Almost at the end…

This is the last week of my blog for this course. At the beginning, I was tasked with identifying an area of interest and, over the course of the semester, doing research into that topic. I restate my initial topic here:

My premise: There is bias in the classroom, be it conscious or unconscious, related to demographic factors such as race, ethnicity, age, and gender.

My hypothesis: Using avatars for students and teachers to represent themselves in an online classroom environment can, at least in part, offset some of the bias.

In my last blog I discussed the premise and found ample sources to support the supposition that bias in the classroom does exist, based on demographic factors. Today I will explore some of the research that has been done to create a classroom using avatars.

As I continued to research this topic over the past seven weeks, I found work done on bias in the classroom and work done on creating a virtual classroom using avatars to represent students. However, I did not find any completed research that addressed the question of whether or not the use of avatars is an aid to offsetting bias. I did find one very interesting piece of research about the topic but it is presently a work in progress. I will discuss that research in my next blog entry.

I did discover that a number of university programs and museums are developing the pedagogical powers of avatar worlds. In general, the following are required:

• resources (building a complex avatar world requires either a lot of money or a lot of free labor)
• extremely fast Internet access speeds
• an avatar voice technology that allows users to communicate with the spoken word
• advances in the programming of bots so that users can interact in a complex way with the avatars they encounter in the virtual world.

Dennis Beck at Boise State University did a study entitled Effects of detailed customization of student avatars on teacher expectations of students. Unfortunately, Beck approached the issue from a perspective that was opposite my perspective. He studied whether a student’s choice of avatar created teacher bias. I hope to see whether using avatars can help avoid bias that might exist in “real” life. Also, Beck’s study had very little statistical evidence to support his conclusions and the study was not dated, although it included many references to other works dating from 1979-2006. Thus, I conclude that Beck’s study is relatively recent.

Another very interesting study was by Joel Foreman from The Technology Source, a peer-reviewed bimonthly periodical (no longer in existence) whose purpose was to provide thoughtful articles to assist educators as they work to integrate information technology tools into teaching and into managing educational organizations (from http://technologysource.org/article/avatar_pedagogy/). Foreman described:

Avatars98, the first virtual conference of the Contact Consortium. Produced by Bruce Damer (the leading authority on avatar worlds), the conference connected global locations, provided an exhibit hall, featured ‘speakers,’ and was attended by 4000 people—and all of this took place (so to speak) on the computer screens of the thousands of geo-distributed individuals whose avatars came together in the virtual conference hall.

The Contact Consortium is a global forum for virtual world cyberspace, formed in 1995. When I went to the Contact Consortium and followed the link to Avatars98, I was rather surprised to see pictures of the conference which took place in Second Life that looked exactly like the Second Life I entered eleven years later! Check it out at http://www.digitalspace.com/papers/av98ars.html.

While I did not find any specific research that addressed the issue of whether or not using avatars in a virtual classroom can help reduce or eliminate bias in the classroom, I did learn that the technology for such a classroom is clearly available and ready to use. Now it is up to me to try to implement such a classroom in my college and follow up with a study that assesses the results!

References:

Avatars98 from Digital Space at http://www.digitalspace.com/papers/av98ars.html. (Retrieved April 17, 2009).

Beck, D. Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Technology,
College of Education, Boise State University.
http://74.125.113.132/search?=cache:I7J6mwaLvMAJ:vwresearchersgroup.pbwiki.com/f/DennisBeck.ppt+avatar+classroom+bias&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a. (retrieved April 17, 2009).

Contact Consortium at http://www.ccon.org/. (Retrieved April 17, 2009).

Foreman, J. Avatar Pedagogy. The Technology Source. From: http://technologysource.org/article/avatar_pedagogy/. November/December 1999. (retrieved April 17, 2009)