Participating on More Equal Terms?

This chapter investigates the potential effects of unequal power relations on participation in a group of student teachers and invited professionals in two collaborative workshops in Second Life. The basic research enquiry addresses whether the relative anonymity afforded by virtual world environments has an effect on established power structures, thereby empowering relatively powerless language learners to more active participation than would be the case in more traditional learning set-ups. The data includes recordings, group reflections, and individual questionnaires. Participation was examined from the aspects of floor space, turn length, and utterance functions, and complemented with student reflections. The results show that the differences of floor space and turn length between the invited professionals and the students were small. The invited professionals did more conversational management than the students, while the students performed more supportive speech acts. No major gender differences in participation were found. There was, however, considerable individual variation.

Collaborative Archaeology, Social Justice, and Digital Heritage in Rosewood

In Chapter 6 González-Tennant discusses ongoing experimentation with new media technology to make historical research accessible to a wider public. The mixed-methods approach González-Tennant describes in earlier chapters continues through a discussion of the ways digital technologies are changing public outreach. González-Tennant describes the use of virtual-world environments, digital storytelling, and the Internet to translate academic research into public knowledge. The use of these emerging technologies is framed within a collaborative practice, and their use in Rosewood demonstrates how such approaches facilitate new engagements between archaeologists and stakeholders. The use of these technologies occurred in response to engagement with survivors, descendants, and their advocates. It has also produced engagements with property owners in Rosewood and other interested members of the public in Levy County and beyond.

A cyber-threat analytic model for autonomous detection of virtual property theft

Purpose The purpose of this study is to provide a framework to detect and prevent virtual property theft in virtual world environments. The issue of virtual property theft is a serious problem which has ramifications in both the real and virtual world. Virtual world users invest a considerable amount of time, effort and often money to collect virtual property, only to have them stolen by thieves. Many virtual property thefts go undetected and often only discovered after the incident has occurred. Design/methodology/approach This paper presents the design of an autonomic detection framework to identify virtual property theft at two key stages: account intrusion and virtual property trades. Account intrusion is an unauthorized user attempting to gain access to an account and unauthorized virtual property trades are trading of items between two users which exhibit theft characteristics. Findings Initial tests of this framework on a synthetic data set show an 80 per cent detection rate. This framework allows virtual world developers to tailor and extend it to suit their specific requirements. It provides an effective way of detecting virtual property theft while being low maintenance, user friendly and cost effective. Originality/value To the author’s knowledge, there is no detection framework, system or tool that works on virtual property theft detection in virtual world environments without access to authentic virtual world data or attack data (because of privacy issues and unwillingness of virtual world environments companies to collaborate). The topic of virtual property theft, lack of existing labelled data sets, user anonymity, size of virtual world environments data sets and privacy issues with virtual world companies and a number of other critical factors distinguish this paper from previous studies.

Ethics in Virtual World Environments Research

With increased use of virtual worlds in education, training, military, arts, engineering, architecture, astronomy, medical, physical sciences, and many other fields, research in the field of distributed virtual world simulation environments has increased manifold in the last decade. This astounding growth has motivated us to think seriously about issues related to ethics in such research. Awareness of ethical issues is not only a responsibility of the researcher conducting research in virtual worlds, but also for ethics committees and institutional review board members. In this chapter we provide an overview of the past and current research attempting to identify ethics issues related to distributed virtual world simulation environments research. We raise questions related to virtual world research ethics that researcher and ethics committee members should ponder, and we provide several references for the reader to engage in thought provoking further study and discussion.

Meta-theoretic Assumptions and Bibliometric Evidence Assessment on 3-D Virtual Worlds as Collaborative Learning Ecosystems

Computer-supported online 3-D virtual world environments have been waxed and waned in interest and representativeness for supporting collaborative- and simulation-based practices. In a post-modern societal framework that requires inexpensive solutions for high-risk situations, research efforts in virtual worlds have developed a basis for understanding the use of virtual reality for multidisciplinary scenarios such as distance learning, training, therapy treatments, and social interaction. Complex relationships can be established simultaneously between several students functioning as integrated learning units using different media, and interacting with their physical environment in the context of real-world settings. In this sense, a recurrently updated research agenda for virtual worlds can characterize the current needs at a systematic way. This paper presents a meta-analysis of 35 publications to identify gaps and opportunities for research in collaborative three-dimensional environments based on content analysis. At a general perspective, there is a lack of established approaches to measure the influence and research potential of sociocultural factors in virtual worlds’ usage, autism spectrum and other healthcare-related settings, learning outcomes, content characteristics, task support for groups and crowds, and online data collection.

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games and Interaction

This current study examines the need for operational definitions of the concept of interaction in distance education studies. It is proposed that a discourse analysis of linguistic features conversation noted as being representative of interaction can be used to operationalize interaction in synchronous CMC. This study goes on compare two different registers: an internet chat register, and a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game register to explore the theoretical claim that such virtual world environments have higher levels of interaction. Overall findings exhibit that MMORPGs have higher amount of linguistic features characteristic of interaction. Evidence points to MMORPGs being more interactive and also supportive of collaborative interaction.

Review of Educational Research Methods in Desktop Virtual World Environments: Framing the Past to Provide Future Direction

This article describes educational research methodologies being used in the investigation and evaluation of desktop virtual world environments (DVWEs) as used to teach a variety of subjects in higher education. Ellis’ research framework on innovations (2005) and Reeves and Hedberg’s research goals (2003) were used as lenses to examine the state of educational research methods within DVWEs. An extensive search that resulted in 127 peer-reviewed papers chosen, was carried out to locate journal articles in the fields of educational technology, computer science and information systems, virtual reality/virtual worlds/gaming, science and health education, human-computer interaction, media and communications, psychology, social science, cognitive science, and library science. Results showed that while small scale research is common, research with broader goals (i.e. program evaluation, developmental research) is lacking.Implications include the need for signature developmental researchers to make their virtual world applications open source, and for DVWE researchers to explore collaborative research opportunities with postmodern, education researchers in order to shed more light on important issues of equity, gender, politics, and culture that impact education.