Session Name: | Serious Uses for Playful Worlds: A Case Study of the University of There |
Speaker(s): | Celia Pearce |
Company Name(s): | Georgia Institute of Technology |
Track / Format: | Serious Games Summit |
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Overview: |
This talk presents findings from a yearlong mixed-methods study, funded by the National Science Foundation, of the University of There (UOT), a player-run distributed learning community within the virtual world There.com. UOT is both a large-scale collaborative project and a learning environment within a virtual world originally designed as a social play space. Findings include: * Play creates conditions that Computer-Mediated Collaboration experts have found enhance collaboration * Players reported happiness as one of the motivations for their volunteer contribution * The play context allowed instructors to experiment emergently combine traditional classroom learning with well-tested teaching modes, such as situated and multi-modal learning * User-created worlds have cultures of constructionism (Bruckman) which make them learning communities by definition. |