(Transcription) RezEd Podcast, Episode 20- Deborah Fields on Whyville Learning Structures and Opportunities
Welcome to the 21st RezEd Podcast produced by MediaSnackers with Global Kids. Coming up is an interview with Debra Fields from UCLA who talks about using Whyville as a virtual space for learning. As ever, we'll kick off this podcast with the news from the Global Kids guys.
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RezEd News
Amira: Hey, this is Amira.
Rik: This is Rik.
Amira: We are coming to you from Global Kids in New York City.
Rik: Here is the news for this week's podcast. Topping the news, for those of you of a certain age you will remember the joy you got out of playing with Legos. We are excited to announce, at least I'm excited to announce, that Lego is actually creating a virtual world/MMO scheduled for launch in 2009. Details are a little sketchy at this point. You can go to universe.lego.com and see a bunch of videos they've put online, but it looks like some sort of combined sort of goal-oriented, role-playing game with virtual world elements, like you can create things, collaboratively create things, and share those with other people. So we are interested in facilitating discussions about how we might be using the Lego Universe as a place for learning. So if you would like to join our Lego Universe group on RezEd, you can talk to other educators who are talking about how we can use virtual Lego blocks to facilitate real learning.
Amira: Great. Next up, we have the Serious Virtual Worlds Report. It came out earlier this month and it was prepared for the JISC Learning Program. It focuses on virtual worlds for educational uses and explores the serious, as opposed to leisure-based use of virtual worlds. From the report it reads that "in order to help practitioners to identify the worlds that are the most relevant for their particular learning context, the report presents an overview of the available virtual worlds, describing in particular the serious virtual worlds that have educational potential or have been used in education and training settings. However, stepping beyond this traditional mode of teacher and learner, the report also aims to foreground how learners themselves are becoming a more central component in the use of immersive worlds, creating learning experiences for themselves and adopting a more exploratory mode of learning". Of course, this is an essential resource for all of us who are interested in virtual worlds and learning specifically and it is available for download for free on rezed.org or at the jisc.ac.uk website under their publications.
Rik: We want to give you a heads up about a call for proposals for a symposium in June 2009. It's a Symposium on Emerging Technology and Online Learning taking place in San Francisco, California, sponsored by Sloan-C. The symposium is going to bring together people who are interested in the ways technologies are transforming education, by addressing challenges in learning affordability, accessibility, and faculty and student satisfaction. This year there's actually a symposium track called "Immersive Learning and Virtual Environments," as well as four other tracks. They had about 300 participants last year and over 80 presentations. They are asking proposals to be submitted by December 8, 2008, so you don't have that long to get on this. For more information, you can see rezed.org or go to www.emergingonlinelearningtechnology.org.
Amira: Great, and that's all for this week's news. As always, if you have news you would like featured on upcoming podcasts or on the RezEd website, send them over to rezednews@globalkids.org.
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RezEd Podcast
Whyville.net as a Learning Space
Debra Fields, a doctoral student at the University of California, discusses Whyville.net as a space for learning. Whyville was created by a company called Numedeon, based in Pasadena, California. You can learn more about Debra’s research on her blog, Everything Whyille (http://kafai-whyville.blogspot.com).
Podcasted on November 17, 2008.
Background
I've been involved in informal learning organizations for over a decade. It’s what I worked on in college. I became interested in gaming when I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working with Jim Gee, among others. At UCLA, I had the opportunity to work in a virtual world called Whyville.net. So, I've been studying that for the past couple of years, as well as how kids interact across Whyville, with each other, and some of the other ways in which they learn in that environment.
Whyville
Whyville is a place where kids ages eight to sixteen visit online. Whyville has roughly, right now, over three million kids registered, with about twenty thousand kids going on it a day. Since 1999 when they started, they have been basing themselves on making it a ScienceEd sort of site. Now ScienceEd isn't everything that kids do on Whyville; kids come on to hang out. They design “face parts” and sell them, so you can have your own business online.
To create how you look, since it's a digital environment, you add layers on a two dimensional face. So you make an oval for your head and you layer on eyes, eyebrows, hair, mustaches or, if you want, skateboards, dogs, et cetera -- anything that you can imagine. I change my outfit quite often on Whyville. I've had a lot of different looks. I've been a pixie. I've had ponytails. I've dressed up for St. Patrick's Day. Those sorts of things.
You can definitely represent your interest. It's a great way to connect and make friends. Some kids will animate characters so that they can make friends with people with similar interest, or have a horse next to their avatar, which is what your digital character is called.
Educational Aspects
The bottom layer has educational aspects in Whyville. The way you earn clams in Whyville, which is the virtual currency, is you play various science games. They have a lot of pretty interesting science games. After that, there are actually a lot more progressive opportunities in Whyville to be involved in science. There are the games you play for salary points, so every time you log into Whyville you get a salary. But then there're also more community-based kind of games. Right now, I go on Whyville and I eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack every day. If I don't have enough calcium in my diet then I get a bandage around my head or if I go on Whyville and forget to eat then I'm very pale the next day. It’s actually a pretty fun nutrition activity. One of the kids that I work with tried to make a vegan diet on Whyville but there are constraints. She had to make sure she had enough protein, iron, fiber, etc. That was a big challenge for her. So there are those sorts of opportunities.
They have various environmental issues on Whyville as well. A red tide has infested the beaches on Whyville, creating a situation where you have an overflow of nutrients. It’s a common problem in the United States and around the World, where there’s run off that pollutes the water and causes plankton to bloom. The kids have to analyze the plankton, figure out what they are eating, where the highest concentration of them are, and plant seedlings on the beach nearby to counteract them. Instead of getting rewarded with money for playing science games they’re actually investing money to save the environment in Whyville, while learning about the environment in the process.
There also are several viruses on Whyville that go around that create various symptoms like pimples, sneezing, coughing. Right now you can go on Whyville and design a virus so as to understand how viruses spread. You can also design vaccines and purchase them. So I sell a couple of vaccines on Whyville and make a little bit of money off of that, though I'm still behind on my Whyville car payments.
Researching Education in Virtual Worlds
Some of the primary ways that I have studied Whyville is through a couple of after-school clubs. I studied one of them just a couple of months ago with some fourth through sixth grade elementary school students. Part of what I’ve done with my work with Yasmin Kafai at UCLA is study how kids learn to be a part of Whyville. It’s learning to be a part of another culture: how they learn and interact with other kids, what information they share with each other, how they navigate places in an after-school club where they are physically with other kids and in Whyville, where they’re virtually with some of the same kids, also a lot more kids.
After the kids were on Whyville for about four weeks, we had a costume contest in which we said, “Change your avatar. We are going to vote on who has the best new look, something very different from what you are now”. One girl moved from being a really cute girl with lovely flowing brown hair to an alien monster with gashing teeth and a beautiful brown brimmed hat. One of the boys switched to being a girl and another boy became an anime character from one of his favorite manga series. I went Goth, which kind of freaked out the kids. It was pretty funny. And at the end of that we talked about how it affected your being on Whyville. How did people change their interaction with you based on how you looked? It was a great opportunity to kind of think about how you look, how people act towards you, about people’s perceptions and first impressions. It was a great learning experience.
Learning Spaces within Whyville
I think there are a lot of opportunities to create learning spaces in Whyville. Whyville has so much going on in it and it is changing all the time. They keep getting new educational partners, both for-profit and non-profit. For example, Toyota has cars in it and I have two cars. One I have paid off and the other I’m behind on my loan payments because they’re very expensive. It has a wing and a cloud underneath it. It’s very cool looking. You can learn about finances. You can take out CDs from a savings bank and do some common banking things. I think the financial side is one of the most easily learned parts of Whyville because it is so built into the daily experiences and I think the kids like that. It’s very empowering for them to be able to manage their own finances in a certain way.
Whyville has partnered with NOA to do some research on heat vents and animal species in the ocean. In some ways, if you are able to get a partnership with Numedeon, which would require quite a bit of money, you could certainly build an area in Whyville. Some not-for-profit [groups] have done that. There’s a girls games group, working to build miniature games on Whyville. Right now you can just browse games that this girls’ club in Northern California is making. One thing that we’ve done in the classroom is build a unit on viruses and then have the kids experience “whypox.”
Whyville vs. Other Virtual Worlds
Whyville reaches an interesting age group, eight to sixteen, with the average age being twelve. In terms of virtual spaces that are reasonably safe for kids that also have some sort of educational element or goal behind it – it’s kind of rare. There’s actually a lot of richness in Whyville. You’re not just going around playing asteroid games or only doing money. You have some design opportunities in there because you can design your own face parts and try to market them. You can make airplane contracts. It’s a vast world. It has a lot of in-roads, for a lot of kids with different kinds of interests, and I think it has some staying power. If they really get into it they can write for the newspaper.
In terms of the other virtual worlds out there, I think it’s very easy to get into. I think worlds like Club Penguin grow kind of boring for kids when they get to older elementary school and so this is a good place for them to be. Then you have Teen Second Life, which is only for teenagers, which I think is very difficult to get into unless you have some extra support to help you learn how to program and take advantage of some of the openness in that environment. Whyville is kind of in the “tween” age group right before teenage-hood.
Whyville in an Afterschool Program
In terms of setting up the after-school club, the school already had an after-school program for kids to stay after school for a couple of hours, and so we recruited from them and just said, “Anyone who wants to join our technology club, go get parent permission.” I ran it and then later I got a couple of other students at UCLA to help me run it. We just had the kids play on Whyville and helped them answer questions. They would find out things about Whyville much more quickly than we would in some ways and so we would troubleshoot problems. You just need an internet connection, as you don’t have to download anything, and that’s really kind of nice.
Resources on Whyville
We have a blog called Everything Whyville, which has a bunch of papers looking at what we have studied, such as race on Whyville. There is actually social activism about race on Whyville, on designing avatars, on cheating and how it can actually be a positive learning activity in terms of sharing knowledge and building up ideas about science. Pam Aschbacher has also done some research on Whyville a while back on the science games.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RezEd Events
Rik: Here are the events for your Google calendar or ical, or whatever device you are using. First of all, today, Monday, November 17, is the very first RezEd Virtual Conference happening within Second Life. Head to the Justice Commons Amphitheater from 3 to 5pm Pacific Standard Time today, where we will be holding a panel discussion with a number of notable virtual world educators including Lori Bell of the Alliance Learning Library System, Ryan Clemens of Arizona State, whose been doing work in Google Lively, and Patti Purcell of Bel Aire Elementary School, whose been working in Dizzywood. All this will be chaired by the Global Kids Online Leadership Director, Barry Joseph. We'll also be holding Birds of a Feather breakout sessions, a social mixer, and a host of other activities. If you're not able to attend this event we'll probably be recording this and posting it later to RezEd.org.
Amira: Next on November 20, 2008, the Research and Learning of Virtual World Environments, also known as RELive08, will be happening in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. The keynote speakers there will be Edward Castranova and Roo Reynolds, and it will involve researchers and practitioners attending from across the globe. It is promising to be a very interesting and stimulating exciting two days. Full details on the event are on RezEd.org.
Rik: Lastly, for those of you who are going to the NCT Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas in November, there was a panel discussion on "Teaching Things Fall Apart in a Virtual World." Basically this is a panel discussion about using virtual worlds to teach about literature such as, Of Mice and Men, December's Night Dream, The Tempest, The Great Gatsby, etc., and there's a number of presenters talking about their experiences using virtual worlds for teaching about literature. For more information go to ncte.org or go to the calendar on RezEd.org.
Amira: That will be taking place November 22, 2008. That's it for our events this week. If you have any you would like to share on upcoming RezEd podcasts or on this site, send them over to rezedinfo@globalkids.org.
To return to this podcast's audio and shownotes, click here.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RezEd News
Amira: Hey, this is Amira.
Rik: This is Rik.
Amira: We are coming to you from Global Kids in New York City.
Rik: Here is the news for this week's podcast. Topping the news, for those of you of a certain age you will remember the joy you got out of playing with Legos. We are excited to announce, at least I'm excited to announce, that Lego is actually creating a virtual world/MMO scheduled for launch in 2009. Details are a little sketchy at this point. You can go to universe.lego.com and see a bunch of videos they've put online, but it looks like some sort of combined sort of goal-oriented, role-playing game with virtual world elements, like you can create things, collaboratively create things, and share those with other people. So we are interested in facilitating discussions about how we might be using the Lego Universe as a place for learning. So if you would like to join our Lego Universe group on RezEd, you can talk to other educators who are talking about how we can use virtual Lego blocks to facilitate real learning.
Amira: Great. Next up, we have the Serious Virtual Worlds Report. It came out earlier this month and it was prepared for the JISC Learning Program. It focuses on virtual worlds for educational uses and explores the serious, as opposed to leisure-based use of virtual worlds. From the report it reads that "in order to help practitioners to identify the worlds that are the most relevant for their particular learning context, the report presents an overview of the available virtual worlds, describing in particular the serious virtual worlds that have educational potential or have been used in education and training settings. However, stepping beyond this traditional mode of teacher and learner, the report also aims to foreground how learners themselves are becoming a more central component in the use of immersive worlds, creating learning experiences for themselves and adopting a more exploratory mode of learning". Of course, this is an essential resource for all of us who are interested in virtual worlds and learning specifically and it is available for download for free on rezed.org or at the jisc.ac.uk website under their publications.
Rik: We want to give you a heads up about a call for proposals for a symposium in June 2009. It's a Symposium on Emerging Technology and Online Learning taking place in San Francisco, California, sponsored by Sloan-C. The symposium is going to bring together people who are interested in the ways technologies are transforming education, by addressing challenges in learning affordability, accessibility, and faculty and student satisfaction. This year there's actually a symposium track called "Immersive Learning and Virtual Environments," as well as four other tracks. They had about 300 participants last year and over 80 presentations. They are asking proposals to be submitted by December 8, 2008, so you don't have that long to get on this. For more information, you can see rezed.org or go to www.emergingonlinelearningtechnology.org.
Amira: Great, and that's all for this week's news. As always, if you have news you would like featured on upcoming podcasts or on the RezEd website, send them over to rezednews@globalkids.org.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RezEd Podcast
Whyville.net as a Learning Space
Debra Fields, a doctoral student at the University of California, discusses Whyville.net as a space for learning. Whyville was created by a company called Numedeon, based in Pasadena, California. You can learn more about Debra’s research on her blog, Everything Whyille (http://kafai-whyville.blogspot.com).
Podcasted on November 17, 2008.
Background
I've been involved in informal learning organizations for over a decade. It’s what I worked on in college. I became interested in gaming when I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working with Jim Gee, among others. At UCLA, I had the opportunity to work in a virtual world called Whyville.net. So, I've been studying that for the past couple of years, as well as how kids interact across Whyville, with each other, and some of the other ways in which they learn in that environment.
Whyville
Whyville is a place where kids ages eight to sixteen visit online. Whyville has roughly, right now, over three million kids registered, with about twenty thousand kids going on it a day. Since 1999 when they started, they have been basing themselves on making it a ScienceEd sort of site. Now ScienceEd isn't everything that kids do on Whyville; kids come on to hang out. They design “face parts” and sell them, so you can have your own business online.
To create how you look, since it's a digital environment, you add layers on a two dimensional face. So you make an oval for your head and you layer on eyes, eyebrows, hair, mustaches or, if you want, skateboards, dogs, et cetera -- anything that you can imagine. I change my outfit quite often on Whyville. I've had a lot of different looks. I've been a pixie. I've had ponytails. I've dressed up for St. Patrick's Day. Those sorts of things.
You can definitely represent your interest. It's a great way to connect and make friends. Some kids will animate characters so that they can make friends with people with similar interest, or have a horse next to their avatar, which is what your digital character is called.
Educational Aspects
The bottom layer has educational aspects in Whyville. The way you earn clams in Whyville, which is the virtual currency, is you play various science games. They have a lot of pretty interesting science games. After that, there are actually a lot more progressive opportunities in Whyville to be involved in science. There are the games you play for salary points, so every time you log into Whyville you get a salary. But then there're also more community-based kind of games. Right now, I go on Whyville and I eat breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack every day. If I don't have enough calcium in my diet then I get a bandage around my head or if I go on Whyville and forget to eat then I'm very pale the next day. It’s actually a pretty fun nutrition activity. One of the kids that I work with tried to make a vegan diet on Whyville but there are constraints. She had to make sure she had enough protein, iron, fiber, etc. That was a big challenge for her. So there are those sorts of opportunities.
They have various environmental issues on Whyville as well. A red tide has infested the beaches on Whyville, creating a situation where you have an overflow of nutrients. It’s a common problem in the United States and around the World, where there’s run off that pollutes the water and causes plankton to bloom. The kids have to analyze the plankton, figure out what they are eating, where the highest concentration of them are, and plant seedlings on the beach nearby to counteract them. Instead of getting rewarded with money for playing science games they’re actually investing money to save the environment in Whyville, while learning about the environment in the process.
There also are several viruses on Whyville that go around that create various symptoms like pimples, sneezing, coughing. Right now you can go on Whyville and design a virus so as to understand how viruses spread. You can also design vaccines and purchase them. So I sell a couple of vaccines on Whyville and make a little bit of money off of that, though I'm still behind on my Whyville car payments.
Researching Education in Virtual Worlds
Some of the primary ways that I have studied Whyville is through a couple of after-school clubs. I studied one of them just a couple of months ago with some fourth through sixth grade elementary school students. Part of what I’ve done with my work with Yasmin Kafai at UCLA is study how kids learn to be a part of Whyville. It’s learning to be a part of another culture: how they learn and interact with other kids, what information they share with each other, how they navigate places in an after-school club where they are physically with other kids and in Whyville, where they’re virtually with some of the same kids, also a lot more kids.
After the kids were on Whyville for about four weeks, we had a costume contest in which we said, “Change your avatar. We are going to vote on who has the best new look, something very different from what you are now”. One girl moved from being a really cute girl with lovely flowing brown hair to an alien monster with gashing teeth and a beautiful brown brimmed hat. One of the boys switched to being a girl and another boy became an anime character from one of his favorite manga series. I went Goth, which kind of freaked out the kids. It was pretty funny. And at the end of that we talked about how it affected your being on Whyville. How did people change their interaction with you based on how you looked? It was a great opportunity to kind of think about how you look, how people act towards you, about people’s perceptions and first impressions. It was a great learning experience.
Learning Spaces within Whyville
I think there are a lot of opportunities to create learning spaces in Whyville. Whyville has so much going on in it and it is changing all the time. They keep getting new educational partners, both for-profit and non-profit. For example, Toyota has cars in it and I have two cars. One I have paid off and the other I’m behind on my loan payments because they’re very expensive. It has a wing and a cloud underneath it. It’s very cool looking. You can learn about finances. You can take out CDs from a savings bank and do some common banking things. I think the financial side is one of the most easily learned parts of Whyville because it is so built into the daily experiences and I think the kids like that. It’s very empowering for them to be able to manage their own finances in a certain way.
Whyville has partnered with NOA to do some research on heat vents and animal species in the ocean. In some ways, if you are able to get a partnership with Numedeon, which would require quite a bit of money, you could certainly build an area in Whyville. Some not-for-profit [groups] have done that. There’s a girls games group, working to build miniature games on Whyville. Right now you can just browse games that this girls’ club in Northern California is making. One thing that we’ve done in the classroom is build a unit on viruses and then have the kids experience “whypox.”
Whyville vs. Other Virtual Worlds
Whyville reaches an interesting age group, eight to sixteen, with the average age being twelve. In terms of virtual spaces that are reasonably safe for kids that also have some sort of educational element or goal behind it – it’s kind of rare. There’s actually a lot of richness in Whyville. You’re not just going around playing asteroid games or only doing money. You have some design opportunities in there because you can design your own face parts and try to market them. You can make airplane contracts. It’s a vast world. It has a lot of in-roads, for a lot of kids with different kinds of interests, and I think it has some staying power. If they really get into it they can write for the newspaper.
In terms of the other virtual worlds out there, I think it’s very easy to get into. I think worlds like Club Penguin grow kind of boring for kids when they get to older elementary school and so this is a good place for them to be. Then you have Teen Second Life, which is only for teenagers, which I think is very difficult to get into unless you have some extra support to help you learn how to program and take advantage of some of the openness in that environment. Whyville is kind of in the “tween” age group right before teenage-hood.
Whyville in an Afterschool Program
In terms of setting up the after-school club, the school already had an after-school program for kids to stay after school for a couple of hours, and so we recruited from them and just said, “Anyone who wants to join our technology club, go get parent permission.” I ran it and then later I got a couple of other students at UCLA to help me run it. We just had the kids play on Whyville and helped them answer questions. They would find out things about Whyville much more quickly than we would in some ways and so we would troubleshoot problems. You just need an internet connection, as you don’t have to download anything, and that’s really kind of nice.
Resources on Whyville
We have a blog called Everything Whyville, which has a bunch of papers looking at what we have studied, such as race on Whyville. There is actually social activism about race on Whyville, on designing avatars, on cheating and how it can actually be a positive learning activity in terms of sharing knowledge and building up ideas about science. Pam Aschbacher has also done some research on Whyville a while back on the science games.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RezEd Events
Rik: Here are the events for your Google calendar or ical, or whatever device you are using. First of all, today, Monday, November 17, is the very first RezEd Virtual Conference happening within Second Life. Head to the Justice Commons Amphitheater from 3 to 5pm Pacific Standard Time today, where we will be holding a panel discussion with a number of notable virtual world educators including Lori Bell of the Alliance Learning Library System, Ryan Clemens of Arizona State, whose been doing work in Google Lively, and Patti Purcell of Bel Aire Elementary School, whose been working in Dizzywood. All this will be chaired by the Global Kids Online Leadership Director, Barry Joseph. We'll also be holding Birds of a Feather breakout sessions, a social mixer, and a host of other activities. If you're not able to attend this event we'll probably be recording this and posting it later to RezEd.org.
Amira: Next on November 20, 2008, the Research and Learning of Virtual World Environments, also known as RELive08, will be happening in Milton Keynes in the United Kingdom. The keynote speakers there will be Edward Castranova and Roo Reynolds, and it will involve researchers and practitioners attending from across the globe. It is promising to be a very interesting and stimulating exciting two days. Full details on the event are on RezEd.org.
Rik: Lastly, for those of you who are going to the NCT Annual Convention in San Antonio, Texas in November, there was a panel discussion on "Teaching Things Fall Apart in a Virtual World." Basically this is a panel discussion about using virtual worlds to teach about literature such as, Of Mice and Men, December's Night Dream, The Tempest, The Great Gatsby, etc., and there's a number of presenters talking about their experiences using virtual worlds for teaching about literature. For more information go to ncte.org or go to the calendar on RezEd.org.
Amira: That will be taking place November 22, 2008. That's it for our events this week. If you have any you would like to share on upcoming RezEd podcasts or on this site, send them over to rezedinfo@globalkids.org.
To return to this podcast's audio and shownotes, click here.
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