Zugl.: Potsdam, Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2007

Tese de mestrado. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2010

The ever increasing popularity of virtual worlds, also known as 3-D multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) or simply virtual worlds provides language instructors with a new tool they can exploit in their courses. For now, Second Life is one of the most popular MUVEs used for teaching and learning, and although Second Life was not initially designed as an educational tool, it has developed into one used in higher education institutions worldwide. In the field of second language acquisition, Second Life could be used to immerse students in the target language and culture. Students can travel to virtual versions of cities or countries where the target language is spoken and engage in meaningful interactions while instructors can track written and spoken linguistic patterns through the program's features. Virtual worlds appeal to language instructors and computer-assisted language learning (CALL) researchers alike because of the affordances it offers. Yet, there are many areas left to explore. The focus of this study was to measure and evaluate the effects of using the 3-D MUVE Second Life on students' motivation to learn Spanish as a foreign language, and on students' academic achievement and language proficiency. This study incorporated qualitative and quantitative research methods to assess the effects of the treatment (i.e., using Second Life) on each of the variables. Significant differences existed in motivation between the groups; however, academic achievement and language proficiency between the control and experimental groups were very similar. The researcher used a phenomenological approach to gather and analyze data from student and instructor interviews. This approach helped the researcher understand the effects of using Second Life in a Spanish course by providing insight on students and the instructor's opinions about the virtual world's applicability as a tool for language learning and teaching. Circumlocution, exposure to the target language, finding people and destinations, and technical difficulties, such as the use of voice chat were salient themes during the interviews. Future efforts should focus on improving the design process of activities through the application of instructional design principles to ensure that they provide sufficient guidance and scaffolding for students to develop their language skills.

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2009

Cette étude exploratoire examine comment l’exploration identitaire entre en jeu dans l’utilisation d’un avatar et dans la participation aux activités d’apprentissage collaboratif dans un monde virtuel. Nous inspirant de l’ethnographie virtuelle, nous avons participé à douze activités collaboratives et nous avons ensuite interrogé treize utilisateurs du monde virtuel Second Life qui y collaborent pour apprendre. Les participants ont démontré une volonté ou un désintérêt à collaborer avec les autres utilisateurs dans Second Life non principalement pas selon le sexe, l’ethnicité ou le degré d’anthropomorphisme de leurs avatars comme l’indique la littérature, mais plutôt selon leur niveau d’expertise. Cette étude suggère que le travail identitaire des utilisateurs peut exercer une grande influence sur leurs collaborations et que le travail identitaire est capable d’aider les utilisateurs à renforcer, à repenser et à améliorer leurs identités et pratiques professionnelles sur les plans virtuels et non virtuels.

Virtual worlds are online communities that enable user interaction via avatars in a computer-based simulated environment. In recent years, the fast growth of virtual worlds and their enormous potential for various applications have attracted much attention. Though the uses of virtual worlds are becoming numerous in diverse fields, the core issue for their development from the perspective of gamers is to maximize user immersion. This paper tackles the issue from the perspective of game designers and explores the immersive dimensions of users via an experiment. The experimental platform is a specific virtual world, Second Life, and a particular gaming situation, dancing. The main manipulation involves altering the graphic realism level of both the avatar¡¯s appearance and the dancing environment. The research aims to find out whether there is a correlation between graphic realism and user immersion and, if there is, what element(s) or degrees of realism will lead to different levels of user immersion.

Cette étude exploratoire examine comment l’exploration identitaire entre en jeu dans l’utilisation d’un avatar et dans la participation aux activités d’apprentissage collaboratif dans un monde virtuel. Nous inspirant de l’ethnographie virtuelle, nous avons participé à douze activités collaboratives et nous avons ensuite interrogé treize utilisateurs du monde virtuel Second Life qui y collaborent pour apprendre. Les participants ont démontré une volonté ou un désintérêt à collaborer avec les autres utilisateurs dans Second Life non principalement pas selon le sexe, l’ethnicité ou le degré d’anthropomorphisme de leurs avatars comme l’indique la littérature, mais plutôt selon leur niveau d’expertise. Cette étude suggère que le travail identitaire des utilisateurs peut exercer une grande influence sur leurs collaborations et que le travail identitaire est capable d’aider les utilisateurs à renforcer, à repenser et à améliorer leurs identités et pratiques professionnelles sur les plans virtuels et non virtuels.

Mémoire de master recherche 1re année : Science de l'homme et de la société. Science sociale, ville et territoire : Tours : 2008. / Titre provenant de l'écran titre. Bibliogr. Webogr.

The purpose of the present study was to explore ESL students’ interactions in task-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) in Second Life, a virtual environment by which users can interact through representational figures. I investigated Low-Intermediate and High-Intermediate ESL students’ interaction patterns before, during, and after three kinds of tasks, a Jigsaw task, a Decision-making task, and a Discussion task. The findings were that the Low and High-Intermediate ESL students engaged in several forms of interaction during the pre- and post-task periods in Second Life, such as checking their voice chat function, checking members, moving their avatars, and closings. These activities pointed to the nature of Second Life voice chat interaction as preconditions for further conversation, and for closing their conversation. Official task period activities revealed factors for task success, such as a leader, a structured way of approaching a task, no technical problem, and establishing a sense of telepresence (Schroeder, 2002) before the task. Concerning negotiation of meaning, the High-Intermediate students made more negotiation during the Decision-making tasks than the Jigsaw tasks, caused mainly by lexical meanings. The wrong answer team and the incomplete team engaged in more negotiations than the correct answer team and the complete team. However, the Low-Intermediate students in the complete team made more negotiations of meaning than the incomplete team. Both levels of students had fewer negotiations during the Discussion task than in the Jigsaw and Decision-making tasks, and they used comprehension checks, confirmation checks, and clarification requests as strategies for negotiation, overwhelmingly focused on meaning rather than form. The students played with their avatars more often during the Discussion task session than during the Jigsaw or Decision-making tasks, and their use of avatars seemed simply to be for fun, although another way explaining what students were doing is to recognize that they were also exploring the affordances of Second Life. Generally, the Low-Intermediate students had a positive attitude toward their learning experience in Second Life, whereas the High-Intermediate students expressed a more neutral view of their experience in Second Life. / text

Educators are seeking ways to better engage their students including the use of collaborative virtual learning environments (CVLEs). Some virtual worlds can serve as CVLEs as the advent of Second Life has created particular interest within the education community. Second Life, however, was not initially designed to facilitate education alone. I propose that as a CVLE, Second Life may be failing educators' expectations of its initial, ongoing, and future use as a system for supporting education. In order to determine how Second Life may be failing educators, I conducted a case study with a group of university-level educators that examined their reasons for and against adopting Second Life as a CVLE, the affordances they explored, the barriers they encountered, and how these affordances and barriers affected student learning and the participant's future use of Second Life and future virtual worlds in education. I then compare their use of Second Life to that of traditional groupware systems. As a result, I propose and detail the development of a rich integrated development environment, application programming interface, more flexible privacy policy, and more robust community tools for educators based on these comparisons.