Could virtual training really replace face-to-face human interaction in career development? There are all kinds of schemes to perfect simulated training environments for the workplace – get a computer programme to create a virtual mentor to help employees with scenarios like conducting job interviews, and you save money on expensive human trainers – particularly significant for the voluntary sector. A nice idea in theory, especially in these financially precarious times, but are machines really good enough at chiming with human behaviour to be effective as trainers? A team of researchers from across Europe is trying to crack that through an initiative called ImREAL. Dr. Vania Dimitrova from the University of Leeds School of Computing tells us more about the project.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00cx67g/Digital_Planet_11_01_2011
www.imreal-project.eu

These games have learning goals and pre-defined structure to achieve the pedagogical goal, but in addition are adaptive and interactive and most importantly they provide enjoyment, pleasure, motivation, gratification and emotion, in order to achieve learner engagement and involvement. Games create simulated environments that facilitate immersion, allowing learners to explore alternative approaches to situations virtually, in order to directly experience practical and emotional consequences of their actions. Through these approaches, GBL allows learners to directly though virtually experience the real-world by developing their awareness of consequentiality through doing and experiencing. For example, SGs can combine a wide range of different kinds of inputs and outputs for understanding complex social issues like poverty or immigration. This requires adopting multiple viewpoints and scenarios to analyse cause and effect. SGs provide an environment for active, critical learning, allowing users to explore skills, methods, and concepts rapidly within a safe experiential environment designed with behavioural learning components. The potential learning outcomes include changes in participants’ behaviour, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and/or levels of functioning.

For educational settings, stories are a valuable resource for learning, especially when applying role-based and problem-oriented learning models. They activate emotions and the possibility of identification, they deliver detailed answers to specific questions. Stories are always holistic. They do not transport just factual knowledge, but connected knowledge and support the building of ‘significant learning’. Stories give learning a meaning. Learning based on Storytelling can be even intensified if combined with Game-based Learning.The process for collecting and transforming stories to a game is a delicate and most challenging one. Depending on the game game types, e.g. role-based, exploratory, narrative and experiential gamest the applied storyboarding approach contrasts with the game factor, four dimensions are important to take into account:

•Accuracy and trueness: how well the story in its different aspects (e.g. characters, chronology of events; learning contents, lessons learnt, etc.) can be transposed into the game;

•Exactness of information: A story reflects the lived experience of an individual, depending on the knowledge of the teller, circumstantial information (e.g. historical and political time frame) can have a higher or lower degree of exactness;

•Learning output degree: how much information is inherent to a certain story and how much enrichment still needs to take place in order to tranform a story into a rich learning element?

•Game & fun elements: In a serious game, game and fun elements are of equal importance as the learning element. The gaming and learning balance is a key requirement to a serious game.

Depending on the story and game type the four dimensions are more or less emphasized and due to delicate interdepencies changes in one dimension lead to variations in the other three.

But how to do it? The use of advanced learning and communication technology for the sake of the personal development of seniors it is a feseable and very promising way. Older people are among the target groups that qualify most for technology-enhanced learning:

• eLearning comes to people and not vice-versa. This aspect addresses seniors’ frequent mobility constraints due to physical impairments, domestic responsibilities (e.g. taking care of relatives) or living outside urban areas where ICT- training offers are available;
• eLearning works best for those with variable free timeslots. Post-professional life is often characterised by free variable daily rhythm and plenty of leisure activities. In these cases, asynchronous eLearning offers are extremely flexible;
• furthermore, it is a fact that, due to their life experience, many seniors are experienced in self-management and motivated to try something new, a fact that well supports the demands of eLearning;
• eLearning enables people to choose their own learning speed, as they are not driven by others, and it enables them to repeat things as often as they wish. These factors effectively support the changes in memory processing that occur as we get older. For example, older adults have difficulty in novel situations in which they must respond flexibly to memorise things;
• in addition, it should be emphasized that mentoring and tutoring can be done much more individually in eLearning. A factor that again adapts to the individual needs of older adults;
• competitiveness and pressure to perform amongst course participants, which is often seen as rather a problem in face-to-face offers, is almost non-existent. The pressure of having to keep pace with other participants declines significantly in virtual learning environments. This aspect is of major importance since third agers tend to have less self-confidence and are more afraid of making mistakes. In learning processes, fear leads to increased activity in the amygdaloid nucleus, which decreases cognitive processes;
• mutual support amongst participants in virtual learning communities is one further positive aspect. Community building is supported by personal and technical assistance. Learners are engaged in the whole learning and teaching process and gain self-confidence.

[Source: Held, P. et al [2006]: Gutachten zur institutionellen Verankerung vonAngeboten und zur Bereitstellung entsprechender Bildungsorte und Lernweltenür eLearning im Alter. ILI-Institute für Lern-Innovation, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Adapted accoding to the results of the project eLSe-Academy]

In an intercultural environment, the problem is clearly intensified by the respective cultural background of the communication partners. This fact often leads to intercultural misunderstandings that could not be simply avoided by having similar language skills on both sides.

In the advancing European unification process, which welcomes and demands intercultural encounters, inter-European encounters are often affected by misinterpretations of statements and behaviour. Hence it can happen once in a while that the dialogue between a communication enthusiast domiciled in Italy and a verbally reserved Norwegian turns out to be awkward, even though both communication partners constantly strive to make intelligible use of a common foreign language. The one is wary of too much talk, the other of too much silence – a situation that generates emotions that can have an impact on mutual esteem and sympathy, and constantly influence the communication process.

When the actors’ disparate linguistic reference frameworks subjectify the communication process even more than their different cultural areas, communication can become seriously entangled and the potential for misunderstandings can rise exponentially. The American farewell “see you later”, meaning “goodbye”, can confuse and irritate the unsuspecting European quite a bit, especially when no further meetings have been arranged yet.

Culturally determined forms of behaviour can also lead to misinterpretations. P. Watzlawick (1969, p. 20) illustrates this fact by means of courtship behaviour between Englishwomen and American soldiers stationed in England during World War II. The soldiers were of the opinion that English girls are easy to get, sexually speaking. The English girls themselves perceived American soldiers as exceedingly tempestuous. The solution of this interesting  contradiction lay with the culturally determined different order of stages of erotic courtship behaviour. While the kissing stage was supposed to happen very early in the mating behaviour of American soldiers, it came only at a very late stage of the relationship with the English, meaning just before the act. The girls reacted to the soldiers’ premature “kissing initiative” with a premature readiness to surrender sexually.

In order to prevent intercultural communication disruptions, it is necessary for the communication partners to calibrate language, value orientations and non-verbal behaviour. Intercultural communication is successful when the communication partners can also identify with the role and quirks of the others, and understand cultural differences.

Sources:
Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast [2003]: Interkulturelle Missverständnisse in Text und Translation.  Einige Überlegungen am Beispiel des Englischen und Deutschen
(Saarbrücken) http://www.spz.tu-darmstadt.de/projekt_ejournal/jg-08-2-3/docs/Gerzymisch-Arbogast.pdf,
Watzlawick, P. [1995] : Gebrauchsanweisung für Amerika. Zürich:  R.Piper & Co.
Watzlawick,  P;  Beavin, J.H. & Jackson, D. [1969]: Menschliche Kommunikation. Formen, Störungen, Paradoxien. Bern: Huber.
FORAREA, Kompetenznetzwerk für interkulturelle Kommunikation, Institut für Geographie, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg: http://www.forarea.de/
Andreas Hepp, Martin Löffelhoz [2002]: Grundlagentexte zur transkulturellen Kommunikation. Konstanz: UVK-Verl.-Ges. UTB für Wissenschaft.
(by Sonia Hetzner)

http://www.eden-online.org/eden.php?menuId=517

This workshop brings together different research teams and approaches around the topic of Storytelling and Serious Games. It starts with a deep introduction into open burning issues in this area and continues with a hands-on participatory activity to produce a game prototype starting from a given topic (taken from the e-VITA project). After lunch the approach taken by the e-VITA team to design and develop 4 game prototypes will be presented and discussed with the participants and finally an insight on how to integrate educational (serious) games into the learning flow is given.

Work shop Blog: http://pretoria.uoc.es/wpmu/ectel_ws_games/