Discussion and Engagement in Virtual Spaces

In the last 12 hours I’ve met and held discussions with colleagues in Mexico and the Netherlands. In both cases the mood was quite relaxed and friendly. There were no particular aims or objectives; nor tasks or responsibilities to be “owned.” In the same way you’d have chats at the coffee cart or the water cooler, these discussions were both social and professional at the same time.

The fascinating thing about this is that I haven’t experienced the same combined levels of engagement, lighthearted social interaction and professional discourse elsewhere on the web. Certainly deeper thinking and communication takes place in blogs and synchronous discussion on Skype and Elluminate; but their nature is somehow different – it feels different.

Usage Comparison
Blogs offer reflective space and a forum to house resulting topical discussions via comments – both of which are professionally discursive in their own right, but arguably far less interactive and engaging. This would seem to be due to the largely text-based, asynchronous, hierarchical nature of blogs in which the thoughts of blogger are the focal point and the resulting discussion is more secondary. Moreover, the notion of a shared experience is minimal on blogs, since there is no real way of knowing who is concurrently reading the content. For everyone besides the blog author, the experience feels far more consumptive than participatory, relatively speaking.

With VOIP tools such as Skype and Elluminate, the synchronous nature of the communication gives rise to far greater levels of interactivity than blogs, and with it a greater sense of a shared experience. In the case of room-based VOIP tools like Elluminate, the opportunity to converge on a central space acts as a focal point for a group or network of individuals and can serve to create a sense of cohesion, continuity and community.

In the case of both blogs and VOIP tools however, I tend to engage with the discussion from a largely distracted position in which I’m typically doing several other things at the same time. In the case of Elluminate meetings in particular, I find it all too easy to lose interest in the discussion and fall prey to distraction. When you’re involved in the discussion this mode of communication can be very interactive and engaging; when you’re not, it can become background noise after a while.

Multiple Layers of Interactivity
In SecondLife by contrast you have a highly engaging, interactive environment that supports many levels of discussion – ranging from many-to-many (e.g. local chat in a central square) to one-to-many (presentation), to one-to-one (IM/private discussions).

Importantly, the interactivity is not limited to people in-world, but can include objects as well. This serves to create a far greater sense of engagement, since the user dictates what they pay attention to, where they go, and what they do. The graphical/multi-dimensional nature of the environment is particularly significant in that respect, since the visual elements result in a far more emersive realm than text or audio could possibly create by themselves.

As a result, I’ve found I can’t engage with SecondLife in a state of partial distraction – if I’m logged in, I’m paying attention. To be in-world is to be submerged in a 3-dimensional audio-visual experience of extraordinary depth and diversity, where interaction is both passive, active and interactive.

Implications for Engagement
For me personally, these multi-faceted, multi-layered characteristics have had some very interesting implications for maximising attention span and engagement.

Blog and VOIP communication is largely bounded by the topic of discussion. When lulls in conversation emerge there is little available to fill in the gaps, which can lead to minds wandering to completely unrelated subject matter; hence the importance of meeting facilitators in keeping the conversation moving.

In SecondLife this is less of an issue because so much of what users are exposed to is unrelated to their immediate conversations, which can serve to create a sense of continuity between bursts of discussion. Indeed it can serve to keep a discussion going by introducing a topical tangent, or segue to something else.

In effect there is much less pressure to “get to the point” or achieve a key outcome at the end of the discussion than exists in VOIP conversations or blogs; so interaction can be far more relaxed, conversational and rambling, while maintaining continuous levels of engagement.

Implications for Learning Space Design
If my argument as outlined above is indeed the case (e.g. with others and not just me), it would seem to highlight some important design elements that should be considered during construction in SecondLife.

For example, if a space is intended to serve as a social hub where learner interaction takes place, and the hope is to maximise interactivity and mutual exploration of educational subject matter then planting elements to instigate conversation would be wise. The importance here though would be to maintain the focus in-world rather than directing the learner to external sites, which could arguably break the continuity of their experience and impact on their engagement.

I’ll flag this as something to investigate and post about here later though, since I’d like to look for examples of this in practice first. If you have thoughts on this please make your opinions, experiences, or thoughts known!