Learning in Virtual Worlds: A Situated Perspective - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 122

moment a group of students passively receiving
information in a classroom. In this traditional
lecturing model of teaching, students are involved
in activities and, of course, learning; however,
the problem is that they end up building mostly
inert and unused knowledge because the instruc-
tional methodology by which they are learning
basically worries about what is learned, believes
that content is context-independent, and therefore
pays almost no attention to the situation in which
the learning is taking place (Brown, Collins, &
Duguid, 1989). For the situated learning perspec-
tive, learning that occurs in this way cannot be
generalized to everyday situations outside the
classroom (Hendricks, 2001). Resnick (1987)
compares the learning practices in schools to how
we use knowledge in context outside of schools
and explains the existence of a big gap between
the two, since outside of schools learning is con-
textualized and collaborative, while in schools it
is characterized by students individually acquiring
rather abstract information. This reflection is also
relevant to educational virtual worlds and for this
reason it is usually recommended that they are not
built to merely replicate traditional unidirectional
information transmission learning processes. As
will be explained later in detail, they should be
built, according to the situated learning paradigm,
as online virtual worlds where communities of
practice can flourish or as very carefully designed
learning environments where learners engage in
authentic learning practices; authentic in the sense
that they simulate the problem solving activities
of a community of practitioners.
From a cognitive perspective, the situated
learning paradigm basically claims that learning
is intricately related to the practices and contexts
where it happens given that all human thoughts are
considered to be adapted to the context in which
they happen (Clansey, 1997, as cited in Driscoll,
2000). In the same sense, Brown et al., (1989)
explain, in their now seminal article, that knowl-
edge is modified by the culture, the context and
the activity in which it is built and used. Brown

et al. see learning as a process of enculturation
because one not only learns the content topics,
but also the cultural aspects of the community
of practitioners, as mathematicians or engineers,
that created that content as their values, signs and
symbols, or their tools and how they use them.
On the other hand, from a more anthropological
approach, situated learning is an “Attempt to
rethink learning in social, cultural, and historical
terms…” (Lave, 1991, p. 64). Specifically, in this
view, learning is understood as active and sustained
participation in a community of practice (Lave
and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998).
Discussing these two perspectives in situated
cognition studies, i.e., anthropological and cog-
nitive, Wilson and Meyers (2000), echoing the
traditional division between anthropology and
psychology (Shore, 1996), make a distinction be-
tween the work done by anthropologists like Jean
Lave who have a more cultural view and consider
that “Knowing, learning, and cognition are social
constructions, expressed in the actions of people
interacting within communities [italics added].”
(p. 59); and the work done by cognitive research-
ers as Allan Collins and John Seeley Brown who
study situated cognition at the individual and social
levels. Also, Barab and Duffy (2000) make a dis-
tinction between the anthropological approaches
of learning as participation in a community of
practice, and a more psychological and educational
approach, which is more concerned about learn-
ing in school contexts and, thus, speak of practice
fields and learning communities. In spite of the
different points of view, these perspectives have
contributed to fundamental concepts for the situ-
ated perspective of learning. Therefore, to better
understand the situated learning paradigm and
how its theoretical underpinnings can be used to
develop MUVEs, in the following sections both
the anthropological concept of community of
practice and the more psychological concepts of
practice fields, learning communities and cogni-
tive apprenticeship will be reviewed. However,
before entering into the analysis of these con-