What is an Immersive Learning Experience in SL and what might it feel like?

Abandonment or enjoyment, or the ability to give oneself in, to immerse oneself totally in, the experience - in short, to live it to its full. No creative activity would ever be complete, or would lead to a meaningful and relevant conclusion without any of the [the following] conditions: Meaning, Questioning, Exploration, Experimentation, Adaptation, Open-mindedness, Insight, Fearlessness, Innovation and Risk-taking.
Creativity in Modern Foreign Languages Teaching and Learning, Margaret Anne Clarke http://complexworld.pbwiki.com/

Immersion is a powerful experience of gaming, and has been mentioned by gamers, designers and game researchers alike as an important experience of interaction. However, when trying to understand immersion for transfer to another domain, it is very difficult to find out what exactly is meant by immersion or indeed even whether the different research on immersion is talking about the same concept.

A Grounded Investigation of Game Immersion, Emily Brown and Paul Cairns http://complexworld.pbwiki.com/

What does an immersive experience mean to me as a learner?

I've been considering how an Immersive experience feels to me as a non MMORPG-er in comparison to the idea of 'stories' on the Complex World wiki. Whilst I can appreciate both these examples, they are not experiences that I would necessarily go out of my way to seek. At my institution I often represent the language learner perspective as an independent learner of Italian, so I began to explore writing on Immersive learning to compare to my own thoughts.

Brown and Cairns talk about the following conditions that are needed for full immersion or Presence to occur in Games, and discuss them in detail in their paper. Basically it involves the following:

• Access e.g. that the style of game appeals and the controls are easily mastered
• Investment of time
• Investment of effort and corresponding rewards
• Emotional investment
• Empathy
• Atmosphere

Obviously there is overlap with other kinds of immersive activity. As I'm not a gamer, the experiences of someone playing World of Warcraft have little meaning or appeal to me. I'm unable to even 'access' the game, I fail on the first hurdle. Personally I don't wish to waste my time learning the rules, I would rather know what they were at the outset and either 'get on' with the game or find a way to bend/break them. Immersive activities seem to me to have similar capacity to lose the self in creative or artistic endeavours, conflict/adventure based games, intensive experiences where you are placed 'in at the deep end'.

Creative or artistic endeavours or those involving other people have far more appeal for me, and interestingly I've found there are a number of ex-MMORPG ers in SL. They have moved world for the creative potential of SL. SL to me seems to address the later immersive aspects such as emotional investment, empathy and atmosphere quite well through its affordances of social interaction, community and creativity. I aim to continue looking at the literature in the hope of finding more work on immersive learning in virtual worlds that involve creative or language learning activities.
I certainly want to explore these further than the small project I currently am running.

SL and learning styles

I'm still intrigued by Johnson and Levine's idea of communicating in 3D in a virtual world* and that of showing. As a kinesthetic learner, I was happily considering this on the bus to work. It's hardly a revelation that something like a virtual world could accommodate different learning preferences, in addition to the necessary language skills such as reading, writing, speaking, but I started to consider Gardner's Intelligences and SL.**Within the space of a few minutes I'd started mapping aspects of SL onto modified intelligences and also to the ontology of our language learning and teaching Learning Object repository.. Though as I'm over this week's word limit I shall save that for another day.

*Lawrence F Johnson and Alan H Levine http://immersiveeducation.org/library/Immersive_Learning-Johnson_and_Levine.pdf

** David Gibson, Clark Aldrich and Marc Prensky, 2007, Games and Simulations in Online Learning