The Chronicle of Higher Education
12-17-07
'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds Made for Learning
By ANDREA L. FOSTER
Students at Boston College stumbled across a jackal in the underground
chambers of an ancient Egyptian tomb in early December. One student
explained that the animal was the god Anubis, who helped transport dead bodies
to the underworld.
In reality, the students never left the Boston area. They were inside a virtual
world where tombs were three-dimensional digital objects and students were
represented by digital alter egos, or avatars.
Their trip was showcased at a conference at Harvard University this month
devoted to Immersive Education, a multimillion-dollar project to build virtualreality software exclusively for education within commercial and nonprofit fantasy
spaces like Second Life. The project combines interactive three-dimensional
graphics, Web cameras, Internet-based telephony, and other digital media.
At the meeting, Aaron E. Walsh, founder of the nonprofit endeavor and an
instructor at Boston College, and two other researchers showed a gathering of
about 40 people how virtual spaces can do more than entertain.
Their goal is to build three-dimensional, interactive lessons that will grab
students' attention in the same way that popular computer games like World of
Warcraft do — but without the violence and titillation associated with many online
games.
"It's important to allow educators to mix and match media types to construct a
virtual learning environment that's right for their students," said Mr. Walsh.
Some critics have complained that promoting video games in schools and
colleges dumbs down education. Yet Immersive Education has gathered an
impressive roster of backers. In addition to Boston College and Harvard
University, its supporters include Amherst College, Columbia University,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology,
Japan's University of Aizu, the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies, NASA,
Sun Microsystems, the City of Boston, and the New Media Consortium, a highereducation technology group.
Colleges are developing educational games on their own, too. Parsons the New
School for Design, in New York, announced last week it was starting a laboratory
to create games that might promote social change and civic participation.
The Immersive Education project is about to get additional financial support from
the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship, Mr.
Walsh announced at the conference. The foundation has agreed to provide
$750,000 to the Federation of American Scientists for the development of online
games and virtual environments. Part of the money will go toward developing
Immersive Education software's technical specifications and documentation.
The science federation, which has worked with universities to develop
educational video games, will also continue that kind of work with his project, Mr.
Walsh said.
Games Turn Serious
Immersive Education builds on Mr. Walsh's experience, beginning in 2001, with
online teaching. He was working with Boston College students on ways to build
virtual three-dimensional objects. In 2003, after virtual worlds like Unreal
Tournament started using a new game engine that allowed players to speak to
one another, he began holding his classes completely online.
Mr. Walsh developed a prototype of Immersive Education in 2001. He was
motivated to create an educationally oriented virtual-reality space, in large part to
discourage students from viewing the sexual content of virtual worlds like Second
Life and the violence in online games like Gears of War and Crysis. Now his
educational environment is moving into its third generation, which will allow highresolution graphics, more realistic avatars, the use of Web cameras, and the
sharing of documents.
Avatars are becoming less cartoonish and more lifelike, Mr. Walsh said at the
conference. He showed how the faces of some avatars, contorting into various
expressions, were nearly indistinguishable from the faces of the real people they
were modeled after. The avatars can greatly improve online communication
among students and professors, he added.
At the Cambridge meeting, the audience watched the avatars created by some of
Mr. Walsh's students take their trips inside the Egyptian tomb. The event took
place inside Second Life, but the tomb was created with digital media from a
variety of sources, including the Theban Mapping Project, based at the American
University in Cairo.
This technology can be used to create interactive lessons within Second Life and
other virtual spaces called Croquet and Project Wonderland, Mr. Walsh said.
Those three environments make their code freely available to the public, so
people can easily tailor the environments to their own needs.
Gene Koo, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law
School, followed up on that point. At the meeting, he described how students at
Emerson College and Boston residents were using Second Life to foster civic
engagement. They are using the virtual world to design real public spaces,
including a park that will be located near Harvard's campus expansion in the
Allston neighborhood. And they recreated Boston's subway system to provide
tours of the city's neighborhoods. Their Boston Island in Second Life was formally
presented to the city's mayor last week.
New Frontiers in Games
At the meeting, Jeff Orkin, a researcher at MIT's Media Lab, discussed an online
game he had created called the Restaurant Game. It uses artificial intelligence to
mimic the experience of being in a real restaurant as either a waiter or a patron.
Mr. Orkin collects and organizes huge amounts of data about people's
experiences in the game to develop automated responses to players' remarks or
questions. If someone was about to start a job as a waiter, he or she could play
the game and be more prepared for work. Similar games could train workers for
other types of jobs, Mr. Orkin said. He is co-chairman of a group that is
developing open standards and best practices for Immersive Education.
But not everyone thinks that encouraging students to play online games is a
good idea. Michael Bugeja, director of the journalism school at Iowa State
University, said video games do not help students handle real-life challenges.
"Education and entertainment are two different processes," he said. "They
require two different interfaces. Our whole society is being eroded by
entertainment."
Still, he said, Mr. Walsh's idea of walling off parts of virtual worlds for educational
purposes is a "step in the right direction."