Writing and Learning Support in the Multi-user 3D Croquet Environment

Mark McCahill, Director, University Technology Development Center
Bernadette Longo, Assistant Professor, Department of Rhetoric

This paper describes a project to develop learning resources in an open source, virtual environment. The presenters obtained extensive feedback on this environment in Spring 2005 through a semester-long collaboration with 17 graduate-level information design students who provided extended focus group response on the question of how Croquet could be used to support learning objectives. After many weeks of this feedback, the presenters developed a prototype writing tool in Croquet that encourages visual learners to reconceptualize a writing task as the manipulation of textual objects and revision as an opportunity to restructure those objects. In this collaborative environment, writers can experience the social construction of ideas and texts while also being able to participate in (re)constructing their open source environment.

The prototype writing tool described here approaches the teaching and learning of argumentation as an opportunity to construct textual objects in a series of studio spaces. Writers can construct texts as discrete objects and then place these textual objects in various relations to one another. Writers can thereby explore textual revision in more depth and with more consequence than typically attempted in scroll-like, two-dimensional word processing environments. Collaborative writing and revising in the Croquet environment gives writers the ability to enact the social construction of knowledge that has been a theoretical underpinning of current understandings of writing and communication practices.

Plans for further developing these learning support tools call for expanding the learning support environment with additional tools and testing this environment in two Rhetoric courses in Fall 2005. Through this extended test period, the developers will have the opportunity to collaborate with users in a 15-week participatory design phase. At the end of this phase, the developers expect to have greater understanding of user attitudes and behaviors in the Croquet environment, as well as a greater array of learning support tools.

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