Gaining Insights Through Immersive Experiences

Lead Presenter: Delia Lake / Linda Morris Kelley

Venue: Lecture A – The Hearth

Second Life offers unique and valuable opportunities for enhancing and deepening learning beyond what is presented by traditional educational approaches. One such method is using avatars in extended immersive experiences to complement learning gained from traditional texts and other media. This presentation revisits four such experiences from the life of avatar Delia Lake.

While an interest to learn more about a particular subject is often the starting place for engaging in an immersive experience, sometimes it happens in reverse. In those cases, the experience of “being there” prompts a desire to learn more about not only the Second Life setting but also real-world counterparts. A well-constructed virtual venue engages people not only intellectually but emotionally and creatively as well. It lays down memories of experiences that cultivate deeper understandings and learning that stick with us. All of us can use this kind of engaged multi-level learning to our advantage.

Objectives:

• Participants will understand the educational value that immersive experiences present.
• Participants will be able to see how immersion can be used to enrich traditional educational media.

Insights Connection:
Using examples from four extended immersive experiences, participants will see how “being there” produces insights and learning that go beyond what is usually gained from reading and other educational media. Additionally, we will discuss how we might translate practices we use in virtual spaces into improved powers of observation and touching experiences in our real-world.

Accessibility: I will use a SpeakEasy HUD Tool.