 at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses in training and development. He has consulted with many Fortune 500 organizations in enterprise performance improvement and learning solutions, including a e-learning design and development, distance education, organization development, and stand-up training. His research interests include the role of trust in the client-consult relationship. He will be presenting students' avatars, pedagogy, psychology, and learning. Welcome, William. Thank you, Dylan, for the introduction. I appreciate that very much. I'm just reading through the chat here, and I thought maybe, just so that I know, okay, so Sue is on now. If you don't mind, maybe, why don't, can we just text into your local chat if you can hear me speaking? Just type in yes, if you can hear me speaking so that I know how to go about this presentation. Okay, Alina can hear, I think, and so can Sue, right? Testing one, two, three. I'll just keep chatting here. On and happy. Yay. Yay. Okay, great. All right. That's excellent. Okay, then I'm going, I'll get rolling here, and I'll do this cognizant of the fact that it appears that I'm the only thing that stands between you and a dance party, so I will try to keep things moving along and flowing and all that kind of stuff. So if you have any questions, you know, as we go throughout here, just feel free to either type them in or however we go about that, and we'll just kind of do it on the fly fairly informally here. A little bit about myself first, as Dylan mentioned, I teach at Oakland University, which is, I'd say, a mid-sized university in Michigan. We've got about 20,000 students, and I primarily teach e-learning, the science of instruction, and courses like that, so what my focus is today is talking about my experience with using avatars in my classrooms, and some of the psychological stuff that goes on beneath it and is kind of the foundation for, I think, allowing it to be such a powerful and meaningful instrument in terms of instruction. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. I started getting into virtual worlds about seven years ago in Second Life. I was just very intrigued by it, and I went there and kind of explored and, you know, flew around and went into all sorts of sims, and one day I stumbled upon a sim, and the owner came up to me and said, hey, we're doing this experiment. Would you be interested? And basically, it was these little mini meditations that we were practicing through the day, and then we'd come and talk about it. So we were in these small group settings, and we would just talk about our experiences, and I was just blown away by how powerful and meaningful it all was. And so that's kind of the onus that I had to consider using this kind of a forum for my classroom activities. So that's kind of the background to this. So here is the agenda for what I'm going to talk about. It's really the use of avatars in any kind of a setting, but primarily, you know, in my instance, it's in an instructional setting. And the psychology around that, some of the pedagogy involved with the classroom and the decisions that I make and how that affects and impacts learning. Then I'll show you an example, and we'll kind of walk through one of the instructional that we actually do in the classroom. So before I hop right into it, as another aspect of helping me know kind of where we're at as a group, how many of you out there are instructors or facilitate online sessions in virtual world so that I can kind of get a feel. You can just type into your chat I am or I do or something like that. That would help me know where you're coming from. And I can focus the presentation a little bit on that. So just go ahead and did Professor Chatterbox this. Okay, great. Okay, and those of you who aren't, a lot of people are, okay, great. So I know that at least I did understand where I'm sort of letting you know. Okay, so let's hop into this and get going. So the last presentation was great. The builds were beautiful. A lot of it was about the actual innocence layer. What I'm focusing in on is a little bit more of what goes on in the human interaction between human beings as avatars. So what I do for my classes is I actually create the avatars for my students. I use the diva distro, which I know allows for users to create their own avatars, but I want to make the learning curve as little steep as possible. So what I do is as I create the avatars. And one of the things that I do try to do is I do try to customize the avatar to the correct gender and to the correct, I just mean, you know, the physical ethnicity of the students. After they've been in for a bit, I want to go ahead and customize their avatar. But right out of the gates, I try to make things good to go from the get go. So all I have to do is really just resin world right, sit. The purpose of our group discussions. Okay, so this is an avatar that I created and pieces that I got, I got from the great developer community who put stuff out there for him. Okay, chatter box sound is cutting in. Okay, well, I will just continue forward. And hopefully it'll it'll clean itself up. And if it does not, then we can go from student. And now, now I'll talk a little bit about this, this idea that I had mentioned before about some of the psychological behind the use of avatars and type in here, local chat, are we having problems with the sound, and I'll try to get feedback on that. Okay. Okay. So, in terms of avatars and psychology, I'm going to talk about three things briefly. And this idea of social prayer, cognitive science, the science about avatar and educational interaction. What we're really talking about is the sense of being. Social presence can occur when we're having a phone call with our friend. So, we don't have to be physically co-present. Okay. So, I am back on and talking here, and sounds a little bit better. Okay. So, I'm going to talk here and just continue on here. So, I'll continue on. Hopefully, this is better. Okay. So, the idea of, okay, great. Good, good. So, social presence is kind of obvious, I think, to those of us who are here at this conference. We kind of get that. A subset of the idea of social presence is this idea of virtual presence. Great. I'm glad that this sound is better. Good. So, virtual presence is the psychological sense of being present in a virtual learning environment. And this parallels, in my mind, kind of what is called the suspension of disbelief. You know, if you go to a play or you go to a movie, and you're so involved in it that you kind of forget that you are not there. You are in all reality there, because all of the stuff in between has kind of melted away. And this is something that can happen in the virtual world, as I think most of us would concur. So, throughout my presentation, I've got some pictures of my class setting. And I break up my class into small groups, because I think it becomes unmanageable at a quantity of over eight. So, I generally only go up to eight in the small group conversation. So, what you'll see are these images. And then I'm going to read to you actual comments made by students after the class. And I should say at this point, too, that my class is a graduate-level class. It's a 600-level class, which at Oakland University is as high as you can go in the master's program before getting into a PhD program. So, these are last semester, or maybe second to last semester. Grad, they're fairly mature in their, at least in their education, but more work full-time as well, are generally alive. They are. So, anyway, again, so go ahead and read this comment, but it has to do with the idea of presence. I felt even though we weren't there, I felt like we actually were. Like, it's not just typing. Like, you could see the class sitting together. I can focus so much better than if it's just a typing session. So, really, what this is doing is this is comparing in the student's mind the difference between doing something like a live chat, where it's just text and boxes kind of going by, or even something like an asynchronous discussion forum type of a situation or activity. So, this idea of co-presence makes you feel like you're there and you're actually part of the conversation, which is really key to affecting the learning outcomes. So, here's another comment, and I'll read this one as well. I just feel like, I don't know. I don't know if it's truly that they don't see themselves as an avatar. I know that feels really deep, but I feel like people felt really comfortable to just type it and give themselves a chance to edit and, like, think about what they wanted to say and have a chance to kind of defend what they're trying to put out there. So, just like being in a classroom setting or face-to-face, there it's conversational and you can make your comments and you can defend your comments and you can interact with other people and follow the flow of the natural flow and the organic flow of the conversation. One of the real powerful things, though, about this idea of presence is that an avatar is, in a sense, the great equalizer. And to students, that's a really key thing. By that, I mean that if you are in an avatar, everyone is kind of the same. So, in a classroom, you might have the student that typically might sit in the back row, not raise their hand as much or make comments or ask questions as often as the student that might sit in the front row, who might be very boisterous, very outgoing, and being a big part of the class. And as a class develops through time, those behaviors only become the greater. The quiet students become more quiet. The more outgoing students become more outgoing. And to my experience, the avatar-based instruction, at least in a small group setting, is the great equalizer to that. And I find that the students who are more quiet in the classroom tend to be much more outgoing and tend to be much more involved when it's in a small group setting as avatars. So, that's, I think, a real key takeaway from my experience in terms of using this kind of technology. So, this was mentioned in the keynote yesterday, but the idea of social learning. We all learn socially. So, this is nothing unique. We all also can learn, obviously, just as an individual on our own. But social learning is extremely powerful. So, it is, by definition, a change in the learner's knowledge due to interacting with other people. So, when we can enhance and augment interacting with other people, then that would be a very powerful tool to use. So, here's another comment that I'm going to read to. In real time, in the chat, it's fast. And there's always new subjects and people talk about a lot of different content that was covered in the chapter. So, you really have to be knowledgeable about it and familiar with it in order to be able to participate in the discussion. So, one of the things that I love about this comment is that what it's saying is that you have to be prepared. So, in essence, this is actually kind of like a flipped classroom. The class that I run is a seminar type of a class at the graduate level. So, what I require the students to do is they have to do readings prior to coming to the class session. And then in the class session, one student will be assigned to do a very brief written presentation that I distribute to all the other students via a note card. The students will all read through that. And then we will discuss that as basically a conversation starter. But if a student hasn't done the reading or hasn't done the work to prepare, it becomes obvious pretty quickly because it's not like you can have the book next to you and try to be involved with the conversation because it's going to pass you by. So, you really have to be knowledgeable about it and familiar with it, as the student says, in order to keep up with the conversation. So, one of the key things here that occurred to me is that there's a theory in psychology called discourse theory. And discourse theory, I think, plays a very significant role in students being avatars. So, basically, discourse theory explains how, as human beings, we have a very powerful reaction to being involved in a conversation. So, if somebody looks at us and says, hi, and looks us in the eyes and asks us a question, then deep within our psychological makeup, we have a heightened awareness. We are more present in the current situation, in the current context, and we are more immediately aware of this communication. So, discourse theory suggests that once, as human beings, we are involved in this kind of a situation, everything is kind of heightened. So, discourse theory, I think, is vital in terms of instruction and also in terms of how it would work with avatars. So, in essence, discourse theory talks about social cues, like maybe making eye contact with somebody would be a social cue, saying somebody's name would be a social cue. So, if we have some kind of an instructional moment and we can put a social cue in there to use somebody's name, like, hey, Jim, what did you think about this topic? Well, Jim's attention is going to be heightened. We've used a social cue and what we do is we activate a social response within Jim. So, Jim has this heightened social response because this has been activated. What that yields is an increase in Jim's active cognitive processing. So, basically, his brain kicks into high gear to be able to deal with whatever this engagement and this communication is going to require of him. Now, in an instructional setting, if we can follow these steps, then what it can do is it can yield to an increase in the quality of whatever our learning outcome might be. So, obviously, in terms of avatars is if we have this presence, this virtual presence, and we can utilize these kind of social cues to really engage our students, and maybe that's even the big topic of what this is all about is about student engagement, then we can enhance the quality of what we're trying to teach them in the first place, which is to enhance the quality of their learning outcomes. Okay. So, what we're looking at now is the third part of what I wanted to talk about with psychology, and this is basically where modern cognitive science today can contribute to how we look about instructing students and just learners overall. Cognitive science offers these four aspects of cognitive science, and the first is the idea of dual channels. And I'll be really brief on these four things, but they're very interesting to me anyway, and I think they're very important in terms of putting together instruction for students. So, the idea of dual channels has to do with the fact that in our brain, we actually have two distinct channels that process information as it comes in. The first channel focuses on the image side of the world, really. So, for example, I'm looking outside my window right now, and I have a maple tree out there, and I see these green maple leaves. So, the channel of my brain that focuses on images and the perception of images and the processing of that is looking at those leaves and seeing green leaf. Now, the other side of this dual channel is the side that processes things in terms of verbal information. So, this can either be through the auditory channel and hearing things, hearing words, or through reading text. So, both of those things, reading text and hearing words, goes through the second channel, this auditory channel. So, on one channel, we have images, and on the second, we have verbal. And in summary, what cognitive science research tells us is that as instructors, if we can effectively combine these two channels together and focus on one specific piece of information, we're more apt to successfully have whatever learning outcome we're looking for. So, that's the idea of dual channels. The second idea here is limited capacity, and this is really important because it's super easy to inundate our students or learners or really anybody who doesn't have the same level of knowledge or experience that we have. So, back in the 1950s, a professor from Harvard, named George Miller, wrote an article about the number seven and how seven seemed to be this magic number in terms of the way that we remember things, that seven seems to be really about as much as one person can hold in their working memory at any one piece of time. And it doesn't seem like a very big number, does it? But Miller suggested that really seven plus or minus two, so anywhere from five to nine, is all that are limited minds, are limited working memory in our mind can hold at one time. Well, recent research has actually downed that number to about four plus or minus two. So, what this more recent research is saying is no, really guys, it's like somewhere between two and six pieces of information is all that distinct information is all that one person can really hold at one time. So, we need to be aware of that simplifying things, chunking things, and presenting things in a manner that's easily and readily digestible is very important. Okay, number three here has to do with learners being active. Now, yesterday in the keynote, there was talk about constructivism. And in essence, what constructivism talks about is how the individual learner constructs their own reality and constructs their own learning. Well, that's not so different from what cognitive scientists talk about in terms of active processing. So, the first thing that happens is selection. And selection is basically that of all of the myriad things that are going into our senses at one time, we need to be able to select in on the one thing that it is we need to focus on, or else we will be easily overwhelmed. Organization has to do with how we then process that information and categorize it in a way that's meaningful to us. Integration is then how we take that now and store it into our long-term memory based on something that we can relate it to, like either our previous experience or knowledge that we might hold that can help to ground that information. And then lastly is transfer, which is basically how can we apply this in the real world, either immediately or perhaps in two or three months down the road in an effective manner. Okay, so there are in essence three demands on how our learners process information. The first is what's called extraneous processing. And as the name would suggest, this is what our learner has to go through that's extra. It's extraneous. So, it's outside the core processing that we want a learner to do in order to learn whatever it is we're teaching them. So, for example, when I have students come into my Sim for the first time, almost 90% of what's going on is extraneous because they're trying to figure out the interface. They're trying to figure out how to walk. They're trying to figure out how to sit. They're trying to figure out all that kind of stuff. And all those things are outside what we're really trying to learn there, which is the content of the course. So, for their immediate purposes, it's extraneous. The essential processing is that which contributes to them learning the content. So, this is really the vital part of it. The stuff that needs to be done within their own mind in order to learn what they're learning. The third part is the generative processing. And this one is the one that I believe that avatar use for students is actually really powerful because this has to do with a student's motivation. It has to do with how much energy they put into their own learning and how involved they are in their own learning. And I think that the social presence that avatars allow for and the great equalizing that avatars allow for can yield to a very positive effect on generative processing. So, generative processing is this processing that's aimed at the deeper understanding of the core material. And it's created by the learner's motivation. So, this is the key one that I think we can really affect with using avatars in an educational situation. So, what this at least created in my mind was this idea of an equation. And that is that we have these three demands on our learner, these three processing requirements. One is this extraneous processing, the stuff that we don't really want. The second is the essential processing, which is what we really need. And the third is the generative processing, which students need so that they can learn better. Now, the sum total of all these things, they're all demands, right? But the sum total of these things needs to be less than the individual's cognitive load. So, in other words, if a student says to you, oh my gosh, I'm so lost or I, there's just so much information here, I just can't keep up. What's happened is that the cognitive load of the student or the learner has been exceeded. And if the cognitive load has been exceeded, then the learning outcomes have been negatively affected. So, through instruction, what we want to do is we want to minimize that extraneous stuff, maximize the essential stuff, and really support the generative stuff. And the good news is that through instruction, we can impact these things, through the way that we design the instruction and through the way that we facilitate our courses. Okay, so how are we doing out there? Are we good? Are we asleep? Are we thinking about the dance party? Okay, I'll just keep on cruising along here. Okay, so let's talk a little bit now about pedagogy and how this is going on. Okay, great, thanks, Professor Chatterbox. Sometimes it's nice just to have some kind of feedback. I'm just looking at a screen of avatars and chairs. Okay, thanks, Sue. Okay, so in terms of pedagogy, there's three things that I was going to talk about briefly here. The idea of blending, which we probably, some of us would have experience with the idea of blending instruction, timing, how to prepare students for this kind of a thing, entering a virtual world, some tips on facilitating this, and then lastly and pretty importantly, the idea of context and how that affects avatars and the learning. So what I did is I, in one of the teachers, one of the classes I teach, rather, I use a book by William Horton who's an e-learning designer and he has a checklist. So what I did is I took his checklist and I just changed it a little bit to talk about avatar use. So I guess what I'm doing is I'm giving a verbal citation to William Horton on this slide since I don't have, I don't have any text up there. So before one would consider using an avatar for a class, it might behoove them to run through a checklist similar to this to make sure it's the right thing to do because it has to really be all about the outcomes. And if using avatars in a classroom can help achieve those outcomes or enhance it, then that would be the appropriate use. But there's obviously several situations that I could think of offhand where it probably would be better not to use an avatar. The reason that I enjoy it for my classes is because in the small group discussions, I think it really engenders thoughtful sharing of information through chat, which I think is very powerful. So the first question is, is avatar use appropriate? The second is knowing your audience. Yes, Uncle Edelman. I think that thinking deeply is very important. And I think slowing things down through a chat, throwing the pace down and allowing people the chance to think deeply about it is one of the things that's enhanced through using avatars. Understanding your audience, who are they? I would do this very differently for a graduate class than I would for an undergraduate class. Clarifying the objectives is extremely important, too, whether it's a business setting or whether it is an educational setting in academia, trying to relate them to running workshops in a business setting. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yes, a lot of I think in terms of media design, the psychology that I'm referring to would affect your media design and using this in a business setting. Understanding the learner's prerequisite skills and that people are going to be at different levels. In our master's program, I have students who are maybe as young as 25, all the way up to the age of maybe, well, at least into their 60s and their mid 60s. So obviously, we have tech natives and tech non-natives. So that has to be addressed differently. Setting guidelines, which I'll give you an example of in a few minutes. Communicating how evaluation works. Which is very important because the quality of the discussion in these live settings is what I grade. So it's important that they know that so that they can proactively determine how they're going to be communicating. And then lastly is this is very active on the part of the instructor is active monitoring and active guiding throughout the process. So, okay, talking about the blended aspect here. So blended instruction combines face-to-face classroom methods with computer-mediated activities to form an integrated instructional approach. When I first started doing the avatars for this graduate seminar class, I did all but three sessions as avatars in the SIM. So our first class we met face-to-face, our last class we met face-to-face and then once in the middle. And I found that that was too much as avatars. So the second time I ran it I went 50%. 50% face-to-face and 50 face-to-face and 50 as avatars. And that felt so much better not only to me but to the students as well because the different environments obviously lend themselves to different social cues and different ways of sharing information and sharing thoughts. So here's one of the quotes from one of the students. I like that it's balanced. I like that there's time where you're in class so you get those networking and those other opportunities to learn from each other. So in class you have more of that bond those relationships that you've formed. I have another student who who made a quote that I don't have in this presentation but she basically said that it's really nice to be able to see people's faces in the real world first. So then when you come into a virtual world you can see the face behind the avatar and that makes that makes for a more strong connection between that person. So there's some benefits to doing to doing this live you know at the same time. And that is that we have the potential to learn from others in a more profound way than something like let's say a discussion forum. Also the facilitator is present and the facilitator can answer questions as a content expert in terms of the subject matter but also just helping to facilitate. And this also positively affects motivation. Okay so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to I think go ahead a few slides. So one of the things I wanted to point out though is is the importance of student preparation. And for those of us who've done this this is probably old hat but one of the one of the researchers into this this kind of work has suggested that there's three dangers. The first is the idea of structure. So structure is the navigation and the graphical user interface and things like learning how to walk you know in a virtual world. So being able to prepare students that way is is actually pretty vital. Response strategies has to do with making sure that students understand the expectations placed upon them about how they should respond and how they should act and how they should communicate within these new environments. And the use of tools has to do with how are they how are they expected to and what are the I guess the potential opportunities for them. So what I have is appearance of your avatar. The turn into changing out your your clothes and whatnot class during a meaningful content experience. So right around a campfire and this stands up changes appearance and is changing his wigs and his change his jackets and all this kind of stuff. The use tools was inappropriate and it falls on me as because I obviously didn't clarify it enough to him that that's an inappropriate use. We need to clarify these things setting ground rules. The first and best place for that is in the syllabus but also we need to do it in class during during an in class session to prep or and in the in the virtual world. And then if we have a content management system like Blackboard or Moodle or whatever the course site is also another place to communicate that. So what I wanted to do is just share with you the chat guidelines that I have as a note card in class that I hand out to the students during the first class. So as we're sitting around the campfire I'll just drop this note card on them and ask them all to read through it and then we'll discuss it so that we have a clear understanding of what the proper chat guidelines would be. I think it does both. The question is does the environment level the field or just change the field? Most certainly it changes the field because the social cues are different and more focused because there's fewer of them. You know the social cues would be basically calling somebody by by name in the chat window or by looking at them with the avatar. So those two things I think are the most powerful social cues and the quality of how you type your your verbiage is also very important. So it definitely changes it but I think it's an equalizer too in that students aren't aware or they're not worried so much about maybe their physical appearance or the way they speak. I've had ESL students do the avatars, English as a second language and they have found it to be actually somewhat freeing because they were less concerned about their accent being not understood. So I think it's a little bit of both that's a that's a very interesting question and then I also share with them just some common chat acronyms because some of them might not know this. Okay so one of the things I wanted to share too are just some of the facilitation tips. So in these settings truly the instructor is way more of a guide than the traditional lecturer. So that's one thing to to keep in mind. The guidance is through reflection asking thought-provoking questions providing immediate feedback and using humor as possible. So here's another quote. It depends on the instructor if you're engaged or not. So if it's just one question and everyone answers I feel that those answers can get lost but if you directly asked one learner the question and they answer I think that keeps the learners engaged. And another quote. Another thing I liked about the bonfire discussions was for me to take time to read somebody's thought and then type again. A lot of times I was thinking about it more than I normally would in class where you just you know shoot up your hand and say it out loud shooting bullets. Okay so I'm going to show just a couple more quotes of students and then we're going to call it a presentation here because we are running out of time. Okay so here's another set of quotes. Whoops let me go back one. Okay hang on sorry. Okay here we go. So here's a student. If I miss something well if it's online I can go back and be like oh that's what that person said. So it's like a dialogue and I can go back instead of having to interrupt the conversation and say wait what did you say? It's like a way of being able to do it on your own. And this is in response directly to the fact that um that you can post your chat logs right into your content management system which is what I do. And then here's a final quote. This was a student who was very surprised after taking taking the classes as an avatar. I actually really liked it a lot. I learned a lot. I was surprised. Okay so that's it. I really appreciate everyone's attendance. Thank you for your patience in sitting through this and if you have any questions or you want to discuss anything I'm happy to stay around before I go out to the the dance party. Okay thank you Bill for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule. This was the last presentation in the education track. You may want to attend the live music closing party which is on OSGrid. Now I've been told in chat there's a correction to the hypergrid coordinates that these ones that I just pasted into chat are the correct ones. So hopefully they are and I'll see you all there. And thank you again to our speaker and the audience. Thank you for attending this conference. It's been a great time. Bye bye.