Mark Childs

Welcome to the ePortfolio of Mark Childs.

I am a PhD graduate of the Institute of Education at the University of Warwick, the title of my thesis is Learners' Experience of Presence in Virtual Worlds. I began this research in October 2005 and completed it in November 2010. You can download it from the link on the left. Just right click on the word "Thesis" and select "save link as". Frpm 31st December 2010 I ceased to be a student at Warwick, and so this portfolio could no longer be updated.

These pages contain information about me, my research, and my personal and professional development. If you have a particular interest in me, my work and my plans, you are welcome to contact me for more information at mailto:mark.childs@coventry.ac.uk or visit me in my Second Life home at http://slurl.com/secondlife/madhupak/104/170/81/

About My Research

Department: Warwick Institute of Education

Research Group: CeNTRE (Centre for New Technologies Research in Education)

Supervisor: Dr Michael Hammond

Research topic: Learners' Experiences of Presence in Virtual Worlds: The first part of the research created a framework that enables the learners' experiences of mediated environments to be systematically described and evaluated.This was then used to structure the evaluation of case studies taking place in an immersive virtual world (in this case Second Life), specifically the role presence has in creating an effective learning experience and the factors that inform this. The conclusions were that presence is essential for effective participation in many learning activities, and can be further enhanced by learners developing a virtual identity and virtual body within these environments.

Funding: I pulled together funding from a range of sources; these were Kaleidoscope NoE, King's College London, the University of Warwick and Coventry University. It was also partly self-funded.

Case Studies: Some of the case studies I evaluated as part of the PhD were taken from the Theatron project, which conducted performance, theatre studies and creative writing within theatres built in Second Life (TM). I've created machinima to illustrate these, as well as a presentation showing the various avatars I use inworld. Other case studies came from sessions friends and colleagues delivered in Second Life. You can look at a Prezi presentation that summarises both the Theatron project and my PhD.