Why is collaboration using Croquet better than wikis and forums?

I am searching for (scientific) papers dicussing benefits of
collaboration using Croquet (or any other suiting 3D environment)
instead of using old 2D applications like wikis or forums. Where can I
find evidence when I say "Using a 3D environment like Croquet for
collaboration creates additional benefits to more traditional tools
(wikis, forums)."

As of now I am thinking of citing Seymour Papert's constructionism and
Donna Harroway's "Situated Knowledge".

If anyone knows of a more to the point research paper, I would be so
grateful! :-)

Thanks a lot,
Marcus

Marcus Lunzenauer wrote:
> Donna Harroway's "Situated Knowledge".

That's of course "Haraway" not "Harroway".. :-)

Hi Marcus,

Well, I don't have knowledge of such a paper, yet here are some of my
thoughts that might help.

The luddite answer might be that immersive 3D is not better than
vector graphics, photos, and text for most things we do today. The
usefulness depends on what the community is creating. For creating
news, journals, documentation, text, movie/TV scripts, conversation
dialogs, reasonings, encyclopedias, source code, and most other text
base community collaboration projects wikis and forums will always be
better ... and those sorts of things are what most people do today.

The population tends not to go shopping in big, collaborative groups
so online 3D shopping is not better than today's 2D shopping which is
based on text and search.

However, as today's gaming generations matures and the amount of
information and rules the world's population will be expected to
perceive, judge, understand, and operate within increases
exponentially, new means of media communication and presentation of
those concepts and the human responses to it will need to be created.
We must learn how to perceive and work within "many systems made up of
many more subsystems". This new media will need to be something
massive, like massive multi-player games (MMOG).

Future shoppers will see the products and services they are evaluating
simulated, animated, and in use in the shopper's own personalized,
tailored contexts before the purchase. It's not just seeing the
clothes fitted on your personal physique, but how it will appear on
location at the dinner party with the other guests who are
simultaneously evaluating their own clothes selection with you.

Here's an older example with which you may have had some personal
contact. When society trains airplane pilots, do they prefer to use
2D, wikis, forums, and text for the best training for flying, for
collaborating with other pilots, and for collaborating with air
traffic controllers on the ground? Or, do they use 3D simulations?
Which pilot would you feel safer with when he controls of the planes
you ride, one that was trained in wikis and forums or one trained in a
flight simulator? Why? Since we have so few crashes considering the
number of planes flying every minute of every day, the simulation
approach seems to work. The same is true with most military training.
Military training, where mistakes can be tremendously costly in a
complex, ever-changing theater of action, is not done with wikis and
forums. They learn by doing and learn from making mistakes in a safer,
simulated environment.

Due to the exponential growth of knowledge and the corresponding
required level of discernment to judge that information and because of
ever increasing time/location constraints, their tolerances, and their
interdependencies becoming more critical, most endeavors in life will
become more and more like piloting a plane or building a skyscraper
(Building Information Modeling) than pushing paperwork as was done in
the past. Old blueprints just can't change fast enough when the
decisions of thousands of people continuously keep changing the
building's design in tiny ways every minute.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_Information_Modeling)

You might check out this book by Clark Aldrich
"Learning by Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer
Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences"
http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Doing-Comprehensive-Simulations-Educational/dp/0787977357/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1205393002&sr=8-1

Cheers,
Darius

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 9:34 AM, Marcus Lunzenauer
<[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi everybody, I am new. Well, I've been reading for a few weeks, and this is my first post. I am working on online math-related or math-inspired miniature social activities. The first few modules of my suite are going into beta just now, so I can't show anything yet. My dream and goal, though, is to have casual multiuser spaces rich in math. "Casual" here means both the level of entry of participants (noobs) and their goals (not necessarily professional or for formal classes).

Marcus, I would look at studies of metaphors and representations, and also of the sense of self, and your presence. 3-d spaces allow for visual and kinesthetic representations of yourself and for the purposes of communication, while wikis and forums are mostly driven by text with occasional embedded multimedia. Being able to manipulate your avatar in space, in relation to other avatars, makes a huge difference for group environments. The simple act of making your avatar face or approach the avatar of the person you are currently addressing changes a lot. Also, the opportunities to use and to manipulate multimedia "within the space" (the quotation marks indicate that "insides and outsides" here are metaphors) create work flow benefits that are even more powerful than having well-stocked and thought-out meatspace collaboration facility. You can look at data for big computer games now making concerted efforts to include browsers and voice chat capabilities and other previously external UIs within the game, to support similar phenomena of the environment immersion and smooth game flow, as opposed to people running multiple external applications with their games.

So, in short, I would look at metaphors, representations, presence, immersion, and flow. Of these things, I am myself most familiar with metaphors and representations studies, because they support my theoretical framework.

Cheers,
MariaD
naturalmath.com

Heyo,

     This is more of a steer than a point.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=alan%20kay

Check vid 1 and 2. 2 applies a bit more. While Dr. Kay was dealing with GUI's at a 2d level it should't be hard to make a case that transfers to 3d. In principle though, wiki's and what not, the web,  is a just a placeholder for the natural evolution of the science...so not a question of better, question of..... keep peddeling or punch the gas.

Important to emphasize teacher responsibility of proper construction of concept.......you can pimp your ride all you want but if it's still popping on four cylinders...then

Danger Will Robinson. Don't waste too much time stating the obvious. If you build it they will come.

wfpi   

--- waufrepi III <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Heyo,
>
>      This is more of a steer than a point.
>
> http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=alan%20kay
>
> Check vid 1 and 2. 2 applies a bit more. ...
I put a segment of this video on my iPhone, the
conflicting brain patches
with the woman's face turned upside down and the eyes
and lips right
side up and the athletically challenged woman learning
tennis
in a half hour or maybe it was less.

That's how much I liked this movie!

Must review it more "on rainy days" :

You thought of it, I did not.

:-(