The Dissertation
My dissertation focused on using Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis and Social Network Analysis as potential methods for exploring and evaluating sociability in Quest Atlantis. The Quest Atlantis project built an educational Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game environment with instructional content and a fictional backstory to motivate participant learning. Because Quest Atlantis participants were located in the United States and across the Pacific Rim, a key question that I wanted too explore was what kinds of international contacts were taking place, using three of the multiple communication modes available to participants.
a new population
To date, most of the studies on Computer-Mediated Communication and Computer-Mediated Social Networks in instructional environments have focused on adult learners in higher education. With most of the participants in Quest Atlantis under the age of 12, this study helps to expand our knowledge to include a population that is relatively understudied. Many of the study participants are sophisticated users of technology eager to cross the divide from media consumer to media producer. Computer-Mediated Communication is likely to become a key part of how children build and maintain social networks.
A round rotating house created by a Quest Atlantis Participant
superusers
One key finding is that participation patterns in Quest Atlantis followed Zipf's law with a small minority of participants contributing a majority of the messages this feature of Quest Atlantis participation complicated analysis, and raises some questions about equity of participation.
Boxplot of number of chat messages per participant separated by participant gender.
gender participation
One topic of interest was assessing in what way the gender of participants influenced participation and discourse in the space. Earlier studies of MMORPG found that women were a small but committed minority of players. This study found that female students were active participants in Quest Atlantis and dominated the list of superparticipants. This study failed to find significant differences on many measures of CMC participation between males and females.
social networks
This study examined the construction of social networks within Quest Atlantis across three communication modes. Mail was a CMC mode internal to Quest Atlantis and was primarily used for sending messages within groups. Chat was a short message mode that was used to communicate in real time among participants logged into Quest Atlantis. Telegrams were similar to chat in that they supported very short message lengths, but like mail had persistence and range beyond currently logged-in participants. This study found that the social networks created differed across all three modes. Sharing the same school was positively associated with the number of messages sent between participants in all three modes. These findings generally support hypotheses advanced by Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman that Internet-based social networks expand on existing social networks.
Network map of telegram participation.