Finland Key Note Resources and Part One of Recap

Here are the links and resources from my presentation at the “Learning in Different Worlds” conference in Lahti, Findland and a small recap which will be expanded later.

The trip started off without a hitch and soon I was in London and then off to the Helsinki Airport and a bus ride to my final destination, Lahti, Finland.

Soon I was out to dinner with our wonderful hosts Georges Segura, Teemu Moilanen, Iikka Kukkonen, Hannu Heinonen, Maria Muinonen and  Sannakaisa Raatikainen.

And, I got to hang out with people who have been impacting virtual immersive environments in a big way for a long time. It was like the ThinkTank of virtual worlds assembled together to discuss innovation, learning and virtual world interactions.

These are the people who have been making things happen in virtual worlds since the beginning–the  Metarati–as Ian calls the group from all over the world which included:

William May with the US State Department who helped to make the Kansas to Cario Project a reality through his early urging of the US Government to leverage virtual worlds, Ian Hughes who dragged IBM into the virtual world space and who has since gone out on his own and is even a TV star in the UK, Claus Uriza from Denmark who runs the widely popular and ground breaking Pop Art Lab within Second Life and the guy who brought us all together Ken Hudson from Loyalist College in Canada who pioneered the use of Second Life for border patrol training and documented specific learning gains using the virtual world (one of the very first to do so).

You can read about Claus’s and Ian’s  experiences here and here.

Here are some photos from the trip. A video will be posted shortly showing highlights from the event. Also, you can see pictures that Maria Muinonen took at http://www.flickr.com/photos/54773073@N07/

Here are my slides from the presentation:

Here are links to  some research which indicates that moving through a computer generated interface as an avatar provides powerful learning stimulus.

Here are some points from an article titled Promoting motivation with virtual agents and avatars: role of visual presence and appearance by Amy Baylor.

1) An experience as an avatar can change a person’s real life perceptions. In a study conducted by Yee and Bailenson (2006) It was found that negative stereotyping of the elderly was significantly reduced when participants were placed in avatars of old people compared with those participants placed in avatars of young people.

2) Watching an avatar that looks like you performing an activity influences you to perform a similar or same activity in the future. In a study, users watched an avatar that looked like them exercising and loosing weight in a virtual environment, the result was that those that watched the avatar of themselves subsequently exercised more and eat more healthy in the real world as compared to a control group. This as reported by Fox and Bailenson (2009).

In similar study, discussed by Baylor (2010), “participants were exposed to an avatar representing themselves running on a treadmill, another avatar running or an avatar representing themselves loitering. Within 24 hours, after the experiment, participants who were exposed to the avatar running that represented themselves exercised significantly more than those in the other conditions.”

As study by Ersner-Hershfield et al. (2008) found that when college-aged students observed their avatar ageing in a virtual mirror, they formed a psychological connection to their “future selves” and decided to invest more money in a retirement account as opposed to a control group.

3) People tend to conform to how their avatar appears regardless of how it is perceived by others. In one study by Yee and Bailenson (2007), participants with taller avatars behaved more confidently in a negotiation task than participants with shorter avatars; specifically, they were more willing to make unfair splits in negotiation tasks. In contrast, participants with shorter avatars were more willing to accept unfair offers than those who had taller avatars.

Additionally, in subsequent research, Yee et. al. (2009) found that behavioral changes originating within a virtual environment can transfer to subsequent face-to-face interactions. In the study, participants were placed in an immersive virtual environment and were given either shorter or taller avatars. They then interacted with a human confederate for about 15 min. In addition to causing a behavioral difference within the virtual environment, the authors found that participants given taller avatars negotiated more aggressively in the subsequent face-to-face interactions with the confederate than participants given shorter avatars.

4.) Interactions with strangers in the virtual world is similar to interactions with strangers in the physical world. Even in the area of racial bias Read about it in Researchers find racial bias in the virtual world. The researcher states that “You would think when you’re wandering around this fantasyland … that you might behave differently, but people exhibited the same type of behavior — and the same type of racial bias — that they show in the real world all the time.” We really do behave in a manner similar to our physical selves in a 3D virtual Immersive environment.

Also read: Accidental Learning and the Power of Stories

You are Your Avatar-Your Avatar is You

A growing body of evidence is finding that strong behavioral and attitudinal changes occur as the result of being an avatar in a virtual immersive environment.

The concept of the “Sense of Self” is a very powerful influencer in the learning environment around virtual worlds.  Check out the book’s web site Learning in 3D at www.learningin3d.info