The description below is of my research for my PhD. To find out more about the research I do as part of my job at the University of Coventry follow the link to my staff webpage (link disabled).. 

PhD Study - Learners' Experiences in Mediated Environments

If you are trying to develop an understanding of how people interact and learn in a mediated environment the literature can seem very fragmented. There is the educational field which has mainly looked at asynchronous computer-mediated communication. There is also places like MIT that have looked at teleoperators. People studying online gaming have also explored these sorts of interactions. There are therefore lots of different models, and terms, to draw upon which don't seem to have been linked together. Even when working in the same field, researchers have often created different terms for the same thing, and the same term for different things. My goal with this PhD was to firstly find a way to join up all of these different models and ideas and fit them into a coherent framework. I've been lucky enough since starting the PhD to meet three researchers that had already begun this synthesis as part of their theses. They are Claus Knudsen, Hilary Thomas and Ken Newman to whom I'm very grateful for granting me access to their work. I'm drawing on their work to create a further synthesis, as well as, of course, a lot of ideas of my own. Some of the key books in my study are in the bibliography, and the framework is elsewhere in this portfolio. An early version of this framework was recently presented at Networked Learning 2008 and has been published in their conference proceedings, which can be reached at this link.

The original plan was to observe and talk to some students who have experienced learning in these environments and then see how well my model fits their experiences. If I found a systematic descriptive framework that always worked, then I anticipated that this could be used by teachers to design better learning experiences, and provide a shared understanding and language to describe their experiences.

However, once I began the research I found lots of other researchers were putting together guidelines for teachers. I instead began to focus on the role of presence in the learning experience, and soon discovered that it plays a central role. Not only that, but I found that students develop progressively deeper degrees of presence over time, and so activities inworld need to be introduced at a time that students have acquired the necessary degree of presence. 

The machinima, framework and more detail about the research findings can all be found by following the links on the left.

Main Supervisor:

Dr. Michael Hammond

Director CeNTRE (Centre for New Technologies Research in Education) 

Co-supervisor:

Dr. Nicholas Lee