Graduate Student, Education
Kellogg College
Thesis Title: Conceptualising Learning in Social Virtual Worlds: An Ethnography of Three Groups in Second Life
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Dr Rebecca Eynon
Prof Ralph Schroeder |
About
Wan-Ying's interest in the use of virtual worlds (VWs) for learning, teaching and research developed whilst working on a summer internship project at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2008. She received her MSc degree in Educational Studies from Oxford in 2008, and subsequently, went on to reading for her DPhil. Prior to this, Wan-Ying worked as a Education Officer with the Ministry of Education, Singapore. She is currently seconded as a Teaching Fellow to the Office of Education Research (OER) at National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
Doctoral thesis:
My DPhil thesis examines how people learn in groups in social virtual worlds (SVWs) like Second Life. Central to many activities in social virtual worlds is being part of certain groups. Whilst Lave and Wenger’s (1991) Community of Practice (CoP) model is widely applied in the literature, I argue that it is not applicable to all groups in social virtual worlds. Not all groups process the defining characteristics of, or will necessarily develop into CoPs. Drawing on Mousavidin and Goel's (2009) life cycle model of online groups and Rogoff's (1995; 1998) three planes of analysis: individual, interpersonal and group, I present a framework that will support the conceptualisation of learning in relation to group development and group dynamics in the social virtual world environment.
Keywords: constructivism, learning, cognition, social virtual worlds, Second Life, online groups, Community of Practice, ethnography, group development, group processes, group dynamics
