Instructional Design in the Metaverse: Behind The Scenes

 

We should officially start our BTS story with the fact that this writing is a rejected academic book chapter.

😢

Rejected Book Chapter

Yeah. No shame, however, tossed towards the editors.  Their decision gets to be their decision.

I was unnerved that the editors were entirely China-based. I'm not saying one way or the other on that. Just that I'm aware that when political winds change, something that seemed like an OK idea at one point could become a very bad idea later.

It was a bit of a strange call for chapters in the first place, putting ALL of the approval at the END of the writing process. I went through a review and a rewrite only to be informed after 8 months that my writing didn't seem to fit what the editors were looking for.

The only tip I'll give about WHICH book it was was that I wrote a long section on myths and that aligned with the book's title. 

But...in the spirit of how the President of Stanford was brought down by what was originally a blog...I figured I'd go for it with self-publishing. Charging for a book? Right now, definitely not my style. Plus, I didn't want to wait another 8 months for another academic publication process.  I told some of my ID friends that I would "juice it up" for LinkedIn and I did! The original chapter had NO images (strict publisher) and I whooped it up on LinkedIn with all kinds of visual "borrows" to help laymen deal with the academic language.

Key Points

1. Continuing to bang my drum on the 3 characteristics that make XR builds successful: reducing time, money, and/or danger.
2. A focus on plot as the driving theme of an educational XR experience.
3. A focus on purpose at every step in the process.

And these 3 items are not new for me to say. I've been trying to get them into the academy since 2013 with my dissertation, or maybe a little earlier in a few mucky conference papers.

Misinformation

In my opinion, I pissed off some of both the XR research and XR industry stakeholders. And I got two rebuttals. The most attention and chuckling came from me doing a TLDR on the myth section and just coming out and saying

Virtual Reality Causes Faster Learning - Myth

That was surprising-- mostly because I don't expect to turn any aircraft carriers with that language. Did I? Time will tell.

Indeed, support for and any engagement with the articles dropped off over time. It was as though literally if one posted ANYTHING with the word Metaverse it in, a whole crowd of whoopdeedooers would drop by, hit the clap button, wish you well and...disappear.  I mean I felt I wrote some uplifting, helpful, and cheap (for the price) advice in the latter articles and there...crickets.

Coda

There is too much XR-for-education misinformation going on out there for me to remain quiet on some of this shit.

Just this morning, I woke up to find fresh serving in my LinkedIn feed.  It's like I want to take a break from writing but the crap keeps flowing in the door.

 

In one sentence, nearly every good research rule is broken:

The numbers show that virtual reality in the workplace can improve communication, togetherness, output satisfaction, and the experience of working together in virtual workshops.

"The numbers show" - that's an appeal to research results.  What they mean is THEIR numbers from THEIR study which was not really structured as research at all. It was structured as a rah-rah-sis-boom-bah don't-we-love-the-newest-shiniest-thing data collection exercise.

"Improve communication" - how? how measured?

Improve [implied] togetherness - how measured?

Improve [implied] output satisfaction - that is a "like" study, which means nothing to productivity. Tricky there....using "output" to make you think these might be widgets. Nope.

Improve [implied] the experience of working together in virtual workshops.  You know what ALSO improves the experience of working together in virtual workshops? Free food.

All that implication was a bit of a grammatical somersault but alas, it is what it is. 

Hopefully if you understood my point, you'd see that these "numbers" refer to novelty effect.  Pretty much on the nail head.  People had fun because it was new. It won't always be new, so be careful. 

AI

Because I wrote and published this article series in 2023, a valid question must be asked: 

Did I use AI at all in the writing of this?
Answer: Yes. And I'll tell you exactly where.

When I was proofreading myself (so long after finishing writing), I wanted to check on a somewhat novel phrase that I was using (coining?) just to make sure that my intended meaning matched what others might think it means.

I asked Bing to clarify the difference between these 2 phrases:

• Non-cognitively comparable methods
• Non-comparable cognitive methods

Sure enough, Bing helped clarify that the 'non-' in front is the item negated. That is:
Non-cognitively comparable means that something is comparable but the DIFFERENCE is in the cognition. That's exactly what I meant; the brain burden is different.  This occurs when studies try to compare textbook learning to VR learning. It's non-cognitively comparable. Therefore, null results. It's like dividing by zero.

Non-comparable cognitive methods assumes that both methods are cognitive (yeah, duh) but that they are not comparable. No, that's NOT what I meant. People try comparing like crazy, even if I don't like.

So I stuck with my original writing and phrase: non-cognitively comparable.

And that's the only AI I knowingly used. It's possible that Google Scholar had some AI with reference writing?? But I don't know that. That's sort of pre-AI because really a reference is just an act of putting the right thing in the right place with the right formatting. It can be driven by code...not by some sort of intelligence.

I did use Midjourney to make the artwork but that was completely separate from the writing (and was really fun and educational!)

Conclusion

In summary, in over 12,000 words, is there anything more I can say that I didn't cover?

Yes.

I sincerely hope that my freely given advice is not lost on decision makers. I constantly write for someone with her hands on a multi-thousands or multi-millions of dollars budget  and she needs to KNOW WHAT TO DECIDE when she gets an XR or virtual reality for education proposal on her desk.

I wrote all of this with NO tie to money whatsoever. I'm not employed. I do not work for a company that will sell you XR.  I'm not working as an instructional designer pushing XR choices on my bosses.  LinkedIn articles, unlike Medium articles, provide NO pay-per-click (although, to be fair Medium pays less than pennies per click..so comparing pennies to nothing is a bit of a low blow). I do not have a monetized YouTube account. I don't have anything social media wise that makes me money.  I'm "employed" at my own Consulting business but that is just a front to make me "look" employed to LinkedIn. I've done no work for pay in 2023. Actually, during the writing and publication, I don't own a car so I used the public bus and I utilized the provisions of a food pantry.  

I have nothing at stake to sway a person one way or another. I'm simply calling out where the research points. I do hope it will be of value to someone.

Here's my LinkedIn video summary of the 8 articles. In under 3 minutes, you can get it all! The bad news? It will come at you VERY fast.