Moving between virtual and real worlds: second language learning through massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs)

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) bring players together in a large virtual community. This type of online gaming can serve many purposes such as entertainment, social interaction, information exchange and education and is now an integral part of many people's lives particularly the younger generation. This research study investigates the use of openly available MMORPGs to supplement second language teaching for higher education students. MMORPGs provide informal virtual worlds in which students can communicate in their second language with people from across the globe. The research approach combines ethnography and action research in the virtual and real worlds. In the real world the researcher observes the interaction with the MMORPGs by the students both through their informal discussion in the classroom and through screen video captures of their game play in the MMORPG. In addition the researcher takes on the role of a character within the MMORPG allowing for observation inside the virtual world from the viewpoint of another game character. Through action research, the researcher observes, plans and then interacts with the students' MMORPG characters within the game. This enables the researcher to provide anonymous but tailored support to the students including advice on the game play, a confidence boost where needed, a friendly face where needed and some support around language issues. In the real world, action research is also used to provide tutorial exercises and discussions based on the students' experiences with the MMORPG, facilitating further enhancement opportunities for their language development. This paper concludes that MMORPGs provide a safe, relaxed and engaging environment in which students can practice and improve their language skills

Maximising Social Interactions and Effectiveness within Distance Learning Courses: Cases from Construction

Advanced Internet technologies have revolutionised the delivery of distance learning education. As a result, the physical proximity between learners and the learning providers has become less important. However, whilst the pervasiveness of these technological developments has reached unprecedented levels, critics argue that the student learning experience is still not as effective as conventional face-to-face delivery. In this regard, surveys of distance learning courses reveal that there is often a lack of social interaction attributed to this method of delivery, which tends to leave learners feeling isolated due to a lack of engagement, direction, guidance and support by the tutor. This paper defines and conceptualises this phenomenon by investigating the extent to which distance-learning programmes provide the social interactions of an equivalent traditional classroom setting. In this respect, two distance learning case studies were investigated, covering the UK and Slovenian markets respectively. Research findings identified that delivery success is strongly dependent on the particular context to which the specific distance learning course is designed, structured and augmented. It is therefore recommended that designers of distance learning courses should balance the tensions and nuances associated with commercial viability and pedagogic effectiveness

Maximising social interactions and effectiveness within distance learning courses : cases from construction

Advanced Internet technologies have revolutionised the delivery of distance learning education. As a result, the physical proximity between learners and the learning providers has become less important. However, whilst the pervasiveness of these technological developments has reached unprecedented levels, critics argue that the student learning experience is still not as effective as conventional face-to-face delivery. In this regard, surveys of distance learning courses reveal that there is often a lack of social interaction attributed to this method of delivery, which tends to leave learners feeling isolated due to a lack of engagement, direction, guidance and support by the tutor. This paper defines and conceptualises this phenomenon by investigating the extent to which distance-learning programmes provide the social interactions of an equivalent traditional classroom setting. In this respect, two distance learning case studies were investigated, covering the UK and Slovenian markets respectively. Research findings identified that delivery success is strongly dependent on the particular context to which the specific distance learning course is designed, structured and augmented. It is therefore recommended that designers of distance learning courses should balance the tensions and nuances associated with commercial viability and pedagogic effectiveness

An Information Diffusion-Based Recommendation Framework for Micro-Blogging

Micro-blogging is increasingly evolving from a daily chatting tool into a critical platform for individuals and organizations to seek and share real-time news updates during emergencies. However, seeking and extracting useful information from micro-blogging sites poses significant challenges due to the volume of the traffic and the presence of a large body of irrelevant personal messages and spam. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework to overcome this problem. By analyzing information diffusion patterns among a large set of micro-blogs that play the role of emergency news providers, our approach selects a small subset as recommended emergency news feeds for regular users. We evaluate our diffusion-based recommendation framework on Twitter during the early outbreak of H1N1 Flu. The evaluation results show that our method results in more balanced and comprehensive recommendations compared to benchmark approaches

Using massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) to support second language learning: Action research in the real and virtual world

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) create large virtual communities. Online gaming shows potential not just for entertaining, but also for education. The aim of this research project is to investigate the use of commercial MMORPGs to support second language teaching. MMORPGs offer a digital safe space in which students can communicate by using their target language with global players. This qualitative research based on ethnography and action research investigates the students’ experiences of language learning and performing while they play in the MMORPGs. Research was conducted in both the real and virtual worlds. In the real world the researcher observes the interaction with the MMORPGs by the students through actual discussion, and screen video captures while they are playing. In the virtual world, the researcher takes on the role of a character in the MMORPG enabling the researcher to get an inside point of view of the students and their own MMORPG characters. This latter approach also uses action research to allow the researcher to provide anonymous/private support to the students including in-game instruction, confidence building, and some support of language issues in a safe and friendly way. Using action research with MMORPGs in the real world facilitates a number of opportunities for learning and teaching including opportunities to practice language and individual and group experiences of communicating with other native/ second language speakers for the students. The researcher can also develop tutorial exercises and discussion for teaching plans based on the students’ experiences with the MMORPGs. The results from this research study demonstrate that MMORPGs offer a safe, fun, informal and effective learning space for supporting language teaching. Furthermore the use of MMORPGs help the students’ confidence in using their second language and provide additional benefits such as a better understanding of the culture and use of language in different contexts

Emotional persistence in online chatting communities

How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the emotional expressions (positive, negative, neutral) of users, we revealed a remarkable persistence both for individual users and channels. I.e. despite their anonymity, users tend to follow social norms in repeated interactions in online chats, which results in a specific emotional "tone" of the channels. We provide an agent-based model of emotional interaction, which recovers qualitatively both the activity patterns in chatrooms and the emotional persistence of users and channels. While our assumptions about agent's emotional expressions are rooted in psychology, the model allows to test different hypothesis regarding their emotional impact in online communication.Comment: 34 pages, 4 main and 12 supplementary figure

Analyzing Human Communities using Fuzzy Graphs

Fuzzy Graphs are used for analyzing and modeling levels of informationin real-time systems (simple or complex networks). A community(network) is formed when human eProfiles (nodes) have links (edges)and interactions with each other. Considering multiple medium ofcommunications like email, chatting and short message service (SMS)in the network, it will make the graph more complex (dense graph orforest). To address this issue in this paper analyzes those humancommunities with the help of fuzzy graphs and highlights the status ofindividuals in a human community. Max-Min Composition (fuzzyrelation) was applied along with statistical analysis on fuzzy graphs ofhuman community. Interaction Index (II) is used to estimate the intensityof communication and Role Index (RI) determine the participation statusof individual in a human community. All this analysis will be used inour research and development of Community Algorithm, which will beused as a tool that will help in identifying, analyzing, manipulating,monitoring, and transforming human communities based on humaneProfiles

Virtual Reference for Video Collections: System Infrastructure, User Interface and Pilot User Study

A new video-based Virtual Reference (VR) tool called VideoHelp was designed and developed to support video navigation escorting, a function that enables librarians to co-navigate a digital video with patrons in the web-based environment. A client/server infrastructure was adopted for the VideoHelp system and timestamps were used to achieve the video synchronization between the librarians and patrons. A pilot usability study of using VideoHelp prototype in video seeking was conducted and the preliminary results demonstrated that the system is easy to learn and use, and real-time assistance from virtual librarians in video navigation is desirable on a conditional basis