Virtually Alone - How Facilitated Aloneness Affect Self-study in IVE.

For most learners, appropriate learning climates within spaces selected for self-study (e.g., libraries) are helpful in sustaining self-regulated learning efforts. In order to provide learners with appropriate self-study spaces, we examined an immersive virtual environment (IVE) for English phonemes acquisition practice. Social settings of a learning environment sometimes yield positive effects, but sometimes not. To assess the influences of social interactivity against learner's effort towards his/her persistent skill development, we have conducted exploratory studies. In this paper, we examined self-regulated learning in IVEs that provided little social interactivity. We compared two "alone" environments: a literally solo space and a shared space devoid of communication capability. Participants in the shared space with a silent other recorded quite better scores compared to those in the solo space at the beginning of the experimental tasks.