carleton Virtual, a 3D virtual environment for Carleton University. Based on the results that show the advantages of using the virtual space as a learning environment, we argue that virtual space can introduce a new educational paradigm.
As educators, we are interested in making our teaching and research as accessible as possible. Sometimes, it is a question of geography—physical facilities and spaces such as research labs and university campuses are location-dependent and only accessible to those in that geographical location. Other times, some training and research activities require the development of fieldwork or complex simulated environments that are either too costly or impossible to arrange (e.g., training emergency personnel on handling major disasters). In addition, it has been recognized that innovative work requires collaborators to share tacit and explicit knowledge freely (Brown and Duguid 2001), which requires the rich communication usually associated with face-to-face interaction, enabling people to transfer individually held knowledge and synthesize it to fashion new collective knowledge.
In this paper, we discuss three case studies that demonstrate the use of a three-dimensional virtual environment (3DVE) as a "virtual campus" and a step toward widening access to both research and teaching. Our case set consists of (1) a virtual presentation of the dance styles of native North American people used as an example in a course on Interactive Media and Digital Art, (2) a framework for language learning for English as a Second Language students, and (3) a simulated archaeological excavation site for history students. The 3DVE used in the discussed cases is called Carleton Virtual, a virtual campus developed by researchers at Carleton University using web.alive, an avatar-based 3D tool by Avaya (http://avayalive.com/Engage/). The academic uses of 3DVEs have been reported and discussed by other researchers, but serious limitations exist both in the functionality provided by these 3DVEs and the evidence of their usefulness as academic tool. Through the presented cases, we hope to show the particular features of our proposed solution (intelligent agents, communication and collaboration, 3D spatial voice, scripted events and interaction, etc.) and also the advantages of 3DVEs in general as educational tools. These case studies collectively and progressively demonstrate a series of features that can improve the educational experience: The first case shows the ability of 3DVE to provide information in a more engaging way by including non-player characters (NPCs) and some artificial intelligence (AI). The second case adds communication, collaboration, and environmental simulation. Finally, the third case advances the simulation to a more interactive task and also shows how the 3DVE experience can be customized and integrated within a special web page.
In the following sections, we begin with a review of some related work, then continue to the general structure of our framework and the particular structure and results of three case studies. Finally, we will provide a discussion and some concluding remarks.
Eysenbach et al. (2004) have argued that the advantages and disadvantages of using virtual communities for health and education still need to be studied. This point is also raised by some other researchers such as Demiris (2006 and 2008) and shows the need for further studies on the functionality required for the educational use of 3DVEs. Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) is a 3DVE that has been widely used for social, educational, and commercial purposes. Boulos et al. (2007) have provided a good review of potential uses of Second Life and other 3D virtual environments for health and medical education. They argue that 3D environments provide an immersive, realistic experience that can combine communication, entertainment, training, and access to a variety of data types. Callaghan et al. (2009) also report the use of Second Life for technology education. They notice the need for some simplifications (for example in teaching engineering equipments) which can be a problem but also mention partial integration with a content management system, Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) which is a considerable advantage. Danilicheva et al. (2009) explore the educational values of 3D virtual worlds but from a storytelling point of view. Their work points to the value of artificial intelligence and also uses stereoscopic 3D to increase immersiveness. The common conclusion seems to be that virtual communities may provide a more flexible and accessible learning experience, empower users (students, professionals, patients, etc.), and enhance coordination of education/care services.
Issues with Second Life and similar products mentioned by these and other researchers include limited ability for scripting and artificial intelligence (used for NPCs and events), difficult integration with other tools, lack of web-based operation and spatial 3D voice, and inconvenient business models for users. Unity (http://www.unity3d.com) is a 3D game engine with growing popularity that addresses some of these issues but still doesn't provide proper integration with other applications (e.g., the containing web page), spatial voice, user customizable avatars, measurement tools, and some other features. Web.alive tries to address some of these issues as discussed in the next section.
Virtual Framework
Carleton Virtual
Carleton Virtual (CV) is a 3D educational virtual environment developed by researchers at Carleton University and built using support from Avaya (http://www.avaya.com) and its web.alive technology (http://www.avayalive.com), itself based on Unreal Engine (http://www.unrealtechnology.com). The research group (including faculty and graduate and undergraduate students) initially reviewed and tested major alternatives for 3DVEs including Second Life, OpenSim, Wonderland, Unity, and some in-house solutions, then established a partnership with Avaya to provide the base technology, servers, and technical support. The researchers then developed the base campus and also specific elements for three courses as pilot projects (the case studies presented in this paper). The research group consists of technical members (faculty and research assistants for system design, content creation, scripting, etc.) and educational members (faculty and teaching assistants for the course design).
As shown in Figure 1, CV provides spaces for lectures, presentations, collaboration, social interaction, and special activities. Figure 2 captures some views of the virtual environment that was designed to resemble the actual Carleton University campus. The design keeps some of the characteristic features and elements of the campus but allows modifications to improve the space usage and customize it for the virtual activities. Current implementation of CV includes only the main "quad" area of the university campus. The quad consists of a recreational area with a library, main administrative building, one academic tower, and two smaller buildings. The actual Carleton University campus is much bigger and is not fully implemented in CV. The quad area buildings are also significantly simplified in CV. On the other hand, a new gallery building, native village, and dig site are added. Researchers from the School of Architecture helped design the CV environment.
Figure 1. General structure of Carleton Virtual
Figure 2. Sample views: top left, general campus area; top right, classroom; bottom, virtual excavation site
The content presentation is done through surfaces (screens) that can show videos, images, presentation files (supporting Powerpoint and PDF), and real-time web pages. This allows instructors and other participants to easily access content and update it in real time while in the environment. The system also allows 3D spatial audio. The sound level can be independent of distance (e.g., for speakers in the lecture hall) or change based on avatars' distance (for local talks). At any time, users can know who can hear them and can control different audio features such as temporary mute. Different "areas" in the environment can be defined to simplify environmental control (e.g. setting up private meetings in a room with restricted access only for a group of users) and behavioral monitoring (e.g. keeping track of users who enter a room, etc).
The same 3DVE can be integrated in and accessed through different web pages, which means each course can have its own customized interface with different information and interaction. Two levels of scripting support event creation and interaction: UnrealScript is useful for more expert developers when creating the 3D content, and Javascript is useful for less experienced users with some HTML/Javascript knowledge when embedding the 3DVE on a web page. Only a technical group with development access and specialized expertise can develop 3D content (using standard 3D software and Unreal Editor) and UnrealScript code. Typical end users (instructors) will need to coordinate with this group in order to make changes to the 3D environment.
General activities like lectures and collaboration involve tasks like presenting content in different forms, meetings, and social interaction. They are used in both case 2 and case 3. Special activities are those not commonly used by educators and students. The primary examples are the virtual dance and the excavation site discussed in cases 1 and 3. The unofficial PC-only prototype for CV can be publicly accessed at http://img.csit.carleton.ca/vcu.
Implementation with web.alive
The implementation of this solution is broken down into two parts: (1) CV content, and (2) Web.alive base. The content is a set of 3D assets generated using standard software tools and environmental controls such as events, triggers, scripts, and volumes, defined using the web.alive editor (which also serves as the tool to put together all the assets). Content development is done at system and course levels. The general CV system is designed for basic academic functionality by the technical members of the research team. Instructors then design their courses and the related tasks based on existing general features (like presentation space) or ask for specific features (like a dig site) to be developed for their courses. This development is done by the technical team with occasional support from the Avaya staff. Since the basic system design includes many required academic features such as communication, presentation, and submission, it is expected that many new courses will not need extra content and can be developed by the instructors with minimal technical support.
Web.alive technology is based on the Unreal Engine by Epic Games (http://www.unrealtechnology.com). It embeds the Unreal Engine within a web-based product and adds a series of commonly needed features such as web integration, security and user authentication, and measurement and inspection tools. At this time, web.alive supports PC and Mac but no mobile devices. Web.alive content is located on special servers that can be run by Avaya or by content owners. For the purpose of this research project, we used servers provided by Avaya as in-kind support.
One of the strengths of web.alive technology is instrumentation and measurement. An overview of the telemetric instrumentation and data collection tools in web.alive is beyond the scope of this paper as they were not widely used in the presented cases. Using web.alive's analytic tools, we can browse through encounters of each user, view conversations that occurred within the environment, observe traffic and conversation patterns based on the interactive heat-map tool, and much more.
Figure 3. Example of conversation influence on active duration (left) and heat-map (right)
For example, using the heat-map tool we are able to observe the influence of conversation on active duration within the environment (Figure 3). As indicated by the graph, those users who did not actively participate in conversation within the environment during the pilot window were far more likely to idle or leave the environment. This is an excellent indicator of the importance of encouraging user participation in conversation during learning sessions. We can also see the distribution of logins to the environment both daily and hourly. What is most important to note from this type of data is that users not only enter the environment for the specific task, but also enter and spend time at other points, likely to collaborate with others and practice their simulations. Other available analyses allow us to identify those that were most active in encouraging participation from others, and the most popular actions and locations within the environment (through heat-map).
Virtual Powwow
Native dance is an inseparable part of First Nations' culture, and understanding it is necessary for relating to this culture and preserving its heritage. The study of First Nations' culture, including their music and dance styles, has received considerable attention from both the aboriginal community and other scholars. Recently, with the growth and popularity of the Internet, some dedicated websites have provided invaluable content for those who wish to learn about these subjects. But digital and interactive technologies are more than a means to collect content on the web. New media present new possibilities for understanding, presenting, and preserving any type of information, and these possibilities have not been fully utilized for First Nations' cultural heritage. As part of a graduate research project before the development of Carleton Virtual, we developed Virtual Powwow (VP) using the state of the art in multimedia and human-computer interaction to add a new dimension to the way we understand and enjoy native dance.
VP allows users to experience an authentic powwow online, interact with it (get closer, pause, and look from different points of view), study the movement in details, and get extra information in a variety of formats including text, audio, and video. Photographs of native villages and dancers are used for modeling objects and clothes while the performances of real native dancers invited to a motion capture studio is used to create animation of virtual characters. VP was originally designed as a separate project using the Unity game engine (http://www.unity3D.com). After the development of CV, selections from VP were ported to CV to be used in possible courses. Integrated within the Carleton Virtual environment, the Virtual Powwow has become part of the virtual campus although it has no analogue in the physical campus. At this time the interaction between users and VP is limited to browsing the environment and starting/pausing the dance. Figure 4 shows some views of VP, and sample videos can be seen on the website: http://img.csit.carleton.ca/vpow. It has links to original Unity-based 3DVE and sample videos; for example: http://img.csit.carleton.ca/vpow/GrassDance-July-22-08.wmv.
Figure 4. Virtual Powwow at Carleton Virtual
Pedagogical motivation
VP can be a significant educational tool for any course that deals with native dance styles, from North American history to arts and culture. Although the native community has always respected and preserved its traditions to the best of its abilities, and a considerable number of scholars have done valuable research on this preservation, advances in multimedia hardware and software have not been fully utilized in this regard. For instance, Native Dance (http://www.NativeDance.ca) and Native Drums (http://www.NativeDrums.ca) are two websites supported by Carleton University that provide a wealth of information on these subjects. However, they are still collections of texts, images, and traditional audio/video recordings. New media and interactive digital technologies provide more holistic tools to understand native dance. Certain native dances have been studied by a few scholars and researchers. Detailed analyses of movements and styles are extremely limited, especially those using new technology. Franz Boas (1944) was one of the pioneers in such studies. Gertrude Kurath (1986) produced the most detailed native dance studies. Her studies of native dance for Iroquois nations (Kurath 2000) combine the musical information with her own notation system for recording dance moves and choreography. Kurath's notation consists of ground plan, choreography, and music, as shown in Figure 5. Kurath's primary movements are mostly limited to lower body steps. Her notation does not provide enough details for proper understanding of dance styles, especially without a video recording.
Figure 5. Example of Kurath's notation. Dance cycle is shown using special symbols, and the music is written around it.
Unfortunately, more recent works do not provide more detailed (or quantitative) analysis for native dance (Wright-McLeod 2005). Those accompanied by videos try to address this shortcoming but are limited by the quality and point of view of the video.
Using VP, instructors and students can interact with authentic virtual native dancers, browse through a native village, and learn about First Nation's' art and culture in a way that wasn't possible otherwise except by attending occasional ceremonies on expensive and difficult field trips.
During the pilot phase of CV, ten graduate students (mostly from engineering programs) in an introductory course on Interactive Media and Digital Art were asked to compare four different media types (books, videos, multimedia websites, and virtual environments) for the common task of finding information on native dance styles. They were instructed to use books and videos available in the university library, the native-dance.ca website, and the VP environment in Carleton Virtual. The students were given a series of evaluation criteria but were also told to add other criteria if they found the given set lacking. The purpose of the task was to understand the role of features of digital media compared to more traditional ways of accessing data. The native dance was only chosen as an example because information about it was available in different media types.
Learning Outcomes Observed
Overall, the results show that a 3DVE such as VP can provide significant learning potential that makes it a strong candidate for a learning space. The assessments were done on a five-point Likert scale, where the students evaluated each media type using a set of criteria, as shown in Table 1 (average values).
Table 1. Comparing Media Types for Native Dance Study
Multimedia web
3DVE
Evaluation based on Criteria Given to Students
Access to different types of info
Level of engagement
Overall pleasantness
Evaluation based on Extra Criteria suggested by some participants
Memorability
The students found 3DVE the most pleasant and engaging method but it received lower scores for access to different types of info and ease of use. As mentioned by some students, the type of information available on VP was limited not because of the medium itself but mainly because textual information has not been implemented in VP yet. As the next two cases show, the 3DVE method can easily be integrated within a website or have built-in textual parts such as notice boards, presentation surfaces, and interactive submission tools. On the other hand, the ease of use may remain an issue for some users and for some types of data as it is a more complex navigation system compared to other methods, although it will be easier with practice. This was also confirmed by some students.
Student reflection
Most students believed that a multimedia website was the easiest way for finding different types of information. These are excerpts from students' comments submitted along with their numeric assessments:
"Websites with text and video scored the highest for the ease of use and ability to access categories."
"Comparison table shows that websites with text and audio are still the best way to research compared to books, videos and the virtual Powwow environment."
At the same time, some students found face-to-face or video easier (not necessarily with better access to different types of information):
"Videos are very easy to have short and fast idea about anything you want."
"Videos is the best method regarding ease of use because it is just one click and you are already watching a powwow dance live on your device. Websites and books needs more navigation and searching to see the dance you want, although it is not that difficult to do so, searching for a video of specific dance is still easier"
"Person to person learning is the easiest form of learning in my option."
"People can obviously search their knowledge quite rapidly."
3DVE was generally considered the most engaging and pleasant medium, but some students still thought the traditional methods were valuable:
"This virtual environment has better level of engagement because it's like a game you go inside this virtual word and walk for different side of this word and see whatever you want. As a result you feel better with virtual pow-wow as a source of information than other sources because you enjoy and collect information about your research."
"Person to person communication was rated the most engaging."
"The Books option had the lowest ratings comparing to other media, even though I personally still enjoy reading books."
Some observations made by participants included options we did not consider in the task, as well as limitations to the current 3DVE system which can be improved:
"E-books should be added to this comparison as they provide a new alternative with advantages of traditional books and websites."
"The VP environment does not provide enough information at this time but has the potential of embedding more."
"The VP environment is not easy to use for some users but will be after proper training."
"Watching virtual dance was as pleasant as watching the video but the Internet speed reduces the pleasantness a little bit."
"Virtual environments were rated mediocre since they vary from poor to good. It is likely that in the future virtual environments will make it easier to find information."
The course was not about native dance styles, and understanding them was not the real objective of the course. Consequently, the task was only one short assignment within a course related to interactive technologies and digital art which included many other tasks not related to this paper. Compared to other case studies, this case was relatively small and included simpler and shorter tasks for students. It should be mentioned that the VP itself was a big project including many features that were not necessarily used in these tasks.
Language Case
The current trend toward "hybrid" or "blended" learning in post-secondary education is driven by the ever increasing access to various modes of technology, student familiarity with these technologies and changes in learner attitudes towards learning. Today's tech-savvy students want more choices in education delivery as a result of different learning styles, work and study schedules, and access to new technologies. For language learners, computers and internet technologies can provide exciting new opportunities but require careful planning, collaboration, time and some technical know-how on the part of the teacher. In the language case, we investigate the use of CV for a language-learning scenario. Initially the teacher, who had no prior gaming experience and was a novice to 3D immersive environments, was hesitant to design and pilot a task, but she was keen to experiment with this new learning platform and motivated by the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from other departments.
Designing 3D learning scenarios and tasks requires collaboration with experienced technical and educational designers—a design team. After several frustrating attempts at designing a language-learning task for CV in isolation, the teacher took the opportunity to experience the environment with one of the 3D technical designers who demonstrated the many benefits of the environment, including classrooms, collaboration surfaces, and synchronous voice and movement. This hands-on experience helped the teacher conceptualize the types of language-learning tasks and opportunities best suited to this type of learning environment. The team then focused on designing learning scenarios that might not otherwise be possible in a traditional language classroom. The teacher's initial frustration was likely caused by trying to replicate tasks used in a traditional language classroom. The challenge now was to create a learning scenario or task late in the term that might help motivate and engage this particular group of learners.
Teaching English as a Second Language for Academic Purposes (ESLA) to international students can be pedagogically challenging at the best of times as some students easily become disenchanted or unmotivated and have difficulty appreciating the value of the course, especially toward the end of term. Traditional classroom tasks attempt to promote collaboration and critical thinking through group work and careful task design, but too often are overshadowed by teacher-talk and instruction. Consequently, any method of delivery that might engage and motivate students was worth pursuing. Further, any context or task that that might promote oral interaction and opportunities to speak, collaborate, and negotiate by its very nature should produce rich opportunities for language use and production—something the classroom was not necessarily providing at this point in the term. Intuitively, using CV as a learning environment might lead to increased language proficiency and accuracy.
This pilot project was designed so that students and teacher from an ESLA class could explore a learning opportunity in a 3D immersive environment. It made use of the existing Carleton Virtual framework, which provided participants with a unique opportunity to practice interacting with classmates and teacher using a common linguistic reference (English) in a risk-free environment. CV allowed students to collaborate at their convenience in a space that replicated the Carleton campus library and other buildings but that was mutually convenient to the participants in terms of time and accessibility. In particular, students were encouraged to meet in any of the ten designated library rooms, and final presentations were held in a replicated auditorium.
This project was piloted with an advanced ESLA class. To begin, students were introduced to the concept of online learning and virtual worlds and learning environments through several related sources (Ally 2008; Augar et al. 2004; Sweeney 2008; Vickers 2010). These reading and listening sources were assigned during regular class time and for homework. Corresponding tasks were designed to help students develop an initial understanding of the issues and challenges associated with learning in a virtual or online environment. For example, in-class activities alerted students to the advantages and disadvantages of online and 3D immersive learning, and identified some basic learning theories. In-class activities included debating pros and cons, comparing traditional to 3D learning contexts, and using specific learning examples to describe the benefits of immersive learning. Additionally and through specific exercises, these readings and activities helped to establish some academic and topic-related vocabulary such as "virtual," "theory," "participate," "environment," "communicate," and "immersive." Students later attended a virtual workshop wherein they were to have experienced first-hand the CV environment. Unfortunately, students were not able to log in as actual users due to an unexpected "plug-in" issue in the school's lab; however, workshop facilitators were able to demonstrate how the avatars moved around and the different physical meeting spaces within the virtual environment on personal laptops.
Next, students were given the actual task. This consisted of a choice between a more traditional group research project and presentation or a virtual group research project and presentation. Student groups then had the choice to compare either two nongovernmental organizations or two virtual learning platforms. These subtopics were related to the broader course themes of sustainable development and eLearning. Students who chose the traditional group presentation had to arrange their group meetings on campus, and the final group presentation took place during a regularly scheduled class time. Alternatively, students in the virtual groups were required to meet, collaborate, research, and present exclusively in Carleton Virtual at a mutually suitable time. During the course of this task, students were encouraged to reflect upon and keep notes on any experiences (actual or anticipated) and try to articulate on any apprehensions about learning in a 3D environment. Group presentations, traditional and virtual, were evaluated as part of the final grade.
The five virtual groups had 3-4 students each. Each group was required to meet at least three hours per week for the duration of the course (two weeks) and once more just prior to the presentation. Groups met in designated meeting rooms in the CV library in order to collaborate on the research, prepare the slides, and practice the group oral presentation. The teacher held virtual office hours each week and randomly joined the groups to troubleshoot and to verify that groups were on task and working in the target language.
The final group presentations were made on stage in one of the simulated university auditoriums. Members of the other virtual and non-virtual groups attended the live presentations. Participants, the teacher, and a member of the research team logged in from their homes to either present or listen.
Figure 6. Student in CV library interacting with NPC
Figure 7. Students interacting in CV library room. For each avatar, name and sound volume can be presented in a small box over the avatar.
Tools and functions within Carleton Virtual
Understandably, the ultimate success of a virtual learning task depends not only on the actual task design, but largely on the environment and the tools available within the immersive environment. As CV physically replicates the Carleton University campus, tools available to users are similar to those that students depend on normally to accomplish their academic assignments. The additional bonus is this environment gives students the flexibility to work from home and at any time. For instance, in each of the library study rooms, students can use either of the two available collaborative surfaces to jointly access content from the Internet and/or upload files from a shared drop box. While these tools are available in traditional working environments, what makes this experience unique is that the students can perform from home and under the persona of their avatar.
The option to personalize their own avatar was appealing to many students as they could choose to alter such avatar traits as hair, skin and eye color, clothing, height and weight, and even gender. This simple act of representing oneself somewhat fictitiously (through a personalized avatar) generated spontaneous language production and even humor as group members commented on each other's changing appearance from day to day. Students liked the "game-like" scenario and had fun using the avatar options. Further, students appeared to take advantage of the relative anonymity of their avatars to take risks with their language without the worry of being judged by their teacher or classmates as in a traditional classroom setting.
We observed an increase in learner oral interaction and collaboration through real-time voice and movement. Students actively communicated with each other using a USB headset, easily maneuvered their avatars with four keyboard keys, and made use of some of the nine basic gestures like a hand wave, head nod, clap, and bow. In comparison, Second Life was found to be more tedious in terms of user-ease. The number of movement options and gestures, landing areas, and presence of random avatars was overwhelming. The interaction was mostly confusing, language of interaction varied, and many avatars did not engage or were inappropriately dressed for an academic learning context.
Figure 8. Student oral presentation in auditorium
Perhaps our most exciting observation was how some student groups embraced this opportunity with new-found enthusiasm and energy (this project was introduced towards the end of term when motivation was beginning to wane); this enthusiasm translated into professional and well-executed group oral presentations. Not only did several groups pull off strong content in their slide presentations, but they had clearly practiced their presentation "etiquette" as evidenced by their stage presence, authentic and "true-to-life" mannerisms, and well-timed delivery. Some student groups also demonstrated great pride and care as substantiated by their carefully groomed avatars.
In addition to apparent increased levels of motivation and task engagement, we observed that some learners appeared less reticent about presenting to other non-native speakers and actually demonstrated more initiative and problem solving skills than had been observed during group work situations in the traditional classroom. In one instance, a student became the group leader and quite outspoken, a complete contrast to this student's typical classroom demeanor.
The 3D environment appeared to generate excitement and gave students the freedom, flexibility, and autonomy that ultimately motivated them to work more collaboratively in a fun, risk-free environment—a gaming environment in which many of them participated easily as experienced "gamers." Consequently they felt comfortable manipulating and moving around this new learning space, perhaps more so than moving around the traditional language classroom.
It is important to note that this task was executed and piloted during a very short period of time and at the end of term. The teacher and students were all new to 3D environments and had no previous gaming experience. Yet preliminary teacher observations suggest that ESLA learners might benefit from alternative learning environments like CV because they are fun, autonomous, and relevant, providing the task is challenging and generates opportunities for language production. Historically, language and immersion are mutually complimentary terms. Intuitively, 3D immersive environments could be exciting new venues for exploring future language teaching and learning initiatives.
As part of the presentation, student groups were asked to reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of collaborating and presenting in CV. While student feedback was generally positive, there were some challenges. Overall, learners liked this unique and interesting learning opportunity and commented on how it was more active and attractive to people in their generation, who like and are at ease with technology. Students liked the fact that communication was easy, synchronous, and more similar to face-to-face communication than other learning platforms common to them. Students commented on the ability to integrate other web-based resources like web renderer (a screen that allows real-time web access in virtual environment). Challenges included technology and internet access, which were not always compatible or working. Students also commented on a lack of privacy in the environment and lack of eye contact or body language, which might be particularly challenging for students with poorer oral communication skills.
We believe this context for learning has tremendous potential as a possible alternative to, but most certainly an extension of, the traditional language classroom. Environments like CV provide alternatives to the traditional language classroom that some students might find beneficial because they permit students to experiment with new roles as they form their own learning communities in a safe environment. This pilot describes just one possible scenario for language learning in 3D immersive environments. Task design should promote interaction and communication through role-play, exploration, information quests, and so on. CV provides a physical space wherein students practice and use the target language with other students and native speakers.
Archaeology Case
The truth-value of archaeology is not self-evident. There is a huge gulf between the primary data and the "final" interpretation. The training of archaeologists typically takes place in North America within the confines of academic archaeology. In that context, students' experience of archaeology tends to be short summer field experiences. We are loath to allow students to get their hands on real archaeology because the available time, money, and resources are too limited to allow our students to make mistakes. There is of course more to archaeology than simply field work, but even in those cases there is a reluctance to allow students to actually work with the materials, to make mistakes. In some institutions, it is entirely possible to graduate with a degree in archaeology without ever having spent more than two weeks doing field work (Graham, personal experience). Yet, by some estimations, the typical student only ever takes in about 10% of a lecture—a 5,000 word lecture distills in the student's notes to a mere 500 words (Johnstone and Su 1994). This kind of teaching/learning has been disparaged as "one tape recorder talking to another" (Foreman et al. 2004, p. 52).
The prototype immersive archaeological experience is built on the results of a 2003 excavation conducted by Shawn Graham (Carleton University) and Andrea Bradley (Institute for Field Archaeologists, UK) in Shawville, Quebec (Bibliographie de l'inventaire des sites archéologiques du Québec MCCQ 3453, rapport inédit). That excavation was conducted in the context of a community revitalization project and was designed to introduce high school students to their community's heritage as a summer field school in archaeology. The site was the Armstrong Brickyards, an industrial heritage site. A heritage park was proposed for the site, the "Armstrong Heritage Farm," which covers an area of ca. 37 acres in Lot 6, Range 6 of Clarendon Township. The village of Shawville is notable in Quebec for its ethnic makeup of primarily Irish Protestants. Shawville sits on clay beds left over from the Champlain Sea; these clay beds were the source for a thriving brick industry in the late nineteenth century. One brickyard belonging to G. F. Hodgins was situated south of the village; another, belonging to the Armstrong family, was situated to the east on Lot 6. All surface traces of this brickyard have long since been erased. The excavation was directed with the intention of discovering the functional layout and extent of this brickyard on the property slated for development. We took the results of that excavation and simulated one of the 2m x 2m trenches in the web.alive environment, creating soil layers, features, and artifacts in their relative correct positionings. The video below shows how the simulation works and what kinds of interactivity can be performed there.
Online multi-user archaeological simulations do exist. The University of North Dakota uses a stand-alone text-based simulation of the village of Like-a-Fishhook (Slator 2001). In Second Life, archaeological themes occur frequently (Graham 2007). An example with archaeological implications is Vassar College's recreation of the Sistine Chapel (http://www.vassar.edu/headlines/2007/sistine-chapel.html). The Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (http://www.pkap.org/) has used Second Life as a place to organize the logistics of their excavations, while the "Remixing Çatalhöyük" project (http://okapi.wordpress.com/2007/04/07/constructing-knowledge-virtual-places/) (Morgan 2009) uses it to understand the architectural layout of that city and the social life lived within it. None of these simulations, though, recreates the logic of excavation or allows the user to interact with the basic building blocks of archaeological knowledge creation.
In our initial assessment of the excavation, we wanted to explore whether or not the system made sense intuitively—if, in interacting with it, some appreciation of how archaeological knowledge is created was developed. A second aim was to understand how engaging it was and what worked or did not work for the students in this regard. Archaeology in the "'real world"' is often compelling due to its romantic or mysterious nature, its social context of practice. While often decried, this romanticism is a major factor in maintaining interest in what is a physically and mentally tedious process. In the "'doing'" of archaeology, the social aspect, the conversations, that surround the process are formative in the development of understanding (Wilkinson 2007). Accordingly, we encouraged the students to 'talk aloud' throughout their interaction with the excavation and with each other.
None of the student volunteers had any archaeological experience aside from one introductory lecture on archaeological landscapes. The students were divided into two groups. One group was introduced immediately to the 3D simulation; the other group interacted with a 2D simulation developed by the Friends of Bonnechere Parks (http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Spirits/English/Dig/digdown.html). The 2D simulation was selected for comparison as it is a well-developed example of archaeological outreach and a teaching tool expressly meant to address the same issues as our own prototype.
Both groups of students were given graphing paper and recording sheets and instructed to talk aloud as they sought to understand what the site they were looking at represented. Afterward, they were asked to complete a questionnaire that reproduced the questions asked by Getchell et al. (2007), which detailed a similar experiment, in order to enable cross-project comparability. These questions were assessed on a five-point Likert scale, where the respondents indicated their degree of agreement with various statements, as shown in Tables 2 and 3.
Figure 9. Student interacting with a dig site (top), and extra information provided about items on the web page containing the 3DVE (bottom). Interaction between the page and 3DVE is done through Javascript.
Game world environments are not designed with the intention that the players or participants can make substantial changes to the underlying simulated geomorphology. The initial problem then was to work out how to translate the metaphors of archaeology—layers, contexts—into three-dimensional manipulables within a world not meant to allow the manipulation of the underlying geomorphology. In essence, to allow users to dig down, we had to build up. We translated each excavated context into an object within the web.alive environment. Each context was then positioned to match the x,y, and z relationships observed in the real-world excavation. Artifact models were created and positioned within the appropriate context. Each artifact model was linked to a web page giving a basic physical description of the artifact. Each of these information pages contained links to archaeological databases, catalogues, or other secondary sources. Each context contained a trigger to cause it to "'melt away"' to simulate the careful removal of the soil. A trigger positioned outside the excavation would, when pressed, overlay a horizontal grid on the excavation to allow users to measure and plot the positioning of contexts and artifacts. Finally, a browser window was provided near the excavation site to allow users to perform web-based research from within the simulation.
The questions and answers for 2D and 3D tools are shown in Table 2. The same questions were used for both tools. The answers ranged from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. The data in each column show the number of participants who selected the corresponding answer.
Table 2. Questions and Answers for 2D and 3D Tools (Click to Enlarge)
The prompt to "think aloud" seemed to generate a good deal of critical reflection among the participants. The 3D environment provided tangible feedback in a way that the 2D simulation did not (could not?). The students felt that the "'basics'" of archaeology were well enough conveyed by both simulations, but they certainly were more excited by the 3D world.
[On the quality of interaction with the 2D world] "Measured it at i6 at the grid – probably the most exciting part, recording what you've found"
"[The simulations] really convey the idea that archaeology is systematic and organized. You get the different tools, you get the brush, and I think what the [simulation] is trying to say, to argue, is that 'this is how it's done'. It might be boring for us as undergrad students to be clicking brush, trowel over and over again but for a younger student I think it's good for them to see that this is the process of archaeology and all the steps are important."
Some students felt that the 3D environment was more "dangerous" in that if they interacted with it in the wrong way, things could break:
Student A: "I can see [B] jumping up and down, but it's like he's in a swimming pool of archaeology. "
Student B: "I'm trapped under one of the contexts!"
Rather than seeing this as a design flaw, in discussion among themselves, they felt that it could in fact be a feature if it were tied to the logic of excavation—if, for instance, one dug too deeply too quickly, maybe the site would collapse (a real danger in real-world archaeology); or if one "ripped out" artifacts (that is, clicked on artifacts visible in lower levels, even though the overlying contexts had not yet been removed), one could damage the artifact and lose the information. Unprompted, they had stumbled into an understanding of why looting matters.
"There needs to be some sort of danger, because, if you're just clicking wildly, you could clear the site quickly but maybe if you had to take your time, you can crawl underneath layers and remove them before the top layers so something needed to stop that, some sort of 'uh oh you damaged the artifact' if you go about things the wrong way . . . gravity [to allow collapse]"
The students were directed to work out what the site represented. With that minimal instruction, the students would position their avatars at different points of the compass so as to get a camera view of the excavation from all angles, directing each other over the voice channel of where to stand. Then, they'd discuss how things looked from their particular point of view in order to record relationships.
"It might be really hard for you to see, cause the avatars can't really see down like that; come around over here, yeah, doesn't really look like a smoking pipe but that's what it says . . . "
This was in reaction to the default setting for their avatars to restrict the camera angle (the view downward), and this restriction actually promoted a kind of emergent group solution. Finally, the students reflected on how they would improve the 3D simulation:
"I think it would've been nice if there'd been more choice, if there'd been more to uncover, because the dig starts, and there's already something there, something uncovered [in the initial state of the simulation, the topsoil is already removed] it would've been very interesting, if as aspiring archaeologists we could've looked at the landscape and chosen our site, decided where to dig based on land formations or what we were told in the lectures . . . we would be able to decide a bit, 'oh we want to dig here, or we want to dig there' as we've learned that's part of the process."
These results can be considered no more than anecdotal, of course. However, by focusing our design on engagement, we seem to be reaching our initial group of use-testers at the level that we desired. The design of the simulation and the affordances of immersive virtual experience seem to be promoting the kind of emergent learning about archaeology that we should wish to promote to a wider public. When things broke in the excavation, or the students pursued a blind alley, they could hit the "reset" switch and start again. It was safe to fail, and thus promoted exploratory and constructivist learning. Both kinds of simulation had their strengths and weaknesses (see table 2), but the 3D simulation seemed to elicit stronger agreement from our use testers when asked if it helped develop understanding; it also seemed to be a better environment for fostering group learning.
While our results cannot be considered quantitative, they do demonstrate ways in which this particular 3DVE can promote accessible learning. Web-based design, scripting and customization, 3D spatial sound, AI and NPCs, and various other features allow the proposed 3DVE to provide a useful, effective, and affective framework for academic activities, communication and collaboration, simulation, and presentation.
The first case demonstrates the ability of 3DVE to provide information in a more engaging way including NPCs and some AI. The second case adds communication, collaboration, and environmental simulation. Finally, the third case advances the simulation to a more interactive task and also shows how the 3DVE experience can be customized and integrated within a special web page.
As the case studies indicate, 3DVEs on their own may not offer a full alternative for other learning tools, but when carefully designed with an eye toward the affordances of the technology, they can supplement other forms of pedagogical practice. Lack of real face-to-face communication, learning curve and usage difficulty for many users, and hardware and software requirements are among the barriers to more wide-spread use of 3DVEs. Although they may provide a less expensive solution compared to setting up physical facilities, 3DVEs still involve development costs and skills not available easily and affordably in some cases. Simulating more complex tasks (such as those involving fluids and complicated machines or those requiring realistic human expressions) are also challenging while advances are rapidly made toward making them possible. Additional research is needed to develop proper evaluation criteria and perform more detailed qualitative and quantitative studies on functionality and usability of 3DVEs.
Ally, Mohamed. 2008. "Foundations of educational theory for online education, development and delivery." In The theory and practice of online learning, edited by Terry Anderson and Fathi Elloumi, 15-44. Athabasca, AB: Athabasca University Press. OCLC 226999285.
Augar, Naomi, Ruth Raitman, and Wanlei Zhou. 2004. "From E-learning to Virtual Learning Community: Bridging the Gap." Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3143: 301-308. Springer-Verlag. OCLC 764380182.
Boas, Franz, and Franziska Boas. 1944. "Dance and Music in the Life of the Northwest Coast Indians of North America (Kwakiutl)." In The Function of Dance in Human Society: A Seminar Directed by Franziska Boas, 5-19., Chicago, IL: Princeton Book Co. OCLC 81413796.
Boulos , Maged N Kamel, Lee Hetherington, Steve Wheeler. 2007. "Second Life: An Overview of the Potential of 3-D Virtual Worlds in Medical and Health Education." Health Information and Libraries Journal 24: 233- 245. OCLC 437527110.
Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. 2001. "Knowledge and Organization: A Social-Practice Perspective." Organization Science 12: 198- 213. OCLC 484548146.
Callaghan, Michael, Kerri McCusker, and Jim Harkin. 2009. "Teaching Engineering Education Using Virtual Worlds and Virtual Learning Environments." International Conference on Advances in Computing, Control, and Telecommunication Technologies. Trivandrum, Kerala, India, December 28-29.
Danilicheva, Polina, Stanislav Klimenko, Yuri Baturin, and Alexander Serebrov. 2009. "Education in Virtual Worlds: Virtual Storytelling." International Conference on CyberWorlds. Bradford, UK, September 7-11.
Demiris, George. 2005. "Virtual Communities in Health Care." StudFuzz 184: 121-122. OCLC 210093149.
———. 2006. "The Diffusion of Virtual Communities in Health Care: Concepts and Challenges." Patient Education and Counseling 62: 178- 188. OCLC 442286007.
Eysenbach, Gunther, John Powell, Marina Englesakis, Carlos Rizo, and Anita Stern. 2004. "Health Related Virtual Communities and Electronic Support Groups: Systematic Review of the Effects of Online Peer to Peer Interactions." BMJ 328:1166. OCLC 195748799.
Foreman, Joel, James Paul Gee, J. C. Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky, and Ben Sawyer. 2004. "Game-Based Learning: How to Delight and Instruct in the 21st Century." EDUCAUSE Review 39 (5)50-66. OCLC 107970252.
Graham, Shawn. 2007. "Second Lives: Online Worlds for Archaeological Teaching and Research: Linden Labs, Second Life, www.secondlife.com." Special Reviews Section, European Journal of Archaeology10(1):77-79. OCLC 4658297828.
Getchell, Kristopher. 2007. "Evaluating Exploratory Learning in Lava." Sixth IASTED International Conference on Web Based Learning. Chamonix, France, March 14-16.
Johnstone, Alex and Wy Su. 1994. "Lectures: A Learning Experience?" Education in Chemistry 31 (3): 75-79. ISSN 0013-1350.
Kurath, Gertrude Prokosch. 1986. Half a Century of Dance Research: Essays By Gertrude Kurath. Flagstaff: Cross Cultural Dance Resources. OCLC 15428099.
———. 2000. Iroquois Music and Dance: Ceremonial Arts of Two Seneca Longhouses. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc. OCLC 611995743.
Morgan, Colleen. 2009. "(Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing Virtual Reality in Archaeology." Archaeologies 5 (3): 468-487. OCLC 471892437.
Slator, Brian. 2001. "Teaching with Immersive Virtual Archaeology." Paper presented at the Seventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia, Berkeley, CA, USA, Oct 25-27.
Sweeney, Breen. 2008. "Mathematics in a Virtual World: How the Immersive Environment of Second Life Can Facilitate the Learning of Mathematics and Other Subjects." Proceedings of Researching Learning in Virtual Environments Conference. Milton Keynes, UK, November 20-21.
Vickers, Howard. 2010. "VirtualQuests: Dialogic Language Learning with 3D Virtual Worlds." CORELL: Computer Resources for Language Learning 3: 75-81. ISSN 1988-1746.
Wilkinson, David. 2007. "Writing Archaeology and Writing Fiction." The London Archaeologist 65: 14-15. ISSN 0024-5984.
Wright-McLeod, Brian. 2005. The Encyclopedia of Native Music: More than a Century of Recordings from Wax Cylinder to the Internet. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. OCLC 56880467.
Ali Arya has received a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic, Iran, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada. With years of experience in industry as a software engineer and project manager, and also research and teaching positions in various academic institutions, since 2006 Ali has been with the School of Information Technology, Carleton University, Canada, where he is an Associate Professor of Interactive Multimedia. His research interests include Computer Graphics and Animation, Computer Games and Virtual Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Art, and Educational Technologies. Ali's research has been funded by National Science and Engineering Research Council, Social Science and Humanities Research Council, Ontario Centres of Excellence, and industrial partners. Ali is senior member of IEEE, a member of ACM, and on the editorial board and technical committees of various journals and conferences in the areas related to his research.
Peggy Hartwick is an Instructor at Carleton University and holds a Master of Arts in Applied Language Studies. She is currently pursuing a Graduate level diploma in Educational Technology. As an experienced language teacher, Peggy develops educational programs and tests, and specializes in English for Academic Purposes. Her main focus is on developing oral communication and academic writing and research skills. She is passionate about creating and executing blended courses using traditional, online, and virtual teaching environments. Peggy's current research interests are centered on 3D virtual learning environments, which provide exciting teaching and learning contexts.
Shawn Graham, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of History at Carleton University, is a Roman archaeologist who uses simulations, agent based modeling, and network analyses to explore ancient history. He has taught at all levels from high school to adult continuing education. His publications have brought together digital media for teaching and learning, and research in history and archaeology.
Nuket Nowlan has a Master of Engineering in Technology Innovation Management (TIM) from Carleton University (Canada) and a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Boğaziçi Üniversitesi (Turkey). Ms. Nowlan is an experienced project manager and has overseen many immersive virtual world research projects including Tipontia (Ronald McDonald House, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario), Persephone (Algonquin College, Ottawa, Ontario) and Carleton Virtual (Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario). Currently, Nuket is the technical advisor for Algonquin College's 3D immersive campus project. She is the founder of the company called 3D Virtual Crafting.
MyDante: An Online Environment for Contemplative and Collaborative Reading
Frank Ambrosio, Georgetown University
William Garr, Georgetown University
Eddie Maloney, Georgetown University
Theresa Schlafly, Georgetown University
This paper explores the tensions between individual and collaborative aspects of reading in the context of MyDante, a digital environment for the study of Dante's Divine Comedy. We provide a view into the long-standing pedagogical experiment we have undertaken to integrate the MyDante site into an undergraduate philosophy course. The site and its usage in the course have gone through several iterations, raising many questions along the way about how the site can best improve the students' learning experience. In this paper, we highlight some of these questions, present findings from focus groups with students who have used the site, and explore how awareness of these issues can itself enhance the effectiveness of the site for teaching and learning. We consider the implications of these findings for the development of two new projects: first, a public version of the MyDante site, and secondly, a new tool called Ellipsis, which is a customizable version of the software underlying MyDante. We find some resonances with larger questions about digital reading environments and the act of reading.
"It's probably natural, here in the 21st century, to fret over the future of literature – to worry that, in an era in which everyone wants everything to be social and interactive, serious reading will be impossible. Yet books are curious objects: their strength is to be both intensely private and intensely social – and marginalia is a natural bridge between these two states. It might end up serving equally well as a bridge between online and literary culture, between focus and distraction: a point of contact that could improve both without hurting either. Digital technology, rather than destroying the tradition of marginalia, could actually help us return it to its gloriously social 18th-century roots."
–Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine1
Today, in what can be seen as a transitional time and space for reading practices, readers are defining new ways of interacting with texts using new media, from collaborative online bookmarking sites to digital annotation tools for e-readers and more. In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, critic Sam Anderson discusses the seeming contradictions between the personal and social natures of the act of reading, and explores the ways that digital technology can mediate between these two different ways of interacting with texts. Anderson's ideas resonate deeply with our MyDante project, which is a digital environment developed at Georgetown University for the study of Dante's Divine Comedy. In many respects, MyDante was designed with the goal of creating a space for the mediation of personal and social reading practices, an interaction that is part of what we will define as contemplative reading—a method of reading, inspired by the metaphor of the medieval illuminated manuscript, that is both personal and socially collaborative. We propose that exploring the capacity of online reading environments to encourage contemplative reading represents an important approach to understanding how new media can redefine the way we interact with texts. Like Anderson, we do not consider social reading and personal reflection on a text to be mutually exclusive; rather, we propose that, in the appropriate context, these can and should be complementary facets of the reading process. A reading environment can foster individual immersion, developing the reader's connection to the text; by connecting that reader to a reality that is shared by other readers, it can also strengthen his or her sense of a communal worldview of human culture. We believe that MyDante is such an environment.2
What follows is a view into the longstanding pedagogical experiment we have undertaken to integrate the MyDante site into an undergraduate philosophy course. The site and its usage in the course have gone through several iterations, raising many questions along the way about how the site can best improve the students' learning experience and encourage contemplative reading strategies and practices. In this paper, we highlight some of these questions and explore how awareness of these issues can itself enhance the effectiveness of the site for teaching and learning. After an overview of the project background and context, we describe the findings from focus groups and surveys about how students used the MyDante site. We then present some lessons learned from this process and possible implications for future development.
Figure 1. The MyDante homepage (dante.georgetown.edu)
Project Background and Goals3
The MyDante project began in 2000 with the primary aim of providing students with a contemplative space in which to engage with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, specifically within the context of the undergraduate philosophy class Dante and the Christian Imagination at Georgetown University. Rather than prioritizing reading and research, as many of the existing online versions of the Comedy did, the MyDante project was designed from the beginning to enable students to understand the text through their interaction with it, their reflection on it, and their engagement with their peers around it. Inspired by the model of the medieval illuminated manuscript, we wanted students to see the text of Dante's poem as a palimpsest, as a place where their ideas and their writing could share the same space as the poem—where they could engage with and rethink the poem by connecting annotations, images, and sounds to the text, just as medieval monks might have done through marginalia and illuminations. As a technology of contemplation, the medieval manuscript was embedded in the communal structures of monastic living, so that a monk would share the fruits of his individual study of a text with other members of the community. Similarly, we hoped that MyDante could help students to benefit from one another's reflections on the text.
As Anderson describes, marginalia in a context such as that of MyDante can facilitate both the personal, reflective aspect of reading and its collaborative, social nature. We created and continue to develop a variety of tools, such as an annotation tool, a journaling tool, and a multimedia editor, to encourage students to interact with the poem and to share their ideas with others. MyDante was designed to encourage deeply personal reflection while at the same time fostering scholarly collaboration focused on the text.
The contemplative reading method
While Anderson refers generally to "serious reading," what we wanted to encourage in particular was an approach that we call "contemplative reading." In the context of Dante's Comedy, practicing contemplative reading requires the reader to accept Dante's invitation to join a shared journey. To read the poem contemplatively, the reader must recognize three levels of meaning simultaneously at work in Dante's text: the literal level of comprehension of the narrative, the metaphorical level of allegorical meaning, and the reflective level of dialogue between the poet and reader.
As explained in the MyDante site's guide to contemplative reading practice:
In order to understand Dante's poetic metaphors, each reader must participate in them personally and in a way which is genuinely contemplative. This contemplative reading goes beyond the literal meaning, and even beyond the traditional allegorical or interpreted meaning, to apply every possibility of meaning contained in the text to the reader's own life and identity.
In further detail, this method of reading asks students to reflect on the following questions at each level of interpretation. (These questions are presented in the site materials and are also discussed in class.)
At the first level—the literal level—these questions cover basic information about the poem's characters and events, and can be summarized by the question "Who is Dante the Pilgrim?"
At the second level—the metaphorical level—the questions refer to choices made by Dante the Poet, and how Dante the Poet is both the same as and different from Dante the Pilgrim. For example, in Inferno XXVI, we ask: "Why does the poet choose to have the pilgrim meet Ulysses? Why here? Why are we given this story of the end of Ulysses' life, when the story of the Trojan horse is much more famous? In other words, how does the poet consciously construct Ulysses as metaphor?" These questions can be generally represented by the question "Who is Dante the poet? What is he trying so hard to tell me?"
At the third level—the reflective level—there is a kind of dialogue between poet and reader. In the context of this dialogue, the reader must ask "Who am I?" Ultimately, the reader recognizes him- or herself in Dante's journey, making this truly the "journey of our life," as Dante writes in the first line of his poem (nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita).
The MyDante site was designed to encourage contemplative reading in a number of ways. Students can annotate the text of the poem, which helps them to work through the first two levels of interpretation, both individually and collaboratively. Personal journals, where students practice moving among the three interpretive levels, are integrated directly into the site. The site includes a diverse collection of images, including not only illustrations of Dante's poem but also other works of art that resonate thematically with the poem. These images can help spark students' reflections. Students can place images from the site's image gallery within the text, as well as finding or creating additional images and placing them in the text. Commentary by the professor helps to guide students in interpretation at the three different levels. In the fall of 2009, we introduced multimedia projects, asking students to assemble images, video, and music into reflective journal entries.4 In the fall of 2011, we added a series of scaffolded multimedia assignments that ask students to work more gradually with individual multimedia elements before taking on the larger-scale multimedia project.
Figure 2. Canto V with Guide and Audio of Canto V in Italian
Contemplative reading and multimedia technology
The marriage of multimedia technology and the practice of contemplative reading led to the following specific goals for MyDante. We have already described the first two:
To encourage imaginative connective thinking by presenting multimedia elements such as images, videos, and music in juxtaposition with Dante's text, and to inspire students to add their own multimedia materials to the text.
Through the contemplative reading method presented on the site, to foster a sense of personal responsibility for each student with respect to his or her relationship to Dante's text.
The final two goals involve enhancing the collaborative aspects of MyDante and expanding the reach of the project to include public use on a separate version of the site.
Through the collaborative nature of the site, to develop a communal dialogue among reflective readers outside of the classroom. This community could extend to anyone interested in reading Dante's work as part of a larger social group.
Finally, a longer-term goal emerged: to develop a flexible version of the software underlying MyDante that could be customized for any text. This tool, currently in development, is called Ellipsis; to learn more about Ellipsis, see the box below.
EllipsisThroughout its history, the MyDante project has had a number of technical incarnations. In its development, we have always striven to create a site that offers the greatest possible flexibility in how its various functions can be used for instruction. As much as possible, we wanted the site to become a place where an instructor could create compelling interactions with the poem and with readers.The current MyDante website is implemented in a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. The Ruby programming language is particularly well suited to a programming strategy called "Domain Specific Languages." In this strategy, a layer of code is written to translate simple, declarative statements into the actual application code. This custom "language," which may be applicable only to the current problem domain, collapses the conceptual distance between the description of a problem and its execution. We feel that this approach is particularly powerful for the design of educational interfaces. It offers the potential to allow non-programmers to shape users' interactions for certain purposes—for example, to create interactions that facilitate deeper reading and analysis of texts. While there are a great many "plug-and-play" tools available to instructors via the web, most share the limitation that they were designed for only a handful of uses and cannot be easily customized to other purposes. While code "mashups," combining functions and content from different web sources, are becoming more ubiquitous and easier to implement, they often become just one more discrete piece of functionality in an instructor's toolkit, rather than allowing an instructor to build an immersive environment entirely customized for the idiosyncratic needs of a particular text and/or a particular pedagogy applied to that text.We are currently building this more flexible type of web application to design environments for teaching and learning. We call it "Ellipsis." Its purpose is to make texts in various media into centers of scholarly activity on the web. Ellipsis could be used in a wide variety of pedagogical contexts; possible uses could include peer review of student writing, annotation of film clips, and collaboration among students at different institutions. By giving instructors and instructional technologists a tool for easily crafting interactions, we hope to create an instructional culture where the design of interactivity is another tool for expressing both the instructor's intent and the students' evolving understanding of a work.To learn more about Ellipsis, watch this video.
Creating a reflective community outside the classroom
Our goal of developing a community of readers stemmed from several factors: first, the logistical reason that face-to-face class meetings do not allow for sufficient discussion and representation of all students' voices. Second, we hoped that collaborative features developed for use in the Georgetown course would help us create a public community of readers outside of the course context, whose members would not meet face-to-face. Third, as discussed above, we wanted to explore the possibilities of using online environments to guide a reading process that could be at once communal and reflective.
Each year, the MyDante site has continued to play an integral part in the undergraduate philosophy course at Georgetown, and we are exploring partnerships with other institutions. In early 2011, we piloted a collaborative project with Regis High School in New York, where a small group of students used the site in an advanced English class. We hope to establish similar partnerships with other institutions in the future.
We are developing a public version of the site that is open to anyone. Readers will not only be able to use the site for individual study, but will be also able to interact with other readers of Dante through the site. We aim to support a virtual community of Dante readers by bringing together scholars, students, teachers, and independent readers from across the world. As part of the process of developing a diverse virtual community, we decided to examine the nature of the interaction among the students who use the site at Georgetown, in order to inform our design of structures that will encourage interaction among the members of the public site.
Furthermore, we believe that the conceptual foundation of MyDante holds great potential for the study of a wide range of texts. For example, a project is currently in development using Ellipsis to design an environment for the scholarly study of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, a text that differs significantly from the Divine Comedy in form. Although based on the framework of MyDante, the Proust Project environment is very different in appearance and structure – for example, interpretive multimedia animations will be a significant element of the Proust environment.5 With both projects, we hope to show that the technologies and reading practices we have developed and modeled over the years are transferable to a wide range of texts and learning experiences.
Analysis: Student Learning With MyDante
Course context
MyDante is primarily used in Philosophy 276: Dante and the Christian Imagination, an undergraduate course taught at Georgetown University. The course, which enrolls about twenty-five students each fall, focuses on Dante's Divine Comedy. Students may read the text of the poem either in hard copy or electronically on the site. Students are required to keep online journals that include "required" entries responding to specific prompts as well as "free" entries on topics of their choosing. Beginning in the fall of 2011, students were required to incorporate images and music into some of their journal entries. Other contributions on the site, such as annotations, discussion board posts, and the placement of images and music within the text, count toward students' class participation grades. Journal entries can either be designated as "private" (visible only to the author, instructor, and teaching assistant) or published so that all members of the class workspace can view them.
The site includes videos that introduce conceptual material, such as this video that orients the viewer to Dante's worldview. In recent years, we have recorded lectures delivered during class sessions using the lecture capture software Camtasia Relay. In addition to making these recordings available to students to review or catch up on missed classes, we have created independent modules both by excerpting audio clips from the recordings and by combining audio clips with related images. (For example, we developed a video and resource page that highlights a painting by Masaccio.) Some of these modules specifically address the concept of contemplative reading or model the use of that approach. Students are assigned to view these modules before class meetings. Thus, discussions can begin at a higher level because students have already covered the introductory material on their own, and more class time can be devoted to interactive discussion than to lecture.
How students use the site
We regularly gather information through mid-semester and end-of-semester surveys about how students use the site. After the fall of 2010, we decided to explore students' experiences with the site in more detail by conducting focus groups. In addition to asking for their opinions about various features of the site in order to improve technical support resources, we wanted to gauge students' overall conceptions of the site. The findings from these surveys and focus groups will not only help us to refine certain technical and design aspects of the current MyDante site, but will also inform the way the site is integrated into the course structure. Furthermore, as we continue to work on the public MyDante site and Ellipsis, our understanding of how students use the current MyDante site will play a key role in our development and design process.
The interpretation of data from the surveys and focus groups requires caution. With an enrollment of fewer than thirty students each semester, the class does not allow for a large sample size, and the participation rate in both the surveys and the focus groups (which were open to the entire class, but optional) is always less than 100%. Of the 27 students enrolled in the course in the fall of 2010, 23 students completed the mid-semester survey, and 12 completed the end-of-semester survey; 7 students participated in focus groups. Furthermore, it is difficult to draw conclusions about certain website features or assignments by looking across class years because of the number of additional variables – changing assignments, varying class dynamics, differing backgrounds of students, etc.
We have nonetheless found these results to be useful in a number of ways. For example, hearing directly from students about how they use the site has been informative. End-of-semester evaluations and focus groups can surface questions or problems that students may be reluctant to voice during the semester. We also find that students often offer interesting suggestions for future site developments.
Our findings from the surveys and the focus groups included the following:
Students developed a variety of methods for using the site to interact with the poem, demonstrating idiosyncratic reading preferences and habits.
For example, one student reported that she would first read a section of the poem in the hard copy text, then read the alternate translation online, finding this "double reading" process a useful way to compare translations. Another student would read the text on the MyDante site while listening to the Italian recording available on the site. Other students preferred to read the hard copy of the text exclusively, later transferring selected handwritten notes to the site as digital annotations. One student voiced a strong preference for "old-fashioned book reading for true engagement with a text," rather than reading on the website.
Students valued the way the site encouraged individual reflection.
As one student put it: "I actually liked the site because it was so personal." When asked in the end-of-semester survey whether they would continue to use the site after the class ended, 50% of respondents said that they planned to continue to return to the site for personal reasons. In the focus groups, one student elaborated: "I may choose to access the website as a means of personal reflection."
Journaling helped students engage with the poem.
When asked which components of the class were most helpful in understanding and practicing contemplative reading, one student wrote: "Journals were the most helpful as they provided a space in which to clarify our understanding of the material." In response to the statement "Doing the journal entries helped me to refine and develop my own understanding of the poem" on the mid-semester survey, 61% of respondents selected "strongly agree" and 35% selected "somewhat agree;" in response to the same statement on the end-of-semester survey, 75% of respondents selected "strongly agree," with another 25% selecting "somewhat agree."
Some students expressed the desire for more interaction with peers on the site.
One student said, "I like the idea of a more collaborative space. [I would say the site is] primarily being used as an individual space, but it could have been used as a more collaborative space." Another student voiced a similar opinion: "Upon reflection I think that it does a good job for me as an individual using it, with making journal entries and annotations, but as a collaborative effort it could be made better." Another student wrote: "I would like to see students encouraged more to use the discussion board feature. It often felt to me as though discussions were being alluded to in the annotations, but students very rarely took advantage of the discussion board to actually delve into their questions." In the end-of-semester survey, only one respondent found the discussion board to be "very useful," and no students reported finding it "extremely useful." The respondents were uneven in their ratings of how useful they found "reading annotations by other students" (On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 corresponding to "not useful at all" and 5 corresponding to "extremely useful," the responses were as follows: 1: 25%, 2: 8%, 3: 33%, 4: 33%, and 5: 0%.)
Some students felt uncomfortable initiating interactions or seemed unsure how to do so.
A number of students echoed this sentiment. For example: "Some way to encourage discussion over annotation would be neat. I did find it intellectually stimulating to see the differences in thought." According to another student: "If there were more people commenting on the discussion board, I think I would have been more inclined. I don't like being the first to post."
The site provided a useful way to migrate certain activities online, freeing up class time for discussions or more advanced treatment of the material.
Students wanted more of this—moving some discussions from class time into the discussion board space and building on online discussions during class time. According to one student: "Sometimes in class the discussion would've been better had it been on the site." Another student wrote: "I'd be interested, especially if there are spots generating a lot of interest, to hear the professor comment on those discussions, either in class or online."
Although anecdotal, these findings represent in many ways the tension inherent to an environment such as MyDante. How can the site meet the needs of individualized, personal reflection while simultaneously encouraging productive collaboration and interaction? While there is no easy or definitive answer to this question, the student responses helped to raise our awareness of a number of the factors that play into this balance between the individual and collaborative aspects of the site.
Groups of students differ; online interaction cannot be taken for granted.
In the fall of 2009, the students in the MyDante course eagerly took to the site's online discussion board. For example, after only four class sessions, a student's 1,250-word post entitled "Why the Catholic Cosmos?" had elicited more than 1,700 words of comments by five classmates. Posting to the discussion board was voluntary, although all work on the site contributed in a general way to students' participation grades.The discussion board was introduced in a similar way to the students in the fall of 2010; however, it was almost never used, despite several reminders from the professor and teaching assistant. It is impossible to identify the exact reasons for this difference, and the possible factors are many – for example, the fall 2009 students might have been more accustomed to using discussion boards in other classes, or they might have known each other better and thus felt more comfortable interacting online – but the important lesson for us was that this type of interaction cannot be taken for granted.
Demonstrating features in class and providing support materials online is not sufficient to inspire students to use these features.
Even though students were passively familiar with certain features of the site and recognized their potential usefulness or found them interesting in the abstract, they did not always take the initiative to try these features or to incorporate these aspects of the site into their reading. For example, many students noted in the surveys or focus groups that the discussion board had not been used much and wished that it had been more active. These comments prove that students were aware of the discussion board and saw value in its potential as an interactive space. However, individually they failed to initiate (or even respond to) posts – what one student termed "a collective action problem."Similarly, a feature that allows students to add their own images was little utilized until a series of assignments in the fall of 2011 required each student to add an image, and then later to "illuminate" and annotate a particular canto. Once they had completed the required image post, we found that students freely posted images outside of specific assignments to do so.
Incentives for online participation should be presented; otherwise, students may fall into traditional individual reading habits.
Several students noted that they didn't see the point of making digital annotations rather than, or in addition to, making pen-and-paper notes in their hard copies of the text. Making these annotations easier to search and sort would have made this process more appealing and feel less like "busywork," as one student in a focus group described his or her perception of annotations. Additionally, while it was possible for students to respond to one another's annotations on the discussion board, in practice this feature was not used frequently. A more robust notification system would have made this option more prominent on the site and helped to integrate it into students' reading practices, even when they were progressing through the text at varying paces.
Students want structured guidelines for site participation.
As one student pointed out in the end-of-course survey, "the mandatory nature of the [journal entries] versus the other optional tools made [them] more useful." In the focus group, one student commented: "I've had to do structured class discussions for other classes, and think it could have more prominent place on MyDante site. I think it's hard for students to opt in to a discussion, and I like the freedom, but when given the choice, students are going to do other [work]. Maybe prompted discussions on [the] website would be good."
We hypothesize that requiring a certain number of posts, and scaffolding these posts with specific prompts early in the semester, will help students develop the habit of posting, which will likely result in participation on the site becoming more integrated with their reading process.
Although the site was useful in shifting certain activities outside of class time, this could have been done even more.
Students liked the fact that some material was available to preview (or review) outside of class time, elevating the level of class discussions. They suggested that some tangential class discussions could be moved to the discussion board so as to make better use of class time. More explicit connections between class discussions and work done by the students on the site would have further encouraged contributions, and therefore interaction, on the site.
Current and future development
In the fall of 2011, we implemented several changes to the structure of the course assignments. Early in the semester, each student was required to post an image and to write a short journal entry about the image's resonance with the poem (the image could not be a literal depiction of the Commedia). Students were required to post on the discussion board before and after viewing assigned films outside of class. Each student was assigned one or two cantos to annotate and illuminate, by adding images or music. Finally, students were required to include images and/or music in a journal entry preceding the multimedia journal assignment, as a way to scaffold the larger-scale multimedia assignment.
Preliminary feedback from students on these new assignments, via in-class remarks and in a brief mid-semester survey, seems positive. In many cases, the student work so far seems to demonstrate a high degree of engagement with the text and with the process of contemplative reading. Images and annotations posted by students on the site have enhanced some of the class discussions. Scaffolding the multimedia assignments seems to have helped the students to become more comfortable in practicing contemplative reading through reflection with multimedia elements. Further evaluation of the new assignment structure will take place following the completion of the semester.
Figure 3. As part of the series of multimedia assignments, a student posted this image that he had created. Student annotations are also visible in the margin of the text. (Image by Kieran Raval)
Our analysis of the focus groups and survey data will continue to inform our integration of the MyDante site into future iterations of Philosophy 276. We will also need to consider carefully the implications of these findings for the public version of MyDante and for the Proust Project, as well as for future applications of the MyDante methodology, as these contexts present further challenges for fostering and sustaining collaborative reading communities.
We plan to develop a notification system to alert students (via email and/or dashboard announcements within the site) when someone has commented on their posts or when someone has commented on the same passage of text. Even within the framework of the course, where students were following the same reading syllabus, students often missed one another's posts because they were reading at different paces. We hope that making students aware of responses to their posts will encourage additional dialogue and collaboration.
Public site and Ellipsis
Users of the public MyDante site, who will represent a wide range of goals and backgrounds, will be separated both by time and distance without face-to-face contact (in most cases). Users of the site may be independent scholars and researchers who are unaffiliated with any formal program of study. We must consider what kinds of structures might encourage their sustained participation on the site, though we want to avoid imposing too many constraints.
Ellipsis offers incredible flexibility for the customization of workspaces; however, this means that careful consideration must be given to the consistency of structures designed to encourage collaboration. The hallmark of Ellipsis is the relative ease with which faculty members can customize environments for teaching and learning. However, rather than presenting an array of choices that could be overwhelming, we want to guide faculty toward structures that will help them achieve particular teaching goals. Awareness of some of the questions raised by MyDante will help inform this design process.
While some of the lessons we learned pertain directly to the classroom context, such as students' desire for more structured requirements for posting, these lessons may still be relevant for the public site. For example, while we would hardly be able to require independent users of the public site to post a certain number of times, we might find a way to offer intermittent reminders about posting. Or we might explore whether a site moderator should comment on users' posts, and assess whether receiving such feedback would inspire users to post more frequently.
Some version of the notification system we are developing for the class site will prove even more crucial for the public site as readers will certainly be progressing through a text at widely varying rates. Similarly, students may use Ellipsis to share comments on different texts or to collaborate across courses or institutions, and would no doubt benefit from a notification system as well.
MyDante strikes a delicate balance between individual and collaborative reading experiences. This tension is not unique to this project, however; nor is it as recent as the advent of digital technology. As critic Sam Anderson points out in his New York Times piece, books themselves are "both intensely private and intensely social."6 Anderson sees the practice of marginalia as a possible bridge not only between these two seemingly contradictory aspects of reading, but also between traditional literary culture and the participatory culture popularized by the tools of the digital age.
Anderson compares the process of creating marginalia to the act of meditation, describing it as "a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane."7 He describes the pleasure of sharing marginalia with other readers through physical copies of books, and then explores the possibility of a digital tool that would allow readers to share marginalia, with its "social thrill of shared immersion," in what he calls "an endless virtual book club" that would include not only friends and classmates but also historical authors and other notable figures. He writes: "This, it seems to me, would be something like a readerly utopia. It could even (if we want to get all grand and optimistic) turn out to be a Gutenberg-style revolution – not for writing, this time, but for reading."8
MyDante encourages readers to practice what we have called contemplative reading by engaging in a personal dialogue with Dante. Our hope is that by doing so within the context of a virtual community, readers will be able to experience what Anderson calls the "social thrill of shared immersion." As our longstanding experiment with MyDante has progressed, our methods of integrating pedagogy and technology have continued to evolve.
We see this project as having great value beyond Dante and Proust. The technology's extensibility and transferability are two of its greatest assets. More importantly, however, we hope that this project and future iterations will show not only what is possible with the technology and framework we have created but also the value of developing a deliberate, contemplative reading practice in relation to digital texts. We believe that these methods can be applied to a wide range of reading contexts, bringing us all closer, if not to "readerly utopia," then at least to an experience of a dialogical community of reflection on the shared experience of human living. This is, we hope, the message and the value of the project to the Digital Humanities.
Ambrosio, Frank, William Garr, Edward Maloney, and Theresa Schlafly. "MyDante and Ellipsis: Defining the User's Role in a Virtual Reading Community" presented at the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale International Conference 2009: Cultural Heritage on line. Empowering users: an active role for user communities, 2009. http://www.rinascimento-digitale.it/conference2009-papersandslides.phtml.
Anderson, Sam. "'What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text'." The New York Times, March 4, 2011, sec. Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06Riff-t.html.
Frank Ambrosio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Doctor of Liberal Studies Program at Georgetown University.
William Garr is the Assistant Director of Research and Development at Georgetown University's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.
Eddie Maloney is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University and the Managing Director and Director of Research and Development at Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship.
Theresa Schlafly is a Writer/Editor and Project Manager at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University.
Sam Anderson, "What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text," New York Times Magazine, March 6, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/magazine/06Riff-t.html. ↩
The authors would like to thank the students who graciously shared their work and opinions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the valuable contributions of Leanne McWatters, Susannah Nadler, Yong Lee, and John Ladd. ↩
An earlier version of this material was presented at the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale Cultural Heritage Online conference in December 2009. Frank Ambrosio, William Garr, Edward Maloney, and Theresa Schlafly, "MyDante and Ellipsis: Defining the User's Role in a Virtual Reading Community" (poster presentation at the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale International Conference 2009: Cultural Heritage Online, http://www.rinascimento-digitale.it/conference2009-papersandslides.phtml). ↩
Many students responded quite creatively to this assignment. For example, one student used his digital story project to reflect on "Dante's influence on contemporary society and how his teachings relate today through music, art, and other images." Another student composed an original piece of music to depict the first canto of the poem: https://commons.georgetown.edu/blogs/mydante/2011/05/25/igor-german-multimedia-project/ ↩
The Proust Project represents a collaboration with Andrew Sobanet and Susanna Lee of the Department of French at Georgetown University. ↩
Anderson, "What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text." ↩
Ibid. ↩