Innovate: Hacking Say and Reviving ELIZA: Lessons from Virtual Environments

[jason]

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Check out Innovate: Hacking Say and Reviving ELIZA: Lessons from Virtual Environments by Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan:

As text-based predecessors to Second Life, MOOs can offer educators important insights on managing virtual communities to create rich, meaningful learning experiences. Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan outline two instructional experiments in MOOs that have implications for current educational practice in Second Life. One involves modifying and modulating users’ ability to speak, first by strategically removing this ability altogether in an attempt to manage information flow and then by adding context-based text to a student’s speech to strengthen the immersiveness of the experience. The second experiment explores the use of chatterbots to deepen the richness and interactivity of a virtual build. While MOOs and Second Life appear to be vastly different technologies, Mazar and Nolan highlight their similarities and suggest that educators can apply the lessons learned from MOO experience to Second Life practice.