John Waterworth: "Be There or Be Square!": the importance of feeling present (and absent) in virtual worlds

The seminar will discuss "presence" or, in other words, of "being there" in a virtual world so that one responds as if one's experiences in that world were real, and not synthesised by technology. The notion of presence is capturing the interest of researchers in several fields, including pedagogy, informatics, and media studies. In the seminar, I will summarise presentations and discussions from two recent workshops on the topic, and I will also report on a Greek conference concerned with the educational implications. The second half of the seminar will cover my own ideas about presence, as presented at those events and summarised below.

The rendering of information as objects and events in apparently-concrete three-dimensional virtual worlds has profound implications for the way people relate to information. The importance of these developments for education are obvious, but the benefits are not so straightforward. The hallmark of virtual reality is the sense of presence, the feeling that one is actually there, within the virtual world. I discuss aspects of feeling present, including time perception and bodily responses, and their relation to conceptual versus perceptual information processing. In conceptual learning we typically develop an internal conscious model of relevant aspects of the external world. In perceptual learning we interact with the external world via increasingly unconscious skills. It will never be possible to define presence adequately, but I suggest that it is possible to identify dimensions of variation affecting the overall sense of presence in particular virtual worlds.

What is important in learning depends on what the student intends to do. Often, our evaluations of new modes of information presentation presuppose explicit, conscious, reportable knowledge as the goal. This may bias our interpretation of results in favour of entrenched technologies. On the other hand, exploration is not necessarily the best way to learn about unknown territory; reading a good guidebook may make our excursions more worthwhile. In educational settings, we need deliberately to control, and sometimes break, the sense of presence - to facilitate both vivid experiences and generalisable conceptual learning.

Välkommna!
Per-Olof Ågren