The Metaverse as a Virtual Site of Research

• In Event: Dreams for Digital Spaces: What Shapes the Worlds of Children, Educators, and Researchers?

Abstract

This paper ‘The metaverse as a virtual site of research’ is underpinned by following the questions: How might we think differently with born digital and digitised data? What if we built new dataverses to help us see through data differently while reworlding data from site to cite? What is important to retain and keep as a source of knowledge for future generations? If digital data a new cultural heritage of life, how can we ensure that it is not threatened or undervalued? How can we leverage digital and virtual technologies to innovatively map and build research publics? What role do virtual galleries and digital museums of research play in creating new worlds for future audiences?

Creative educational researchers are faced with ongoing shifts in their ways of knowing, being and doing as the impact of COVID-19 continues to make an impact on scholarly processes and practices, as well as research translation and dissemination. Many continue to challenge what constitutes research as they strive for more nuanced understandings of how-to co-construct new knowledges with communities. As educational researchers seek out new places to present creative research and co-create stories to expand ways of knowing, they have encountered alternative, virtual and immersive worlds that might be reimagined through advancing products and technologies. The innovative, virtual, and immersive have brought about new forms of dissemination to research teams in education that go beyond traditional academic publishing norms to consider impact in authentic and community-based sites beyond academia. This catalyst for change was spurred on by the extended pandemic lockdown period in Melbourne, Australia (the most locked down city in the world), which forced researchers to explore virtual worlds for exhibiting and disseminating research.

In this presentation we speculate through the outputs of two research projects: 1) a digital artist-in-residence and data scientist collaboration funded by the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, and 2) a speculative a/r/tographic project created to house a world of climate, art and digital activisms funded by an Australian Association for Research in Education grant. As interdisciplinary collaborations of artists, scientists, data workers and digital placemakers, both projects take up a speculative approach to creative research, pushing the boundaries that surround digital methods, post humanities, and immersive practices in educational research.

We present the design and build of a meta-dataverse as research assemblage, constellation and digital research architecture to show what happens when education research goes ‘meta’. The metaverse ‘a quasi-successor state to the mobile internet’ (Ball, 2021) is a rapidly emerging cultural and technosocial phenomena with deep potential for mobilising the creative act of research. As the metaverse gains prominence as both place and metaphor – a collaborative tool used to create immersive virtual realities – we argue the metaverse can be transformative, as a multimodal form of engagement and pedagogical site in educational research.

Authors

• Kathryn S. Coleman, University of Melbourne
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Belton, University of Melbourne
  Presenting Author

• Jessica Laraine Williams, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne
  Non-Presenting Author

• Neda Sajadi, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne
  Non-Presenting Author