updated 12/25/09 MAKE SURE TO REFERESH THE SCREEN FOR LATEST VERSION
Three experiments in 3-D interactive visual-verbal rhetoric.
I. Writing inside a Virtual World
- Writing assignments done in the virtual world itself make better use of the appeal of massive, multimedia, multiplayer, interactive, 3-D social virtual worlds to engage both sides of the brain in the teaching of multimodal composition.
- MMOGs can facilitate a version of active learning and virtual place-based education that results in the invention of new “architextural” hybrid genres of reading and writing
- .
II. “Architextural” Writing
III. 3-D Interactive Avatars Writing:
Flow, Coherence, Sympathetic Imagination, The Cognitive Immersion of Literature, Telepresence, Copresence, Resurrection of the Dead
- [a] 3-D avatar chat fully engaged students in the “flow” and made it easier for some to write coherent essays.
- [b] Choosing an avatar other than their own, such as a role model, and then engaging in various group chats, also helped students exercise their sympathetic imagination, their ability to see others from the inside.
- [c] The cognitive immersion of group avatar chat can be compared with reading literature. By offering the interactivity they expect, the online generation was able to experience the internal life of other human beings somewhat like that of reading a novel.
- [d] This assignment makes it easier to study positive effects specific to virtual worlds, such as telepresence and copresence, the unique feeling of social presence caused by immersion in a virtual environment. (For example, one student was so moved by the way this assignment seemed to bridge the gap between the living and the dead that she kept revisiting her avatar even though she hated computers.)
SELECTED IMAGES and MOVIES
3-D AVATAR CHAT
The students redesigned their personal avatars in Second Life to look like their role models.The range of avatars, seen below, was a testament to the diversity goals of the university and connected the concept of the sympathetic imagination to the goal of multicultural understanding.
They were then assigned four different locations on our island to discuss the relationship between leadership and three other topics: compassion, diversity, and history.
avatar interaction at the “office”
two of the other locations: the campfire and the rug
Brief Movies:
Graduate Assistant Inspects the Chairs of Space 6
Avatars Discussing in A Deck by the Sea
Avatars Discussing in a Living Room by the Sea
Avatars Discussing on a Zebra Rug by the Sea
Avatars Discussing on Modern Furniture by the Wall
Four of the Spaces
instructor,
hovering in the air, observing two discussions
instructor observing the discussion on the deck
instructor observing the discussion in the modernist living room
instructor observing the discussion on the rug
instructor, hovering in the air, observing the discussion in the living room
instructor flying over the wall to return to "The Tower"
“Architextural” Writing
3-D INTERACTIVE ROAD MAPS
One student made a series of boardwalks in SL from one "webloader picture" to the next, at one point over the creek. In this hybrid genre, one’s avatar had to virtually walk through his life
ARCHITEXTURAL WRITING
Students were to construct in SL models of the kinds of buildings they wanted to see on campus and they were to embed in these buildings words to persuade others to adopt these buildings as models for their own competing campus architecture master plans.At firstconstructing true 3-D buildings that one could walk into and “inhabit” in SL seemed impossible. However, one student stayed up all night and was able to construct such a building:
DETAILS
Using Second Life
to increase motivation for writing
basic question:
DOES IT WORK?
A CASE STUDY:
one Fall 07 Freshman Seminar paper
She and her colleagues became more comfortable with computers and Second Life. Eventually, they were able to make avatars of their role models and participated in a very unusual class discussion
The instructor flying above the discussion sites waiting for the students
The author of the essay comes to class and checks out the activity of the other students who have already plunged into cyberspace
She sees that they are already in their groups!
She starts up Second Life
The instructor flys up from the discussion area to see if she has landed by the tower yet
The primary sound in this class, as in the 603 class, is keyboarding
Her grandmother joins her first discussion group as the instructor observes
Her grandmother in her second group while the instructor flys up from the second group 4
Her grandmother in her second group with the instructor obvserving
Documentation
E603A FALL 06 AND E603B SPRING 07 (PLAN 2)
E603A WEB SITE E603B SCHEDULE
Fall 06-Spring 07 evaluation by instructor
An example of D.I.I.A. evaluation questions
D.I.I.A. Final Report 06-07
E603A AND FS301 FALL 07
07 E603A SCHEDULE (PLAN 2)
FS 301 WEB SITE (PLAN 1)
DIIA pre SL survey: FS 301
DIIA pre SL survey: 603A
DIIA pre SL survey: COMBINED
MORE IMAGES
DIIA post SL survey : COMBINED
D.I.I.A. Second Life site
Professor JEROME BUMP mail:bump@mail.utexas.edu
Jerome Bump, Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin. First director of the Computer Writing and Research Lab (1985-1989). Author of C.A.I. in Writing at the University: Some Recommendations," Computers and Education 11.2 (1987), 121-133; "Radical Changes in Class Discussion Using Networked Computers," Computers and the Humanities 24 (1990):49-65; "Teaching English in Second Life," Currents (2007); "Left vs. Right Side of the Brain: Hypermedia and the new Puritanism" Currents (1997); “Collaborative Learning in the Postmodern Classroom” in Situating College English: Lessons from an American University (1996); papers on computers and English at the Universities of Paris, Pittsburgh, Indiana, and NCTE, CCCC, CCTE, and the Fifth and Sixth Computers and Writing Conferences, the IBM AEP conference; and recipient of grants for writing in virtual worlds, computerized invention heuristics, and multimedia autobiographies.
Office: Parlin 132
