media station

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media station

• Media Station is an umbrella project covering
  three investigations into the potential practice
  of using MMOs in educational situations. Each
  Media Station vision is focussed on a particular
  opportunity drawn from the project participants
  own educational and research practice.

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media station

• This project is a feasibility study that will
  explore the possibilities and potentials of the
  use of Massive Multiplayer Online Environments to
  assist learning. It does this by proposing a
  learning environment called the Media Station.
  The Media Station would be a virtual reality
  learning environment for the creation and
  distribution of art, entertainment and
  information in media-rich forms. It is a
  creativity playground that includes tools and
  materials for creating and distributing media
  content. It would be a multi-player world and
  have shared and individual 'spaces' with tools to
  design, build, and decorate those spaces.

Glen Wetheralls escape a rich immersive world
with collaborative access to building tools
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Virtual Temptations Being there

• MMOs or rich graphic immersive environments seem
  to offer a place to play
• Educators must question how the MEDIATION of the
  environment might AFFECT pedagogy

Diagram adapted from Jesper Juul "A Clash
between Game and Narrative". Paper presented at
the Digital Arts and Culture conference, Bergen,
Norway, November 1998.
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Significance

• The value and importance of this project is that
  it will identify those factors which characterise
  the interactions, engagements and encounters of
  multi-user game environments that can enhance
  teaching and learning. Of specific interest will
  be the modelling of different ways of enabling
  the relationship between learning participants
  that does not replicate existing institutional
  practice, but rather takes advantage of virtual
  communities, knowledge construction and content
  creation.
• The media Station concept provides an learning
  space different from flat online media (the web,
  online teaching, blackboard, moodle etc) because
  rather than the affordances provided by the
  environment being added to the surface of the
  platform, they are embedded within the
  background.
• The Media Station is based on an immersive game
  concept that can enable a very different form of
  pedagogy and interaction to other online
  environments, in that the player is immersed in a
  role, is confronted with authentic tasks that are
  interesting and relevant, and the media station
  provides access to the full range of constructive
  tools within the environment itself.

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Overall research aims and objectives

• Better understand and articulate how media rich
  (3D visual and audio) multi-user environments can
  enhance learning.
• Better understand the implications of media rich,
  multi-user environments for pedagogy and
  curriculum development.
• Develop and refine methods for the design,
  development, use and evaluation of multi-user
  learning environments.
• Investigate ways to integrate online and offline
  learning opportunities with multi-user
  environments.

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Media tools

• The Media Tools undertakes to explore the
  potential of using rich media environments as
  PLACES where participants are encouraged to
  construct and collaborate. The driving hook for
  the project is the requirement across most
  tertiary media courses for students to create
  some kind of storyboard - eg storyboarding in
  film and media studies, concept design in game
  studies, wireframe and architecture in web
  design, animatics, flow charts etc.
• If the overall media station projects aims to
  "create a multi user environment in which users
  collaborate / conflict / interact in order to
  learn about digital media itself" the an
  underlying question must be whether these media
  rich environments actually contribute or enhance
  learning.

Screen grabs from e-scape by Glen Wetherall. A
useful rich immersive world design would need to
provide pedagogical TOOLS for the purposes of
construction and collaboration. Media Tools
considers what these would be and how they might
be utilised by learners working in collaborative
groups
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Media Tools
Example design work taken from e-scape
documentation (Wetherall 2004) How would tools of
this design affect pedagogy?
Using similar immersion via graphics as many
MMOs, Media Tools investigates the potential of
e-scape to embed specific world scene building
tools. Research will focus on the collaborative
versus the competitive aspects of implementing
pedagogy in this environment
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Creative Town

• The creative town vision is currently in the
  research phase of the project. In brief, the
  project involves a large Creative Industries core
  unit of undergraduate students who are asked to
  produce project proposals for assessment
  purposes. The creative town vision offers the
  students a fictitious Queensland town which they
  then explore in order to apply course provided
  skills in order to present potential
  improvements. The initial phase of the project
  offers a two dimensional environment, the second
  phase of the project will provide a rich
  immersive environment and the key research is
  into the perceived value of the richer
  environment.

Screen grab taken from Virtual Ipskay one of
the Creative Town websites providing a simulated
environment
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Creative Town

• The students in this unit are given a practice
  environment in which to explore the roles of CI
  practitioners. In order to scaffold this process
  and assist the participants in comprehending the
  convergence of CI, the Creative Town provides a
  simulated Queensland town, redolent with
  opportunities for new CI projects
• The primary research environment has resulted in
  rich collaborative product from the students and
  the first phase of the research cycle is
  currently under implementation.
• The second research phase involves the
  construction of a rich MMO made in the Torque
  Engine

A sample student poster proposing improvements to
Ipskay. Creative Town Website http//creativetown
.ci.qut.edu.au/
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When Worlds Collide

• This study exploits a drama experience called
  History's Purchased Page which explores the
  mystery of who actually climbed Everest. Within
  this experience the children take on the role of
  historians and game designers who are employed by
  a fictitious company to design interactive
  software that offers learning experiences around
  the conquering of Everest.
• A key learning outcome of this experience is that
  the participants start to problematise the nature
  of historical truth through active engagement
  in a dramatic world that uses web based media,
  images and recounts to support immersion in the
  event.
• This feasibility stage of the study sought to
  understand what might happen if the being there
  of drama is combined with the being there of a
  persistent world.

The activity is taken from O'Toole, Pretending to
Learn Helping Children Learn Through Drama" by.
OToole, J. and Dunn, J. (2002) Pretending to
Learn Helping Children Learn through Drama.
Sydney Pearson Education
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When Worlds Collide Key questions

• Would the experience be more engaging if the
  students were also given opportunities to enter a
  parallel persistent on-line world capable of
  generating rich visualisations of the Everest
  context and the chance to deepen their immersion
  via avatar presence and exploration opportunities
  opportunities to not only see the Everest
  world but also act within it?
• How does this immersion in the virtual world
  affect the childrens engagement in the dramatic
  world, especially with regard to the tensions
  that usually drive dramatic worlds - including
  the all important tension of metaxis defined as
  the "the state of belonging completely and
  simultaneously to two different autonomous
  worlds" (Boal 1995, p.431).
• 1 Boal, A. (1995) The Rainbow of Desire The
  Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, London,
  Routledge

The Historys Purchased Page drama process
exploited web based media such as the Mount
Everest Panorama http//www.panoramas.dk/fullscre
en2/full22.html
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Measures of success

• Research cycle data from three projects focus
  groups, videos of research events, formal
  questionnaires
• Analysis of data from specific perspective of
  individual projects
• Prototype environments and further research
• Journal and Conference outcomes
• Technology transfer opportunities
• Collection of Media Station papers
• Implementation of research concepts in rich
  graphic environment.

Media Station will establish a centre of
expertise in the growing area of educational
interest in games and MMOs. There are no
development cycle risks in this project to date.