The challenges of collaborative learning in virtual spaces

While I firmly believe there is an incredible future for learning through virtual worlds, there are also many problems in this area to be addressed. Several of these problems arose as design challenges for my project and presented opportunities for refining my ideas.

Problems I faced during this project

• Exactly who is the primary audience for this project? Are there other audiences who would benefit as well?
• Is the primary problem an issue that is affecting education widely or is it more of an opportunity to improve education?
• Will educators be able to manage such far-reaching technology and still maintain order in their classrooms?

First, I had to address the challenge of finding an appropriate audience for my ideas. Initially, I wanted to work with younger audiences since I knew they would be better equipped to handle virtual reality environments. There are few children today who are without their own personal computer or console gaming system and therefore the transition from gaming to educations would be easier for them. However, I realized that using an audience that is already knowledgeable about VR would not allow me to fully explore the impact of using virtual environments for learning in a broad context. I decided that I needed an audience that was virtually opposite my original plan. This was the thinking that led me to select older adults as the primary audience for Phase 1 of the project.

Next was the concern I had about the nature of my learning problem. At first my idea was to address teaching older adults about virtual reality. While this was a sound idea, it did not presently address a specific learning problem. There was plenty of opportunity and interest in this audience but there was no threat to be managed. After discussing this concern with Professor Decker Walker we identified several potentially problematic areas. The specific problems I address are detailed on the Problem page.

Finally, there is the outstanding question of managing technologies in a classroom. This issue is of major concern to me and is somewhat beyond the scope and resources of this project. Nevertheless, I believe that design has an answer to this concern. If the classroom technology is designed as I have prescribed then there should be little difficulty as it will leverage natural affordances of the normal classroom environment (chalk for writing on the board, projection systems for showing films, etc.). Further, I plan to continue addressing this problem as I advance into my career after my program at Stanford has concluded.