Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Tone Vold
Dewey promotes in particular is building new experiences with the previous experience as a back
drop (Dewey 1938, Dewey 2005, Dewey 2008). In order to draw upon previous experiences, active
participation is required. Involving the participants promotes their engagement, and in other
disciplines, like systems engineering, this will induce a learning process (Sommerville 2007).
4. Structure of the paper
Following this introduction is a description of the experiment, how it was executed and what the
outcome was. The findings from the experiment are discussed before concluding with
recommendations for similar use in the future.
5. The experiment
The LMS Fronter uses a school house as metaphor, offering a “room” for each course. The role play
simulation has also a separate “room” with participants. The participants were listed from one to five.
Figure 2: Screenshot from Fronter - the Tretorget room
The participants were required to create a scenario and roles of their choice. They chose to relate the
simulation to their latest theme; drinking and drug problems at work. The complete scenario was
uploaded to the Archive in Fronter. Triggering the action was an input from the facilitator. The
facilitator, who is also the author, distributed the roles and the groups in different rooms and the
simulation could start. However, the computers were missing the program that ran the chat-function,
resulting in the decision to continue the experiment using a Forum instead. The participants were
hesitant, but gained confidence as the simulation progressed. Using the discussion forum, however,
created some confusion. Instead of using one discussion thread for all participants, it was opened up
for group discussions. This made the communication very difficult to keep track of as there were
several discussion threads running through the same forum. This was corrected by moving all the
participants to the same discussion. An unstable internet connection at this point made it difficult to
continue, and we were unable to establish a back up for this, e.g. a machine to machine network, as
Fronter required an internet connection to function. An overview indicating the time consumption for
the experiment is shown in Figure 3:
Also the idea was to let the role characters chat one-on-one as well as in a common forum. When the
chat was not available this was done with creating folders for different one-on-one-conversations.
6. Findings
The participants reported that role play simulation was engaging. They were engaged in developing
their scenario and roles and found this to be a “a new way of seeing the curriculum” which is coherent
with Dewey’s suggestion of involving the participants (Dewey 1938, Dewey 2005, Dewey 2008). This
is also suggested by Chesler and Fox (1966) to strengthen the value of the role play.
However, when it came to the simulation, they were somewhat confused about the different
instructions given due to the faulty installation on the computers. As a result, the participants felt that
their learning had been hindered. The different discussion threads and the unstable internet
connection breaking the flow of the simulation were prohibiting the learning process. Maintaining a
state of flow is important for the learning process according to Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1990).
Kember et al, states that if this is unattended, it will prohibit learning (1999).
In debrief the participants reported on learning from the workshop where they developed the script.
They found the interruptions and different discussion threads irritating, which disturbed their learning
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