Part One: How It Happened

While it was happening, my coming to work in educational virtual reality seemed full of the kinds of chaotic serendipity found in James Burke's Connections series (or in those traffic circles in Rome), but now it seems almost inevitable. As a teacher of writing, the challenge has always been to get students to get real: a real voice speaking to a matter of importance to an audience that needs to hear it, as opposed to dwelling on superficial matters of form and correctness. The problem is that students felt issues in their own lives were too trivial or too private, and they would not be listened to even if they did engage in political issues. Inspired by friends who were taking language and anthropology courses that successfully used role playing strategies to create compelling yet safe interactions, we held peace negotiations after having read Leon Uris' Trinity, chronicling the "troubles" in Northern Ireland. In doing this, students got a sense of the most valuable lesson I could possibly teach them: that using language with power and precision can affect actions in the world.

The next level was using the original virtual worlds, text-based MUDs (Multi-User Domains)to create a village involved in the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico. MUDs are ideal for teaching writing. because they have the magical property of creating rooms which can be entered and objects that can be used merely by the act of describing them. We were also able to run the simulation for longer, with greater complexity, because students could plan and create alliances via email. Strikingly, secret alliances emerged between, for example the more traditional clergy and landowners, just as they had in the real situation, though these were not detailed in the reading.

Although this may have been cutting edge from an educational point of view, MUDs could not remain compelling to students who grow up with video games. Serendipitously (apparently), the admissions folks at my university about this time recreated our entire campus--hills, redwoods, and buildings--in virtual reality so distant students could get a sense of the campus. About the same time, I was reassigned to do outreach to high schools that were too far away for the regular visits (my students tutoring and mentoring there and the high schools students, many who had never been on a college campus, or even knew anyone who had coming to visit us) which were possible at closer high schools. Thus some students and I developed eCollegE (eeKOLogee), the first college devoted to ecology.

I chose the environmental theme because it is the focus of the first quarter orientation course taken at my college at UCSC, also because it is so interdisciplinary as to include all high school subjects, and because it is one of the few political issues that students can become impassioned about (and indeed, unless it is addressed, none of the others will matter much). Moreover, the battle to save the earth is fought via words and research. Information on how to visit eCollegE is at http://people.ucsc.edu/~pmmckerc/vc8main.html

Part II: Why It's Important

More serendipity: in general, my studies in rhetoric sought to understand why language (according to the American Burke, Kenneth) makes "our bodies hop in peculiar ways," such as jumping out of perfectly good airplanes to shoot perfectly pleasant people we may well have enjoyed having a beer with. In particular, I was interested in how metaphor was central in this (how, for example, FDR convinced a wary isolationist nation to enter WWII by likening it to lending a hose to a neighbor whose house was burning). What I realized in building eCollegE, while pursuing my fantasy of a situation that students would demonstrate their skill with language by writing their way out of a jam, is that it enabled the embodiment of metaphors. For example, by entering the Situation Room in eCollegE, one becomes a powerful head of state, getting briefed with the latest and best information and scenarios in order to deal with a crisis, in this case the environment.

But we also have metaphors within metaphors: Bucky Fuller asserted that if we could just see the whole world, we could care about it and act accordingly. Thus all the materials on the lefthand wall (as well as the multimedia room beyond) literally allow us to see the entire planet in realtime, via live web cams, high-resolution satellite images and data in 3D showing pollution and the planet's "vital signs" (for example, the "dashboard of the planet" site offers continuously updated statistics on population, education, economic and other relevant factors). Above your head floats an enormous globe that you can fly around and through; the red flashing hotspots indicate an environmental emergency. Should you be inspired to act, general and specific ways are provided.

The best action would be informed, so the front wall allows you to drill down for more information via topic: earth, air, fire and water, as well as by location and species. The room beyond is a sort of Exploratorium, ultimately allowing you to test your hypothesis of what to do about a given problem in a computer-model simulation. For now, the current interactive exhibit, Planet Aqua, allows students to track sea turtles, identify whales, communicate with marine biologists in the field, listen for whale song on live hydrophones etc.

The right wall allows you to teleport to different rooms: a hall of ecoheroes such as Julia Butterfly Hill, who spent two years in an 800 year old redwood protecting it from loggers (she came into eCollegE for a live talk with UCSC students studying the Humbolt "Timber Wars"), a science fair where students can present and discuss their websites, and a Writing Center.

The Writing Center has a more subtle metaphor: it embodies the writing process as ascending stages, beginning with research (although this is available at all stages), prewriting, drafting, revision and editing; if you go the distance, you get to savor a job well done and enjoy the view from the top of the tower. At each phase, famous writers give you tips on how they accomplish a given phase of a project. We also experimented with "bots" (short for robot, AKA intelligent agent. Bots can play quiz games, conduct tours, scavenger hunts and allow users to manipulate objects).

Since many papers tend to get written late the night before they are due, our aim was to create a bot that would help. We already had a "greeter" bot that met you when you entered the world and answered questions. We also had a bot in the Situation Room which could give a short slide show (i.e., written chat synchronized with web page images on the state of the world and how to use the Situation Room), but we wanted a tutorbot for the Writing Center that would do both. So we asked a South American bot designer living in Holland to modify a bot for this purpose, and he obliged (I never cease to be amazed by the generosity of this community). I will be working with graduate students in a new Library and Information Science course in January to further enhance bot capabilities.

In conclusion, I am excited by the prospects of students building learning environments for other students (imagine what students would have to learn to recreate a historical place accurately with some complexity, the mathematical, psychological, and artistic skills required to make a compelling game, and the "people" skills to work with a design group). I also like that I am no longer the judge of a project (the users provide feedback for improvement), but a coach. Nor does using these worlds have to be a solitary experience, in fact we have conferences in these worlds for users in general, and for teachers in particular (See vlearn3d.org). As the online version of the Everquest games shows us, thousands of people can participate simultaneously in worlds of astonishing realism. We just need to offer them something better to collaborate on than killing people.