March 8, we held our 5th workshop at “Metasuppo Campus” established by Ehime Prefectural Board of Education. The theme this time was “My Favorite Places and Places I Want to Visit”. We then used Google Maps to find places we liked and places we wanted to visit.
The MetaSupport Campus has students who are in the Metaverse platform “GAIA TOWN” as avatars, and students from 8 different locations in the prefecture who are participating using GIGA terminals, seeing their avatars at each location. This makes communication among participants across sites during the workshop difficult, and how to share participants’ activities among them has been a central theme in the design of each workshop.
Throughout the five workshops this year, we have attempted to share activities among participants in various ways, but we have not been able to facilitate it very well. However, thinking about it again, it may be that sharing among participants occurs during the workshops not because participants do activities for the sake of sharing, but because they want to share their own activities with someone else or because they want someone else to share their activities with them.
Compared to in-person or remote workshops, where participants can see how their activities are going, workshops in the metaverse provide extremely little information from the participants. The information shared by the participants, not only among participants but also for those who run the workshop, is valuable information for the workshop to proceed. Therefore, I myself may have been preoccupied with wanting the participants to share information about the activities.
I would like to think for the next fiscal year about designing activities that make people want to share, rather than activities for the sake of sharing. Perhaps participants do not want to design activities that are too sharing-oriented, even though the metaverse is a space with a high degree of anonymity rather than a face-to-face setting. I would like to think carefully about how workshops should be conducted in the metaverse.
You can’t think about workshops on the metaverse without thinking about workshops on the metaverse🧐
You can’t think about the workshops on the metaverse without thinking in the workshops on the metaverse.
We thank the Ehime Prefectural Board of Education and all participants for this valuable opportunity.
We look forward to working with you again next year.