Serenity - Week 2 Reading Summary

Applying Constant Comparative and Discourse Analyses to Virtual Worlds Research

This research article had two goals, the first was to look at which analytical approaches are best for dealing with domain specific research questions within Second Life. Though this was not specifically drawing any conclusions about Second Life itself, I chose it in order to better understand what methods I might use in my own assessments within the program, as well as to get a better understanding of the scope of research that can be done. The second, and more minor goal was to look at students' reactions to a Second Life learning experience.

The research itself was a case study of students learning about Second Life and its educational potential, in which all the classes were taken through Second Life as well as having weekly blogs on their experiences. These communications were then (after being transcribed, in the case of the audio) compared for constantly occurring themes. The main ones found were frustration, appreciation for the program, and socialisation. Secondly, a discourse style of analysis was used to look at how and when expressions of frustration were used. 

From this article, I did learn a number of things that could be helpful in the future, such as what recording software might be useful and other audio programs to use in the event that the Second Life speaking interface fails. Unfortunately however, I felt that in the end, it didn't offer me the critical analysis of different analyses that I was expecting. That said, there were several other interesting points that I found. Though not to do with the topic of analysis, this research found that students were more vocal with their frustrations to do with the topic at hand than they might be in a real world classroom, as well as a strong aspect of peer-to-peer assistance. The researchers offer no reasoning behind either of these occurrences, however, I believe that the first point happens due to the sense of safety that using an avatar gives a person. Just like how users in Second Life feel more comfortable dressing in ways they would never do in reality, these students felt more at ease voicing their unhappiness with some event within the classroom. Though with more aggressive players this may lead to unwanted behaviour (Trolling, griefing, etc), with more shy students this environment could help them to open up to discussions and only help their learning capabilities. As for the peer-to-peer assistance, the research suggested that the majority of it was happening through private messaging. This makes sense, as within a real world classroom, students are unable to freely assist each other without risking interruption to the lesson. Second Life, through its multitude of communication methods, allows many different conversations at once, and if the majority are text based, gives the user time to go over anything they might have missed. This allows the students to freely communicate with each other while the lesson takes place, though this does have the negative possibility that the students may become too focused on their own conversations.


Reference 

Leong, P., Samuel, R. H. J., and Boulay, R. (2010). Applying Constant Comparative and Discourse Analyses to Virtual Worlds Research. Journal of Virtual World Research, 3 (1), 3-26