Abstract
Prior studies have shown how knowledge diffusion occurs in classrooms and structured small groups around assigned tasks yet have not begun to account for widespread knowledge sharing in more native, unstructured group settings found in online games and virtual worlds. In this paper, we describe and analyze how an insider gaming practice spread across a group of tween players ages 9–12 years in an after-school gaming club that simultaneously participated in a virtual world called Whyville.net. In order to understand how this practice proliferated, we followed the club members as they interacted with each other and members of the virtual world at large. Employing connective ethnography to trace the movements in learning and teaching this practice, we coordinated data records from videos, tracking data, field notes, and interviews. We found that club members took advantage of the different spaces, people, and times available to them across Whyville, the club, and even home and classroom spaces. By using an insider gaming practice, namely teleporting, rather than the more traditional individual person as our analytical lens, we were able to examine knowledge sharing and diffusion across the gaming spaces, including events in local small groups as well as encounters in the virtual world. In the discussion, we address methodological issues and design implications of our findings.
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Notes
The only exception to this would be learning from an online written record of insider knowledge, namely, an exceptional cheat site where they might be listed as part of “newbie” hints (Fields and Kafai 2007). Based on analysis of the data where we specifically looked for how and whether members used cheats, we are very confident that club members did not learn about teleporting from cheat sites, so it must have been learned from others more directly.
Note that in Whyville as opposed to most massively multiple online games (MMOGs) or chat spaces, there is no window on the screen that keeps a chat record for a particular space. Once something new is typed in a person’s chat bubble, or once a person leaves a location (as in the case of teleporting), the chat disappears. Thus, no one on Whyville can actually see a teleport command because the person disappears before the chat would have appeared.
Assembling conversations in logfiles is difficult and time consuming. Because logfiles are listed in order of time stamp and potentially 60 school members could have been logged into Whyville at any given time, we had to filter out those who were in the same virtual space on Whyville and then determine whether they were conversing with each other.
Cf Rodney Jones’ work as described in Leander (2008). Jones certainly studied learning across a large group of students, but not in the detailed way that we have–piecing together conversations and events that took place in multiple spaces.
While we cannot say for sure that the tweens were at home simply because they were not in class or the club, the opportunities for them to play on Whyville as 9-12 year olds in places outside of school and home are few and far between, based on our knowledge of the activities of youth at the school.
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Acknowledgments
The writing of this paper was supported by a grant of the National Science Foundation (NSF-0411814) to the second author. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of NSF or the University of California. We wish to thank Linda Kao for documenting club activities in field notes and Tina Tom for help logging the video data. Many thanks also to Melissa Cook, Maria Quintero, Michael Giang, David Feldon, and the LTRG research group at UCLA for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Fields, D.A., Kafai, Y.B. A connective ethnography of peer knowledge sharing and diffusion in a tween virtual world. Computer Supported Learning 4, 47–68 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-008-9057-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11412-008-9057-1