Virtual Worlds – SERIOUSLY

As previously mentioned here, last week I did a presentation at the Virtual Worlds project’s workshop “Augmenting Reality in the Public Domain”.

It was an interesting day with good discussions on amon other the constructions of the “serious” in serious games and serious virtual worlds. I deliberately turned my title around to “Virtual Worlds – SERIOUSLY” because I wanted to indicate that there exist many ways to engage with virtual worlds seriously. I also wanted to insert that the boundaries between what makes a virtual world and a serious game are not very clear. They might in fact become partially contained in each other.

In my talk, the focus was on assemblages of relationships between education and virtual worlds. As previously mentioned here, CarrieLynn Reinhard and I went to Singapore in June where we met up with representatives from the InfoComm Development Association and people from two schools working with various initiatives to engage with and construct virtual worlds for both educational and gaming purposes.

CarrieLynn’s presentation at the workshop introduced how the government in Singapore is thinking strategically in terms of virtual worlds for tourism, and my presentation was more focused on what seems to mark the Singaporean mergers between education and virtual worlds (with the limited knowledge we have). I supplemented this with a focus on my research following how a particular virtual universe Mingoville.com moves and becomes moved in and out of schools, homes and other contexts dealing with education ‘in the world’ (i.e. in Vietnam, Singapore, Finland, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Chile, Nigeria, China).

(Too) Briefly put, I suggested (and this is very much to be considered work in progress) that we are dealing with many different constructions of what it means to work seriously with virtual worlds (e.g.):

• Built/designed/structured around/for serious purposes with learning goals/purposes
• Used for serious purposes for learning goals / purposes
• The imaginary that learning transfer happens from the serious game/gaming/virtual world engagements to other situations.

Furthermore, I explicited three variations as examples of approaches to serious engagements in virtual worlds:

• Virtual worlds used for / engaged in  local/regional/periodic educational situations (e.g. secondlife.com and the Singaporean virtual world constructed for education and youth olympic games engagements. See CarrieLynn’s and my slides for examples and elaborations).
• Virtual world / learning environment developed locally (e.g. for a school) with more long-term serious aims (e.g. several examples can be found in Singapore’s Future Schools projects that merge serious games, virtual world elements and LMS/VLE elements).
• Serious games /virtual worlds developed for serious purposes with a broader scope/market (e.g. the world as market) and more broad educational aim – ‘educational oxygens’ (e.g. Mingoville.com and the Serious Games Interactive series). Those may include both shorter periodic activities and more long-term engagements.

These examples represent quite different ways to construct hybridities between serious games and virtual worlds, and how these can in various ways adress and become actors that augment different aspects of educational activities and thereby assist in solving/supporting various educational challenges in the world.

 I would love to get comments on my attempts to describe these matters.

PhD thesis and defense

Yihaa, I am defending my PhD thesis on 3 June 2010. See and download the announcement here at the Danish Association of Science and Technology Studies’ homepage. Hope to see you at the defense :-).

Download the thesis: Hansbøl, Mikala (2009) Researching Relationships between ICTs and Education: Suggestions for a Science ‘of’ Movements, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University

I just stumpled upon this fun blogpost about different ways to conduct PhD defenses in the world. This is actually kind of interesting.

Another incredible STS resource

I just want to share this link to another recent incredible STS resource. Here you will find an interesting debate about whether we can talk about the turn to ontology in STS?  The page includes links to the different speakers speaches as well as comments. Ï’ve really enjoyed reading these resources. You’ll find  STS people like Mike Lynch , Noortje Marres, Arie Rip, Ted Schatzki, Steve Brown, Geof Cooper, Mariam Fraser, Rosalind Gill, Alain Pottage, Brian Rappert, Paul Roth, Andy Stirling, and Sally Wyatt participating in the debate. Simply an incredible resource for anyone interested in STS as well as the concept of ontology and its multiple heterogeneous entanglements with STS researchers workings! 

One-day workshop “A turn to ontology?” arranged by the STS group at the James Martin Institute: http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/ontology/

Blackboxing

Blackboxing means backgrounding, making opaque, being invisible, taken-for-granted.

The tacit/silenced aspects of our everyday lives may be said to exist as black boxes. When opening black boxes (assuming here that they can be opened) we are questioning some-thing’s or some-one’s existence as such. Questioning how is it, that this/they/it becomes practiced as a natural, somewhat established and stabilizing aspect of everyday life?

Taking-’things’-out-of-the-black-box: Unfolding black boxes means trying to unfold the kinds of efforts put into the establishments of certain objects. E.g. ‘pioneers’ (in Danish: Ildsjæle) may be appointed in practice and no one may discuss these enrolments of particular persons as pioneers in practice. However, questioning the taken-for-grantedness and naturalization of the existence of such pioneers means (trying to) taking ‘pioneers’ out of the black box and investigating how pioneers enact and become enacted in practice. Questioning: what is a pioneer? How does someone become a pioneer? How are ‘pioneers’ done?

Another example could be cultural patterns of structuring learning, which we take for granted – like academic lessons and the age-segregation of learners in school. 

The black box is often referrred to in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-network Theory (ANT). When I use the term black box, I use it inspired by Latour:

“Objects that exist simply as objects, detached from a collective life, are unknown, buried in the ground… Real artifacts are always parts of institutions, trembling in their mixed status as mediators, mobilizing faraway lands and people, ready to become people or things, not knowing if they are composed of one or many, of a black box counting for one or of a labyrinth concealing multitudes…” (Pandoras Hope, Latour, 1999, p. 192-93 )

On-Line writings – Copyright

The online writings on this website may be cited or briefly quoted in line with the usual academic conventions. You may also copy or download them for your own personal use. However, the writings must not be published elsewhere (e.g. to mailing lists, bulletin boards etc.) without the author’s explicit permission.

Please note that if you copy my writings you must:

• include this copyright note

• you should observe the conventions of academic citation in a version of the following form:

e.g. Hansbøl, Mikala: “Blackboxing”, published at Mikala’s Klumme – A researcher’s blog: http://mikalasklumme.wordpress.com/2007/11/21/blackboxing/ . Version 11th December 2007. 

Internet as culture and cultural artifact

Christine Hine (2000) stresses that the Internet is both culture and a cultural artifact.

”The meaningfulness of the technology does not exist before the uses themselves, but is worked out at the time of use. At the same time, making the use of the Internet meaningful involves representing it to others as valuable in recognizable ways.” (Hine, 2000, p.29)

Hine’s approach means taking a turn away from looking at technologies as such – as mere static tools with certain predescribable meaning and purpose. Instead it becomes as important to look at how technologies become enacted in practice as how practices are performed with technologies.  

Hine, Christine (2000):  Virtual ethnography. Sage Publications.