Learning in Dramatic and Virtual Worlds: What
Do Students Say About Complementarity and
Future Directions?
by
John O'Toole and Julie Dunn
A top financial backer has arrived to determine which team
of computer interaction designers has developed the most exciting and
innovative proposal for the Everest component of the Virtually Impossible
Computer Company's Conquerors of the World Series. Tension is high as
the presentations begin, but this tension soon turns to outright conflict
as some proposals suggest George Mallory as the conqueror, and the financial
backer will have none of him. The backer, it seems, has her own agenda
and is determined to allow for only one view of history—the one
that records Sir Edmund Hillary as a New Zealand hero and the only real
conqueror of the tallest mountain on earth. The designers become more
and more agitated until suddenly someone bangs their hand on the table
and calls out, "Hang on… just because you've got the money doesn't
mean…kids need to learn about both these men…they need to
learn about history." With that the drama is cut by the teacher. The deep
understandings about "history's purchased page" that can be generated
when drama and computers are brought together for learning have been made
explicit… but could these same outcomes have been achieved using
just one of these approaches?
Introduction
The research explored within this article was generated as part of the Media
Station, a project funded by the Australasian Collaborative Research
Centre for Interaction Design (ACID), with an overall mission to investigate
the potential of massively multiplayer online games for learning. This particular
subproject, History's Purchased Page, saw researchers from interaction
design and drama education come together with a group of young learners
to investigate their perceptions of the complementarity of computers and
live classroom drama and to brainstorm future possibilities for applying
computer-based technologies to drama-based learning. We sought to discover
the following:
What do young learners say about how they experience and value
learning in a context involving a combination of drama and computers?
What ideas do these young learners have about how future technologies
might enrich the complementarity of this combination?
As the drama researchers involved in this project, we had been experimenting
with this perhaps slightly unusual combination for over a decade by incorporating
computers into a number of our drama units within our primary textbook Pretending
to Learn. Our goal in these experimentations had always been to enrich
the classroom drama experience by taking advantage of the information capacity
of the Internet and other computerbased resources, including databases.
For example, we had used The First Fleet Database to support a
drama unit where the learners take on the role of convicts arriving in Australia
in 1788. We discovered that this material, combined with other documentation
and historical materials available via the Internet, greatly enhanced not
only the historical accuracy of the work but also the level of engagement
experienced by the learners when in role. Therefore, we were very keen to
extend this work by exploring new possibilities and were especially keen
to develop a better understanding of what the learners made of this interactivity.
|
|
