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As immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article rep...
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... Indeed, these scholars have also argued that it is the role of technical communicators to look beyond technical principles and develop rhetorically effective, and ethical approaches that promote actual technological usage (Tham et al., 2018). Focusing on students' experience, it is important to gather and learn from "bottom-up" data which provides valuable knowledge for pedagogical models (Lucia et al., 2023). At the same time, researchers and academics need to be wary of ethical issues surrounding emerging technologies that help serve various stakeholders, not just industry leaders (Sun & Getto, 2017). ...
Guided by the scholarly understanding of generative artificial intelligence, this study explores technical writing students’ engagement with ChatGPT during their writing process. This study is informed by the classical five canons of rhetoric, along with the contemporary reinterpretations of the canons. Employing a qualitative analysis of interviews, this study argues that the students’ engagement with ChatGPT allows for reframing and expanding the notions of the writing process and rhetorical canons in the previous literature.
... The rapid advancement of information and communication technologies has ushered in a new era in educational practices, epitomized by the emergence of the Metaverse and virtual reality (VR) as transformative tools in teaching and learning. These technologies are increasingly recognized for their potential to revolutionize education by enhancing student engagement, facilitating immersive learning experiences, and reducing the costs associated with traditional educational infrastructure (Çengel & Yildiz, 2022;Creed et al., 2023;Lucia, Vetter & Solberg, 2023). Indeed, virtual reality platforms, through integrating theory with practice and enabling active student participation, overcome the limitations of conventional online and remote classrooms (Çengel & Yildiz, 2022). ...
... Both Blakesley [14] and Tham [2,10] acknowledge that Virtual Reality constitutes an opportunity in which students can practice both digital and ethical literacies through a critical lens. While learning the mechanisms that underlie VR benefits students in its own right [15], the factors that surround the use of the technology are rich with areas of technical and rhetorical invention for students preparing to enter our field. Miles [16] speaks to the importance of audience and embodiment in teaching students in VR environments, Lueck and Bachen [17] highlight the need for careful consideration of language and vocabulary in designing VR, and Lucia et al. [15] argue that a focus on rhetorical elements of VR and building experiences from the bottom up, rather than the top down, are all important ways to frame experiences for audiences and students working on their design. ...
... While learning the mechanisms that underlie VR benefits students in its own right [15], the factors that surround the use of the technology are rich with areas of technical and rhetorical invention for students preparing to enter our field. Miles [16] speaks to the importance of audience and embodiment in teaching students in VR environments, Lueck and Bachen [17] highlight the need for careful consideration of language and vocabulary in designing VR, and Lucia et al. [15] argue that a focus on rhetorical elements of VR and building experiences from the bottom up, rather than the top down, are all important ways to frame experiences for audiences and students working on their design. Offering a specific strategy for working with students in VR environments, Misak [18] offers the idea of "meta-strategic knowledge" that helps students establish a sense of narrative and place in VR work, and Blevins [19] invites the use of "layers" (communication, social/cultural, etc) to investigate how different needs, contexts, and processes overlap to facilitate an experience for the audience. ...
... For them, the technology is often very visible and not always functioning as expected. At the same time, users' understanding of what VR should be-a seamless technology that enables immersion and presence-is shaped by industry narratives, which as sometimes also reproduced by users (Lucia et al. 2023). VR is thus not a finished product that might or might not correspond with the needs of user groups but rather something that is constructed in the meeting between different narratives. ...
... Another growing strand of research has attended to the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) underpinning emerging digital technologies in education, often characterized by a tech-optimistic solutionism where the introduction of new technologies in education is seen as a part of societal transformation (Forsman et al. 2023;Rahm 2023;Rensfeldt and Player-Koro 2020) as well as enhancing the learning of individual students (Hrastinski et al. 2019;Tafdrup 2020;Williamson 2018). Some studies within this area have focused on the tensions and negotiations taking place when global sociotechnical imaginaries are translated into local contexts, thus stressing the co-productive elements in future technological development (Lucia et al. 2023;Mager and Katzenbach 2021) 'where improvisation and maintenance are ongoingly emergent' (Pink et al. 2018: 200). ...
... Paradoxically, the idea of being present in one place also meant paying more attention to the environment in which you are physically present than you would in ordinary teaching (c.f. Lucia et al. 2023). To begin with, the VR headsets as such were a very tangible aspect of the experience for the participating students who found them heavy and that in some cases caused dizziness. ...
Virtual reality (VR) in educational settings is often promoted by commercial actors as a way to experience environments outside the classroom and a soon-to-be part of everyday teaching and learning. This study follows the development of an educational software package in a Swedish municipality that combines VR technology with 360° live footage from museums and science centers to enable students to visit these spaces from the classroom via their headsets. By focusing on the workarounds and configurations intuitively performed by teachers, students, museum staff, and technicians in this pilot project, different kinds of articulation work performed to make the technology fit with local conditions are identified, from hands-on repair and maintenance to the facilitation of interaction and presence. The collective effort put into making the technology disappear and create a feeling of unmediated experience or immediacy shows how global imaginaries about VR as an immersive technology are enacted by the participants, at the same time as the work put into the project made them challenge the idea of VR as a new everyday technology. This tension between the desire for immediacy and the hands-on work in the physical environment that goes into fulfilling these imaginaries points to the need for local production of educational technologies that recognizes their co-constructive, embodied, and situated nature.
italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> Background:
Virtual reality (VR) has been studied as a potential tool for preparing technical and professional communication (TPC) practitioners to contribute to emerging technologies. However, no present research in TPC has focused on the methodological value of VR as a sociotechnical research site. Therefore, this study aimed to reveal the methodological value of VR by documenting the processes and methods employed by a student researcher in understanding the ways VR affect community building.
Literature review:
Humanists have explored and theorized virtuality from various perspectives. Social researchers have explored the use of VR in multiple sectors. Yet, TPC has not established a steady agenda for studying VR as a research site.
Research questions:
1. What can we learn from a student researcher's experience of conducting social research in VR? 2. What were the methodological challenges in VR interviews? 3. How can TPC scholars use VR for research?
Research methodology:
Using ethnographic approaches including interviewing, affinity mapping, and reviewing of VR environments, this study collected insights about performing research with VR and its implications for TPC researchers.
Results:
The study's participant shared their experience with using VR to conduct research. Five categorial themes were identified from the interview: interactivity, reach, usability, positionality, and tactics. Four VR applications were reviewed. Additional methodological strategies were discussed to prepare TPC practitioners for using VR as a research technology.
Conclusion:
TPC researchers should consider VR as a viable research technology to expand the methodological means of TPC studies.
