Connected Learning Summit 2019

Research has shown that learners’ real-world identities and virtual identities have a significant impact on educational outcomes. The process of establishing a virtual identity can not only reveal aspects of a learner’s real-world identity, it can also influence the way they interact with a piece of educational technology. In this workshop, we will ground a discussion of virtual identity in three immersive, educational artifacts: Cellverse (Thompson, Wang, Roy & Klopfer, 2019), Passage Home VR (Olson, 2019), and AIRvatar (Harrell and Lim, 2017). Cellverse is a cross-platform, collaborative game where pairs of students diagnose and treat a diseased cell. With respect to identity, the aims of the work are to support learners’ self-image as scientific thinkers, to support the development of a professional identity, and to support the legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice. Passage Home VR is an interactive narrative VR game that operationalizes a novel computational model of racial and ethnic socialization (RES) (Hughes et al., 2006) as a step toward improving approaches to virtual race and ethnicity representation in video games. AIRvatar is a tool for monitoring, collecting, and storing telemetry data developed to study real-world and virtual identity phenomena. As part of the NSF-backed “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation” project, AIRvatar was used to study the impact of virtual identities on educational outcomes. Workshop attendees will participate in discussion-based activities and engage with several interactive system demos. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring laptops to the session.