Please fill in a summary of, or any points about, the talk or subsequent discussion that you wish to capture for the workshop report.

Virtual World Applications Discussion (Bruce Damer)

Discussion:

Bringing NASA Planetary Content into Virtual Worlds (Matt Hancher)

Discussion:

X3D and Networked Interoperability (Alan Hudson)

Discussion:

LUROVA "Edutainment (Ron Creel)

Discussion:

Content fidelity is an important aspect when the goal of the game is learning rather entertainment. Ron’s team has the requisite and unique content expertise for their game. Just as content matter expertise is requisite for design of a game world that maps on to targeted content, skills, and learning outcomes--game design expertise is requisite for design of a game that incorporates gameplay and structures a game system to support and motivate gameplay targeted toward player construction of targeted knowledge.  Ron and his team might consider adding experienced game designers to their team, along with staff that can mediate between the content experts and the game designers. In the event that budgetary constraints preclude partnering at this time for this particular project, it is important that the emerging fields targeting educational games and educational virtual worlds consider all the expertise required for viable educational game design. Teams must include content, game, and pedagogy expertise—as well as individuals with the expertise to broker/mediate/lead the team.

Ongoing work for the NASA Constellation Architecture Integration Team (Tom Cochrane)

Discussion:

Exploring a Toy Galaxy (Will Wright)

Discussion:

Will stressed that players want to own their gameplay experience. Will designs games that enable players to build mental models of important ideas. Models are approximations rather than perfect representations. When Will’s players come back to him and argue about his assumptions; Will considers that Will, the player, and even the game have won.

Games require large investments. The Spore user interface has required 10-20 rewrites of the system. There are now 100 people on the team, and the financial investment is greater than $30,000,000. Everything in the game is procedural, even the music.

During discussions subsequent to his talk, Will agreed that educational games require the same investment as his commercial games: 

Contemporary initiatives to specify and refined national/state/domain standards support a vision of educational game repositories. Educational games would be designed for topics that typically challenge and thwart learners. Game worlds would be analogs of targeted content/knowledge/skills. Gameplay would be designed to position learners to discover targeted knowledge by making, testing, and refining hypotheses about the game system. Game knowledge would be embodied knowledge, and, by design, it would be a viable analog of the targeted learning domain. Game goals would be designed so that gameplay positions players to construct that viable knowledge. According to Will, this characterization of game design (game worlds as analogs of targeted concepts that scaffold player’s emergent mental models through discovery) is obvious, but not necessarily realized or followed by game designers. This is because game design is a young field. The field of educational game design is even younger.

The repositories could manage and assess learner progress through game-based learning objectives. These games would be expensive to produce. The vision is for national (or global) investment by all sectors: education, business, governments, science, organizations, and industry. Participation by the game industry would leverage, for educational purposes, the great expertise and resources the industry has already accomplished.

The SciFair Model (Margaret Corbit)

Discussion:

Educational Application and Pedagogical Underpinnings of Virtual Worlds (Dan Laughlin)

Discussion:

Off-loading.

 Gavriel Salomon edited a volume  about distributed cognition that included discussion of the costs and benefits of off-loading (1997b). There, Roy Pea defined off-loading as process through which “mediating structures organize and constrain activity” (1997, p. 48). According to Salomon and Pea, off-loading is a component of a division of labor in which the other (whether machine, tool, person, environment, etc.) carries part of the cognitive load. The trade-off of off-loading is an increase in efficiency and accomplishment without concurrent increase in understanding. Salomon called this effect “deskilling” (p. 133). In contrast, environments (in our case, virtual environments) targeting learning might concentrate on tools that scaffold understanding and knowledge/skill growth. Pea had defined intelligence as “not a quality of the mind alone, but a product of the relation between mental structures and the tools of the intellect provided by culture” (1985, p. 168, as cited in Salomon, 1997a, p. 112). Pea called for “reflectively and intentionally distributed intelligence in education, where learners are inventors of distributed-intelligence-as-tool, rather than receivers of intelligence–as-substance” (Pea, 1997, p. 82). Speakers at the Ames Virtual Worlds workshop supported this participatory vision for game and virtual worlds. At the same time, designers of NASA’s virtual environments (such as those proposed by this workshop’s 2020 Vision breakout group) must carefully consider situations, learner/participant characteristics, and learning/participatory goals, to determine the parameters (e.g., when and for whom) under which aspects of the environment should off-load and/or scaffold.

References

Pea, R. D. (1997). Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 47-87). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Salomon, G. (1997a). No distribution without individuals' cognition: A dynamic interactional view. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations (pp. 111-138). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Salomon, G. (Ed.). (1997b). Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations. New York: Cambridge University Press.

K-20 Education: Distance Learning and Collaboration Using Second Life (Stan Trevena, Cathy Arreguin)

Discussion:

Exploring the Multiverse (Corey Bridges)

Discussion:

Opening the Universe (Khal Shariff)

Discussion:

The Lunar Racing Championship Game (Mary Duda)

Discussion:

From 2D to 3D web: The Science Center in Second Life (Rob Rothfarb)

Discussion:

Remote Telepresence for Exploring Virtual Worlds (Larry Smarr)

Discussion:

The 100Mpixel display demonstrated was truly fascinating. I think that the head-tracking system alluded to sounds very promising. Are there any plans for

a system that is both 3D, headset-free _and_ multi-person?

Why Open Protocols Matter (Christa Lopes)

Discussion:

Life After the Orphidnet (Rudy Rucker)

Discussion:

Rudy advised that we may be moving to a post-privacy world. Larry Smart had presented the session’s foundational talk and was sitting in Rudi’s audience. Larry agreed with Rudi, stating that privacy has been a 200-year anomaly due to the growth of cities. At this juncture, all stakeholders should pause to consider. Virtual world technologies enable humans to engineer the future. What metaphors and parameters would be most conducive to positive and optimal experience? Rather than passively accept what evolves, we should apply our greatest intelligence to this philosophical, ethical, and engineering opportunity. A post-privacy world? Perhaps. But let us first determine the efficacy and desirability of privacy. A disembodied future? Perhaps. But as humankind engineers the next reality and its evolution, consider the privilege of embodied experience.

How Virtual Worlds May Augment Collaboration (Henrik Bennetsen)

Discussion:

Living Beyond Ourselves: How the Next Crewed Mission to the Moon Could Transform the Way Humanity Experiences Life (George Whitesides)

Discussion:

Democratizing the Universe (Ed Lantz)

Discussion:

Shrinking Space: Designs for Augmented Exploration (Bob Ketner)

Discussion: