Design Scenarios for Virtual Worlds

Show your skills: visual portfolios for cooperation in virtual worlds
Design scenarios for digital identity and virtual worlds:
Steven Warburton, King’s College London, UK Margarita Perez Garcia, MENON Network EIGG, Be Applying design patterns series

Scenario case-study: MUVEnation programme

Teacher training in the use of virtual worlds for education
Field research about the use of virtual worlds for education
Background: MUVEnation – EU funded project with a twofold objective

240 participants for the introductory course
200 newbies and 40 experienced users of Second Life
107 participants admitted to the course
66 active participants, 9 months of intensive work
Participation figures

Peer to peer learning programme: Driven by cooperative and collaborative activities inside and outside of Second Life.

Our design problem: How to facilitate cooperative and collaborative activities between participants in a virtual space knowing that successful collaboration requires articulated knowledge about the skills and abilities that others bring to the team.

Q. What approach can we use to solve this problem? A. Use design patterns A design pattern captures expert knowledge derived from successful practice in a form that promotes creative as opposed to derivative use. Problem Solution Context

Design pattern: ‘ Wear your skills’ Release state: Beta Lead author: Nicole Schadewitz

Problem Potential collaborators need to know about each others skills and abilities to complete a certain task. The aim of this pattern is articulating skills among potential partners before a task in approached together.

Forces Potential collaborators might not know each other except from what they can see or read in the online environment. However, they consider collaborating to become more efficient in achieving a shared task or goal. How do they know what another person is able to contribute? Collaborators might have difficulties to establish the truth about advertised skills by another user using words only. The form of representation needs to agree with the skills and abilities that need to be represented.

Solution A user represents him or her and their abilities using their abilities. This shows indirectly proficiency in skills that might be required to achieve a certain task. The representation of your skills needs to fit the requirements that are sought by others to collaboratively solve a task or reach a goal.

Our design solution using the pattern ‘ Wear your skills’: Allocate each participant their own space (a sky platform) within the virtual world. Each individually owned space becomes a place for developing personal visual portfolios of skills and abilities.

Micro-challenges were used to drive the creation of visual portfolios e.g.
‘ Curating the digital self’
‘ Almost famous’
‘ SL tools exhibition’
A portfolio In Second Life can comprise: audio, video, text, images and scripted objects

1. Visual portfolios acted as a form of self-profiling 2. Participants were able to display abilities such as building, using in-world tools, scripting and design 3. Aided development of enhanced digital literacies 4. Successful in creating teams/groups that worked successfully together not only within SL but across the other learning environments used The results:

http://www.muvenation.org Find out more Design patterns Rhizome project - digital identity patterns: http://www.rhizomeproject.org Planet project – participatory pattern design: http://www.pattenlanguagenetwork.org Mor, Y., Warburton, S. and Winters, N. ( forthcoming 2010 ). Practical Design Patterns for Learning with Technology . Sense

http://1100051926.nvmodules.netvibes.com	10
http://muvenation-mh.blogspot.com	8
http://www.slideshare.net	2
http://1103760572.nvmodules.netvibes.com	1

Design Scenarios for Virtual Worlds

by Steven Warburton on Dec 12, 2009

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

4 Embeds 21

Statistics

Design Scenarios for Virtual Worlds Presentation Transcript