In which Mr. Drinkwater says a Thing or Two about Immersion

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Education is hearing a lot about immersion and immersive learning, these days, but clear definitions are still a little hard to come by. I want to start with the root concept, and also talk a little bit about the immersive learning process, before we get into the "tools" aspect, which in this case is more a matter of the ways and means to use what's already in the SL environment.

So…what do we mean when we call SL an immersive environment?  What does that mean, for a digital environment to be immersive?  What, exactly, is this immersion thing?  Let's start with the dictionary definition - in this case, the Oxford Concise Dctionary online:

immersion
• noun
1 the action of immersing or the state of being immersed.
2 deep involvement.

So, we need to dig a little deeper - back to the action, which is to say, back to the verb:

immerse
• verb
1 dip or submerge in a liquid.
2 (immerse oneself or be immersed) involve oneself deeply in an activity or interest.
ORIGIN Latin immergere ‘dip into’.

So, the idea of being immersed means being quite surrounded - not only being in something, but being wholly inside it. "She's immersed in her studies" means both that the student we're describing behaves with intense interest and focus, and that everything else as it were recedes into the background for her.

Let's continue to unpack this idea by talking about it vis a vis learning:  when we talk about immersive learning, lately, we're often talking about something in a digital environment. But that hasn't always been the main meaning  - there's an older notion of that kind of education in "language  immersion."  When you learn a language by immersion, it means you don't just sit in a classroom learning about verb forms and constructing sentences; instead, you go somewhere that the language is spoken, and are surrounded by people using it, and that helps you make the transition to using the language , not as a series of separate linguistic entities, but as a tool for doing everyday things…lots of them. Language immersion is a way of helping the student make the jump into thinking in the language, which is what's considered necessary for real fluency.

As far as digital immersive learning, we can pick out a few salient qualities:

First of all, it  uses the ability of environments to supply information, and to engage more of the learner's cognitive "package" than does a traditional read-lecture-and-discuss format.

It uses immersion, engagement, risk, creativity and agency to get a student involved in the activities that lead to the construction of meaning and the creation of knowledge. It's designed "learning by doing"
 
Let's dig a little deeper into that:

Immersion: The environment is multi-faceted, non-linear, "global"; as a learner you're a participant: you interact with various aspects of the environment via tasks and options for behavior. 

 Engagement:  As a learner you have a "self-motivating" or "interior" reason to interact with the environment, and the problems or situations; in short, you become involved with the process

Risk: the environment gives you an experience of cause and effect, actions have consequences, the possibility of a "loss" within the terms of the environment acts as a spur to creativity, and supports involvement with the activity.

Creativity: in learning by doing, there isn't necessarily a right answer. Many paths might lead to a good, useful, or instructive result. As a learner, you have an opportunity to try out options, to forge your own path by exploring.  The process of learning asks you to analyze situations, think imaginatively and construct your own interpretations, and not only your own solutions but also sometimes your own problems.

Agency: As a learner/participant, you're active, testing hypotheses, experimenting with options, seeing results, constructing as well as analyzing.  Understanding that, and how, the environment responds to you is an integral part of the process.

What do we mean by "ability of environments to supply information"?

1. We can see cause and effect - how actions relate to results in time
2. We can use our understanding of spatial relations to engage - humans have a very sophisticated cognitive faculty evolved to navigate in space
3. We can see how things fit together - we all have an innate sense of "this works with that" and we use it to navigate environments all the time. Environments help us think in terms of systems
4. The environment helps us think through a problem, or explore an idea in some less cut-and-dried way. For instance,  it helps us think creatively by supplying us with rich metaphors, or it helps us keep a bigger picture in mind, in short it presents us with useful matter for reflection.

Essentially, you want to be around things that will spur subject-appropriate useful thoughts.

(Compare this to the Classical era idea of  memorization by "loci" -- remembering things in reference to the visual image of a place -- which the Renaissance thinker Giordano Bruno reimagined as "The Palace of Memory. " Tolerable writeup here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci )

How often have you heard someone say something like "When I saw the solution, I realized it had been there all along, I just had to connect the dots." This is the kind of phenomenon I'm talking about. The environment reminds us of what we already know, or connects new information to information we've already assimilated.

Those of you who re familiar with problem-based learning will recognize that immersive learning shares a lot of the same values.  (For a quick précis of problem-based learning, look here: http://www.udel.edu/pbl/  )

For a kind of shorthand, let's say that when you learn from, or in concert with, an environment, you are learning via an experience

I can't put it any better than John Seely Brown does in the forward to Opening Up Education, so I'm going to finish my discussion of "immersiveness" with a long quote
(http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262033712forw1.pdf)

Technology, of course, is key, and I want to dwell on only two aspects of how technology can now transform our learningscape: immersion and intelligent tutoring systems. Immersion is a concept that has received all too little attention in the learning literature. Consider, for example, how every one of us has learned the immensely complex system that is our own native language. We learn language through immersion and desire. Immersion comes from being surrounded by others talking and interacting with us and is furthered facilitated by our deep desire to interact, be understood and express our needs. We learn language fearlessly and constantly. Nearly everyone with whom we interact is a teacher for us—albeit an informal teacher, encouraging us to say new things, correcting us, extending our vocabulary, and so on. This simple form of immersion is fundamentally social in nature.

And that brings us to Macbeth and Macbeth
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Macbeth/44/54/54

We've asked you to explore the Macbeth sim, because it's a very good example of a self-contained immersive environment. It can help students do what we've been talking about, and what every good teacher who introduces students to Macbeth hopes for: it helps a person get inside the play. 

However, not every use of SL as an immersive environment is so self-contained as this, or require the extensive time and thought that obviously went into it. 

Civic and military organizations are experimenting with various kinds of disaster simulations, for preparedness exercises,  in SL. The Nursing education community has also really embraced SL, for training, and uses simulations and environments here for education.  In these cases, the immersion is provided by a pre-assigned scenario, and an environment sufficient to create something of an experience of being in the situation.

It also involves a kind of role play on the part of the participants.

Role play (RP for short) has a very mixed reputation in educational circles, since for some people it conjures up the image of people running around with pointy ears and +5 Magic  Dragon Slaying Claymores ™  But to confine RP to that is to take a very complex phenomenon and reduce it to a single pop culture stereotype.

What I mean by RP is as simple as this: the participants in these exercises are encouraged to think "In this situation, what could I do?  If this happened, what would I do? If that happened, what would my options be?" 

That kind of thinking is pretty basic to human functioning. For instance, it's nearly always involved in any kind of planning when there's uncertainty about what will happen.

And, I will go so far as to say that at the root of that kind of thinking, there's a "what if" that is also part of our engagement with a great deal in the way of the products of the human imagination - literature, theater, all the explicitly narrative forms of art, but also depictions of situations in the visual and plastic arts. I mean, what's one common form of praise for a vivid painting, like Renoir's Wave?  "You can almost feel the spray"  "It's like being  there"

So that's the kind of ability, the aspect of how humans think and act, that we talk about leveraging with immersion and roleplay.

Two very involving kinds of RP that I see developing in SL are Historical or Semi-historical RP, and Literary RP. I bring them up together because they overlap, and because they draw on source materials in similar ways.

In both cases the environments, are constructed to give the feeling of being in some definite milieu, in a conceived-of place, and time:  Victorian England, Versailles, a Dakota town in 1876, the Grey Havens from The Lord of The Rings, the Starship Enterprise. 

This conceived-of place , this locale, is the site of interactions that take place, and the context for the interactions is drawn from the "documentation" for the locale, be it a novel or a body of historical research.

Those of you who have ever visited a re-enactor event, or a historical interpretation center like Plimoth Village , in Plymouth MA, can guess what a great deal of research goes into the "improvisations" of the participants: they research clothing styles, speech, cooking methods, contemporary opinion of world or local events, in short, all the things that make up an historical context.  The same goes for, for instance, actors at Renaissance Faires, who may not be drawing on specific event, but still need knowledge of all the stuff of the history of everyday life to perform their "what-ifs" 

You probably see where I'm going with this train of thought:  this kind of exploration, while not trivial to achieve, is very possible in SL. Although it's easier to do in the digital than in hand-wrought iron and homespun linen, the need for historical knowledge is the same, and therefore the motivation to explore history is the same.

By the same token, if you want to try to imagine what one character from a story, or a story world, would have said to another, you need to deeply engage with the narrative, whether it's a text like Lord of the Rings, a movie like The Seventh Seal,  a series like Firefly, or a mythos like Arthur and Camelot 

So, what are the tools of RP and this kind of creation-focused imagining?

1) We can build environments that put us in mind of our conceived-of place, whether explicitly or merely by indication - that means building in SL, or working with builders

2) We can design and dress our avatars appropriately, when we have determined what that is - that means making clothes, or finding them here, or working with clothes designers

3) We can suit our words and our actions to the milieu - that means, besides typing and talking,  gestures and animations.

Fortunately, there are good tutorials for all of these things - in this case, the skill of the educator is not in the specific techniques of making shirts or buildings, which are merely instrumental, but in composing the learning environment

When we talk about "using the environment as a tool" this is what we mean.  I'm going to return to John Seely Brown, because he just says it so well:

In today’s high tech, graphically rich world we now have almost limitless opportunities to leverage immersion. We can now build simulation models of cites, historic events, atomic structures, biological and mechanical systems to name just a few. Our challenge becomes how to share the vast simulations and data bases that already exist and share them in a way that others can extend, remix and compose them in order to expand their reach and scope. I still dream of a virtual human system where I can explore any aspect of how our bodies function from organs to cells to membranes. There are promising signs, but as of yet we have no real framework for constructing and sharing modules of such a system. But if we can entertain the semantic web, perhaps we could entertain a vast and recursively interconnected web of simulations. No one group can build it all, but many could contribute, including students themselves.

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I remain, as ever

your servant

JJ Drinkwater