Role Play

The roles actors perform: role-play and reality in a higher education context
Matthew Riddle, BA Department of History and Philosophy of Science Faculty of Arts University of Melbourne July, 2006
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts (by Advanced Seminar and Shorter Thesis)
Abstract
This thesis undertakes a description and analysis of the way in which Australian higher education students perform roles through the use of online role-play systems at the University of Melbourne. It includes a description of two case studies: DRALE Online, developed in 1997, and The Campaign, developed in 2003. The research undertakes a detailed study of The Campaign, using empirical data derived from classroom observations, online communications, and semi-structured interviews. It undertakes a qualitative analysis of these data using an interpretive approach informed by models drawn from social theory and sociotechnical theory. Educational authors argue that online educational role-plays engage students in authentic learning, and represent an improvement over didactic teaching strategies. According to this literature, online role-play systems afford students the opportunity of acting and doing instead of only reading and listening. Literature in social theory and social studies of technology takes a different view of certain concepts such as performance, identity and reality. Models such as actor-network theory ask us to consider all actors in the sociotechnical network in order to understand how society and technology are related. This thesis examines these concepts by addressing a series of research questions, such as how students become engaged with identities, how identities are mediated, and the extent to which roles in these role-plays are shaped by the system, the scenario, and the agency of the actors themselves. An analysis drawing on models from social theory and sociotechnical theory allows an investigation of the interpellation of roles, networks of human and non-human actors, the effect of surveillance on individuals and their self-constitution through performance. The analysis finds that individuals readily take on multiple roles through online role-plays, and that this leads to the development of vocational identities. Some of the constraints on actors are self-imposed or hidden, and indicate inscribed social relationships inside and outside of the online systems. As a result of this analysis, the concept of authentic learning and its relationship to ontology is considered, and future work in this area is suggested. This is to certify that the thesis comprises only my original work except where indicated in the preface; due acknowledgment has been made in the text to all other material used; the thesis is 20,000-22,000 words in length, inclusive of footnotes, but exclusive of tables, maps, appendices and bibliography.
The Roles Actors Perform
Acknowledgements
Research for this thesis was supported by The Research Training Scheme from the Department of Education, Science and Training. The project grew out of discussions with Dr Michael Arnold and Dr Martin Gibbs. I am greatly indebted to them both for their encouragement, support and supervision throughout a project that has been unusually drawn out due to my poor health, but was nevertheless very enjoyable due to their considerable understanding and good humour. I would like to particularly thank Dr David Hirst at The University of Melbourne for his friendship and support in allowing me the time to conduct the empirical research. Special thanks must go to a number of my long-term mentors in educational technology, including Dr Michael Nott, Dr Jon Pearce, Prof Shirley Alexander, Prof Carmel McNaught, Prof John Hedberg and Dr Michael Keppell. Without your friendship and encouraging words, I would never have completed this work. I would like to thank all the people I have met over the years at The University of Melbourne through whose work I have learnt so much about online role-plays, including Prof Martin Davies, Dr Sally Young, Peter Jones, Myrawin Nelson, Albert Ip, Gordon Yau, Patrick Fong, David Vasjuta, Josella Rye, and all the staff at Educational Technology Services. I am grateful to Dr Mark Poster at UC Irvine for his suggestion to consider the work of Erving Goffman, which had an important impact on the nature of my analysis. I would also like to thank Dr Rosemary Robins and Assoc Prof Helen Verran from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, who guided me through my coursework. The final few months of this project were undertaken while working at The University of Cambridge. I would particularly like to thank John Norman for allowing me the time and flexibility required to complete this project and Dr Lee Wilson and Dr Catherine Howell for their comments and encouragement. I dedicate this thesis to my dear partner Lotte, my parents, Margaret and Malcolm, and my family and friends for their limitless love and support.
Table of Contents
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................... 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................. 3 LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES ..................................................................................... 5 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 6 LITERATURE REVIEW ................................................................................................... 8
Part 1: Authentic learning and online role-plays ................................................................................... 8 Part 2: Performance, identity, and reality ........................................................................................... 14
RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...............................................................................................21 METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................... 22

Primary sources .................................................................................................................................. 22 Analysis............................................................................................................................................... 23 Theoretical approach .......................................................................................................................... 23
CASE STUDIES ............................................................................................................ 25

Case Study 1: DRALE Online ............................................................................................................. 25 Case Study 2: The Campaign.............................................................................................................. 30
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ......................................................................................... 34

Getting into the role............................................................................................................................ 34 When the system breaks down ........................................................................................................... 39 Going off the radar.............................................................................................................................. 41 The complexity of relationships ......................................................................................................... 46 Suspending disbelief........................................................................................................................... 48 Freedoms and constraints................................................................................................................... 51 Roles and identities ............................................................................................................................ 54
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 62
Figures
Figure 1: The connections to be simulated by DRALE Online. ........................................................... 26 Figure 2: The DRALE Online design process: a schematic design of the To Do list. ............................ 28 Figure 3: DRALE Online: A Case File screen with authenticated document....................................... 29 Figure 4: The Campaign Log In Screen ............................................................................................... 31 Figure 5: The Campaign To Do List .................................................................................................. 32 Figure 6: Journalist Graham makes intitial contact with Political Adviser Josie.................................... 37 Figure 7: Journalist Graham makes follow up contact with Political Adviser Josie. ............................... 38 Figure 8: Email extract from Adviser student Stacey to Journalist Guido. ............................................ 43 Figure 9: Email extract from Journalist student Guido to Adviser Stacey............................................. 44 Figure 10: Email extract from Journalist student Guido to Adviser Stacey........................................... 44
Tables
Table 1: Student roles in pairs in The Campaign. ................................................................................ 34
Introduction
Role-play has long been used as an educational tool to provide learners with a way to understand the real world. Since the advent of the World Wide Web, online role-plays have become widely used in Australian tertiary institutions endeavouring to provide students with authentic learning opportunities (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989). It is argued in the education literature that through the performance of roles, students are able to appreciate a multitude of perspectives on real world scenarios (Herrington and Oliver, 1995). However, work in the area of social studies of technology and sociology asks us to look at the experience of reality and role-play through a different prism. This work raises a number of important issues for the development and use of online role-plays in higher education, including the questions of performance, identity, and reality and their relation to the roles of all of the actors involved in the development and use of role-plays. This research reported in this thesis undertakes a description and analysis of the way in which tertiary students perform roles through the use of online role-play systems, using the cases of DRALE Online and The Campaign at the University of Melbourne. It interprets and analyses the performance of roles through these systems in a number of dimensions, informed by models drawn from social theory and sociotechnical theory. It therefore does not evaluate the effectiveness of online role-play as a teaching and learning method, but intends to frame an empirical approach informed by social theory and social studies of technology in order to bring new questions and different answers into focus. The empirical work relates specifically to online role-play environments as distinct from traditional role-plays (that is, those which do not involve communication over computer networks). It also draws upon a broader body of work on the use of computer simulations in teaching and learning. I have arranged this dissertation in a way that is intended to represent as clearly as possible the research process that was undertaken. A Literature Review follows this Introduction, and is separated into two parts. The first focuses on educational research surrounding the design of online role-plays, and the second on social and sociotechnical models used as the frame of reference in this thesis relating to the topics of performance, identity and reality. This is followed by a statement of the particular research questions under investigation in this thesis. The Methodology chapter includes a summary of the methods of
data collection and analysis used, and concludes with a note on the interpretive theoretical approach applied to this analysis. Then follows a description of two online role-plays that I was involved in developing as case studies that inform this research. The DRALE Online case study offers an example of an online role-play used over eight years with an average of more than 200 undergraduate law students each year. Documents used in the design and development of this exercise are used as a primary source in this research, rather than observations of the system in use, and this case study provides a reference point for some items of discussion that follow. The second case study is on The Campaign, an online role-play developed more recently for small group teaching with postgraduate students in the Media and Communications Programme at the University of Melbourne. Students who participated in The Campaign were observed and interviewed as part of this research, and design documents were analysed. The Results and Discussion Chapter is organised into seven themes that emerged from this analysis in the light of the research questions. This is followed by the Conclusion, which summarises and suggests further work.
Literature Review
Part 1: Authentic learning and online role-plays
A central argument used to support the use of role-play environments in tertiary learning is that they provide access for students to the world of doing and acting instead of simply receiving instruction through reading and listening. As this literature review will show, the idea that students should participate in their own learning through a form of practice has been mainstream in educational theory for a long time, yet it is still commonplace for tertiary courses to be taught through the heritage method of lectures and seminars. Where methods such as role-play are used, therefore, the argument is that students will be more fully engaged through practice in an authentic learning environment. Brown, Collins and Duiguid (1989) suggest that the activity and context in which learning takes place are generally regarded as ancillary, distinct, and neutral with respect to what is learned. They argue that this common assumption is clearly incorrect, drawing on Vygotskys (1978) theory that knowledge is fundamentally social in nature. Cognitive skills are, they contend, the products of social interactions within an individuals environment rather than being innate. Learning and acting are therefore not to be thought of as somehow distinct functions. There is a life long process of learning how to act. Thus Brown, Collins and Duiguid (1989) espouse a situationist approach to learning: individuals learn from the environment within which they find themselves. Learning is situated, and therefore we should focus on providing rich, active learning environments rather than dull and inert classrooms. They cite various studies as evidence, for example one comparing the very limited success of students who learn new words from dictionaries with the fact that they pick up over 5,000 new words a year just through ordinary conversation (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989: 33). Furthermore, learners tend to pick up cultural behaviours and gradually start to act within the norms of that culture through observing and practicing in situ. The problem is that schools use classroom tools such as dictionaries and formulae in a different way from practitioners, so students can do well when assessed but may not be able to use a chosen domains conceptual tools in practice.
The activities of a domain are framed by its culture. Their meaning and purpose are socially constructed through negotiations among present and past members. Activities thus cohere in a way that is, in theory, if not always in practice, accessible to members who move within the social framework. These coherent, meaningful, and purposeful activities are authentic,
according to the definition of the term we use here. Authentic activities then, are most simply defined as the ordinary practices of the culture. (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989: 36)
These authors draw a parallel with the idea of trade apprenticeship as a valuable means of learning and cognition. Cognitive apprenticeship, according to this theory, is an important example of authentic learning. The authors appeal to the accepted understanding that apprenticeship is a valid mode of learning for practical skills in arguing for the learners environment to be more like that of a practitioner. In other words, a major problem with teaching students in standard classroom situations is that they may find it difficult to relate to material that is out of context, despite being able to cope with their assessment. They may find it even more difficult when they later attempt to put their knowledge to the test in a working environment.
The development of concepts out of and through continuing authentic activity is the approach of cognitive apprenticeship a term closely allied to our image of knowledge as a tool. Cognitive apprenticeship supports learning in a domain by enabling students to acquire, develop and use cogitive tools in authentic domain activity. (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989: 46)
Jonassen, Mayes and McAleese (1993) support the view of learning developed by Brown, Collins and Duiguid (1989) in their Manifesto for a Constructivist Approach to Technology in Higher Education. Constructivism, an extremely influential model in the educational technology literature, posits that context is all-important for learning.
Too often, learning materials or environments are stripped of contextual relevance. Learners are required to acquire facts and rules that have no direct relevance or meaning to them, because they are not related to anything the learner is interested in or needs to know. We believe that useful knowledge is that which can be transferred to new situations. The most effective learning contexts are those which are problem- or case-based, that immerse the learner in the situation requiring him or her to acquire skills or knowledge in order to solve the problem or manipulate the situation. So, instruction needs to provide contextually-based environments that are meaningful to the learners. (Jonassen, Mayes and McAleese, 1993: 235)
Constructivism refers in this context to the pedagogical approaches based on a theory of experiential learning developed by Piaget (1950) and in particular the more recent variant social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978) which emphasises the importance of social context to the learner. The concept that higher learning can and should provide students with a way to relate to real life experiences is one of the most common arguments for the use of educational technology in general (Jonassen, Mayes and McAleese, 1993) and internet learning environments in particular (Harasim et al, 1995; Teles, 1993; Riel, 1995). Turkle and Papert (1991) refer to what they call epistemological pluralism when talking about
the application of technology to education. The educational constructivist approach they recommend does not attribute special status to logical or computational approaches over what they term bricolage. Some students, they contend, prefer to appropriate knowledge through more concrete experience, and this is just as valid a form of education. Moreover, forcing students to learn in ways they feel are uncomfortable may actually be detrimental. Turkle (1995: 61) argues that bricoleurs (or tinkerers) are more likely to find simulations and the internet comfortable because of the way in which connections between concepts can be made through hypertext, and the exploratory style the internet supports. The apparent incongruity of advocating real life experiences while using online technologies to mediate the learning experience needs to be balanced by the argument that the internet is now a central part of the personal and professional lives of most people who graduate from study at Australian universities (Pattinson & Di Gregorio, 1998). Online experience is real life. It is to be expected that their working lives will involve electronic communication, and in fact information literacy is seen as an important life long learning skill. Huang (2002), for example, argues for the application of constructivism in online learning with reference to Vygotsky and Jonassen. The online environment can also facilitate complexities that can be difficult to manage offline. Role-plays often involve multiple documents flowing back and forth in a complex sequence through multiple drafts between a large number of people (Riddle and Davies, 1998). An idea closely related to cognitive apprenticeship is teleapprenticeshipthe concept that networks can mediate student-teacher and student-student discourse, enabling new forms of collaboration using synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication, enhancing knowledge-building strategies and fostering human interactions rather than focussing students attention on the technology (Teles 1993, Waugh and Rath 1995). Students can become mentors to their peers, or collaborate in the learning process, either at a distance or locally. Criticisms of authentic learning and the ideas underpinning it are rather more difficult to find. Laurillards (1993) critique of situational learning as a metaphor for higher learning is that it does not go far enough:
Learning in naturalistic contexts is synergistic with the context; the learning outcome is an aspect of the situation, an aspect of the relation between learner, activity and environment, so it is learning about that world and how it works But the analysis does not go far enough
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for the purposes of academic knowledge because it also has to address how the process of abstraction is to be done by the student. (Laurillard, 1993: 22-23)
Bereiter (1997) provides a positivist critique of situational learning that takes a harder line. He traces experimental psychologists Edward C. Tolman and Robert S Woodworth as the originators of the idea of situated cognition. Bereiter (1997) points out that Woodworth (1958) argued that cognition was situated when he looked at the way that rats learn about their environment in 1950s. Bereiter (1997: 282) suggests that current researchers tend to forget that animal cognition is situated as well. His main contention is that the situatedness of human cognition has a biological basis, and that we have spent a great deal of time and energy in trying to overcome it. We generally overlook this because mainstream educational theory has been so heavily influenced by Vygotskys ideas about the social origins of cognitive structures. Our brain, like the rats, evolved as an adaptation to our environment, however, we have learnt to transcend our animal heritage in certain ways in order to overcome this situatedness (Bereiter, 1997: 282). We do this in three ways: by transforming our physical environment through social structures and practices, by acquiring expertise enabling us to function in novel environments, and by creating a world of abstract knowledge objects through methods such as science. It is the third of these that is most often ignored by situationists, Bereiter argues, and it is only by realising this that we will improve learning theory and practice (for example by focusing on improving theories rather than minds). The situationist position may be open to criticism for setting up a straw man through its characterisation of traditional learning environments that use lectures, theories, dictionary definitions and formulae as passive, dull, and inert. The challenge for educational theorists is to explain the specific characteristics of learning environments that enable active engagement, and the means by which students will be able to take lessons learnt from authentic learning environments and apply them to new contexts; to show how they will go from the particular to the abstract. Role-play is a relatively common teaching practice, particularly in primary and secondary school settings. Traditional role-play activities involve students enacting some kind of story for the purposes of gaining a more complete understanding of a concept or issue. Milroy (1982: 41) argues for the validity of role-play as a learning technique because it
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is an opportunity for discovering more about human behaviour and for acquiring the kind of information that will help people cope more effectively with their own relationships. Freiberg (1996) advocates the use of improvisation strategies such as role-play for the purpose of involving students more actively in their learning, encouraging collaboration among students, improving the development of shared meanings, and linking varied curriculum areas together. In addition he argues that role-play provides a way for students to take on new roles in order to test out their ideas in a safe environment. Role-plays are, Freiberg says, a way of making learning real (Freiberg, 1996: 337). One might ask why someone would think that putting students into a computerbased environment assists in this goal. The answer, according to Schank (1997: 37-38) is that participants in role-plays are suspending their disbelief. Whether the participant is using a telephone, a flight simulator, or an adventure game on a CD-ROM, they are driven by the desire to succeed in the simulated environment. They are still playing a role. The technology is there to enable a greater range of plausible scenarios. One of the most celebrated capabilities of online environments is their ability to facilitate communication. Computer mediated communications (CMCs) and their application to teaching and learning is a relatively new field of research in education, having only begun to pick up pace after the World Wide Web became popularised through the release of a Web browser called Netscape Mosaic during 1994. By 1998, about 80 percent of adult students in Australia reported using the internet as part of their studies (Pattinson & Di Gregorio, 1998). Even though email and online publishing technologies such as gopher had been widely used for some years, their application to teaching and learning was not widespread at this stage. Harasim et al (1995) describe a wide range of ways in which networks were being used as learning environments in the early days of the Web, and place a great deal of emphasis on the ability of CMCs to allow collaboration at all levels of education and in many subject areas. They argue that online learning environments can take many forms, ranging from small adjuncts to traditional courses to full online degrees, and that although there are often limitations on online learning environments, there are many advantages over traditional courses alone. Despite not being widespread, online role-plays were being used in higher education in Australia prior to the existence of the World Wide Web. In an interview for a video documentary about teaching and learning conducted in 1992, Dr Andrew Vincent The Roles Actors Perform 12
describes an early online role-play used for teaching political science students about the Middle East peace process during this time. Students took on the roles of important public figures involved in a fictional scenario based on events in the Middle East. Students from the University of Melbourne were linked up with students in Texas studying the same issues, and communicated using email. The exercise culminated in a telephone conference between the two student cohorts in which the students dressed as their characters. Vincent comments that the use of role-plays is nothing new, but suggests that the application of online technology to them demonstrates positive results in student motivation. Thus students were more thoroughly engaged in their role as students.
What weve done is weve adopted this rather old teaching method and tried to apply a lot of new technology to it, using computers, using electronic mail, and its proved to be a bit of a winner. (Vincent speaking: Swart, 1992)
Students involved in the online role-play reported similar feelings, and reflected on the comparison with traditional role-plays.
Using electronic mail we spent probably about 4 hours a day, I think, each of us, each member of the team, online. Personally I found it to be a very valuable experience, and I think all members of my team particularly got very involved in their character and were very interested in it, and followed the newspapers and the media, and were then able to give a lot more to the simulation rather than just an analytical profile. (Student 1 speaking: Swart, 1992) In the past when they did these sort of simulations they had it in a building or something like that where the various players would be in rooms and the messages were passed by runners. This way its possible to do it with somebody on the other side of the world and still have instantaneous communications. (Student 2 speaking: Swart, 1992)
Vincent and Shepherd (1998) report that the role-play was later successfully repeated at Macquarie University, again linking it to improved motivation among students, and noting increasing enrolments each year. Ramsden (1992: 178) uses Vincents simulation as a case study of effective teaching in action. However, the use of the role-play is not always without its problems. Some students become too involved in their characters:
On occasion, the intensity of the simulation can cause personal conflicts among the players, as the following example shows. In such cases, the Controllers have an extremely important role in calming the players. (Vincent and Shepherd, 1998: 19)
The authors then include an excerpt from a student message to a Controller (who is moderating the simulation) in which the student worries that the lines between character and player are becoming increasingly blurred and describing personal attacks as entering the communications between students. He warns: It is things like this where
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people get dangerously emotional. While disruptions in the expected flow of the simulation may require intervention, the authors argue that students reflections on their characters in this way can nevertheless provide educational opportunities for them. The development of Vincents Middle East role-play simulation influenced the development of a series of others based at the University of Melbourne, including DRALE Online and The Campaign, as well as at other Universities in Australia (Kinder, Fardon and Yasmeen, 1999). Describing a learning design architecture that follows on from Vincents work, Ip, Linser and Naidu (2001) emphasise the facility of role-play simulations in the acquisition of practical skills, as well as their ability to provide a context for those skills through the use of goal-based scenarios (see also Linser, Naidu & Ip, 1999 and Ip & Morrison, 2001). This term, rather than the more general simulations emphasises the need for learning environments to include specific goals, and is used by Schank (1997: 27) in describing roleplay techniques for workplace training. Ip, Linser and Naidu (2001) explain that the teachers design the instructional goals, but students design their own task goals based on their roles and then design a strategy to achieve them. Bell (2001: 68-69) also compares traditional and online role-plays, arguing that most online role-play is text-based, and therefore can be more considered and permanent than real-time face-to-face interactions using voice, gestures and actions. This could also pose a problem, Bell suggests, because online role-players may become disengaged from other people in the simulation, and uninvolved with their own roles. Freeman and Capper (1999) suggest that online role-plays can do things that are impossible or impractical with face-toface strategies, such as providing anonymity, and combining synchronous and asynchronous communication methods. McLaughlan et al (2001) reported on an online role-play simulation involving decision-making and conflict resolution regarding natural resource development that they argue resulted in an increased awareness of multiple perspectives and improved negotiation skills among students.
Part 2: Performance, identity, and reality

An investigation of online role-plays that attempt to allow students to see themselves as professionals calls into view a number of important theoretical considerations. The concepts of performance, identity, and reality and how they relate to one another are of particular interest to the discussion. This study undertakes an examination of these themes
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using the prism of social theory and the social studies of technology, and is necessarily limited in scope to their importance in an online environment being used for teaching and learning. Turkle (1995) investigates the idea of identity in online environments in some detail. To Turkle, technologies such as the internet provide the capacity to reveal human identity once and for all not as singular, or even serial, but as changeable, multiple and parallel. These aspects of the self are a result of a reconstruction of our identity when we step through the looking glass into virtual communities. Online text-based environments such as Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) became popular in the early to mid 1990s and provided a new and exciting way for people to test out alternative identities. Role-playing, already a popular pastime in many ways, was transferred into this new world. Turkle describes in detailed field notes the ways that online role-playing provides people with a way for working on important personal issues and allows them to test traditional boundaries such as gender and status. At the same time, the experiences in online roleplays blur the boundaries between self and game, self and role, self and simulation (Turkle, 1995: 192). In the end, Turkle says, a new identity that includes facets of both the online and offline personas is generated. Turkle has been criticised by those who point out that her sample was focused on a relatively narrow online application (MUDs and MOOs) used by a relatively small subgroup that may not be generalisable (McIntosh and Harwood, 2002). Critics argue that rather than socially unsure individuals using online personas to test out fanciful new identities in order to become more socially connected, the heaviest users are actually those who have strong social connections offline (Uslaner, 2000). Those who are marginalised by community find community at the margins (McIntosh and Harwood, 2002) and the internet is has now become a mainstream way for individuals to pursue their own identities in ways that value authenticity. When considering the possibility for new ways that individuals may construct and recognise identities, it is useful to recall the work of Althusser (1977), who posits a theory about how individuals (actors and their roles) are defined and reflected by ideological structures in the world around them. Althusser (1977: 160) coins the term interpellation to mean the process by which individuals are recruited and transformed into subjects. He gives the example a police officer who hails a pedestrian by calling Hey, you there!. The The Roles Actors Perform 15
individual instantly recognises that they are the subject who is being hailed, and in that moment recognises and declares him or herself as a subject. Indeed, Althusser says, we are always and already interpellated (or hailed) as subjects by ideology. In fact we become subjects even before we are born children have an identity and are considered irreplaceable even before birth due to a highly structured familial ideology, he argues. It is because we are subjects that we are able to recognise each other through the ideological structures around us. Further, Althusser argues, the mechanisms that define particular roles that individuals play in society are the means by which the relations of production are reproduced. It is in the context of this point about the reproduction of the relations of production (i.e. a class based society) that Althusser comments specifically on the way vocational training realises this goal:
It is only within the process of production and circulation that this reproduction is realized. It is realized by the mechanisms of those processes, in which the training of the workers is completed, their posts assigned them, etc. It is in the internal mechanisms of these processes that the effect of the different ideologies is felt (above all the effect of legal-ethical ideology). (Althusser, 1977: 170).
Poster (2001) introduces the term digital subject (or digital author) to distinguish it from the analogue author. The main difference between digital authors and analogue authors is the degree and shape of alterity in the relation of author to writing (Poster, 2001: 69). A key issue for Poster is how the subject is reconfigured in this process, and how identiy is performed in online environments.
These digital authors enact an unprecedented type of performative self-constitution in which the process of interpellation becomes an explicit question in the communication. Instead of the policeman-teacher-parent-boss hailing the individual in a manner that conceals the performative nature of the communication, in on-line communities one invents oneself and knows that others also invent themselves, while each interpellates the others through those inventions. (Poster, 2001: 75)
Castells (2000) looks at the internet and identity in global socio-political terms, and sees a darker picture. He argues that since the late 20th century we have seen unprecedented change: the individualisation of working relationships, an increase in global competitiveness, the deregulation of markets, and increased geographical and cultural differentiation. Financial markets have become integrated, resulting in an overhaul of the capitalist system. These forces have meant uneven development around the world, which has caused the information revolution in affluent regions to be coupled with black holes of human misery (Castells, 2001: 2) in other places. The internet is producing a global
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system for the production and distribution of words, sounds and images of our culture, and customizing them to the tastes of the identities and moods of individuals (Castells, 2001: 2). Yet in a world that is changing at breakneck speed, people tend to regroup around primary identities: religous, ethnic, territorial, and national. (Castells, 2001: 3). Castells sees a postmodern world in which institutions and organisations are disintegrating. Individuals are struggling so hard to keep hold of identity that it is becoming the main source of meaning. The rise of religious fundamentalism is symptomatic, according to this theory. Social fragmentation ensues, and the internet is used to regulate people and groups. As a result, our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self. (Castells, 2000: 3) The definition of identity Castells favours is a process of constructing meaning in terms of a cultural attribute that has priority over other sources of meaning. Individuals may have a number of identities, and these are sources of meaning for actors that are stronger than roles. (Castells, 1997: 6) While Poster (2001: 7-9) agrees with this differentiation between roles and identities, he argues that Castells definition relies too heavily on a model of consciousness, resulting in the limitation that it becomes difficult to explore the relation of self and media. Poster (2001) follows Althusser (1977) in contending that individuals are constituted by linguistic practices as subjects or identities, through the process of interpellation. The idea performative self-constitution can be traced to Goffmans (1959) work on the presentation of self in everyday life. Goffman suggests that it is through performing roles in life that we develop our sense of self. In order to perform a role successfully, we must make our audience believe our performance. The performer may believe the performance themself, or may not. Sometimes the act begins as a cynical exercise and ends with self-belief, according to this theory, and sometimes this sequence is in reverse. Goffman (1959: 32) uses the term front for the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance. The front is not limited to linguistic practices, and includes a setting (an office, for example) and the personal front comprising the appearance and manner of the performer. Clothing, physical characteristics, speech patterns, and gestures are all important parts of the performance. Papacharissi (2002) applies Goffmans (1959) theory of the presentation of self to the internet by investigating a range of characteristics of World Wide Web home pages that
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people use to present themselves. Factors such as creativity (including innovation, the use of graphics, and inviting feedback) personal information and expressiveness were assessed. Papacharissi (2002: 654) argues that the home page authors employed web templates or web publishing elements as their setting. Appearance and manner, which indicate social status in Goffmans (1959) model, are replaced by hyperlinks to other websites the performer wishes to be associated with. Despite these efforts, the online environment often confines performances due to its inherent limitations (Papacharissi, 2002: 657).
The frequent use of links reflected an effort to present the interests of the author, as well as to structure an identity for the author by associating him/her with certain types of sites available online. Moreover, it presented an attempt to express social status in an environment where more traditional status markers like appearance, accents, and other nonverbal behaviors were absent. (Papacharissi 2002: 654-655)
While Goffmans (1959) description of performance conjures images of actors on a stage, taken it in its most literal sense, role-plays are about playing a role, and the notion of playfulness has its place in the use of these environments. The relationship of gaming theory to education under the broad heading of serious play is a growing area, and online educational role-plays could be investigated using this work. For example, the work of Resnick (1994) encourages students to play with computer models using StarLogo, and applies Paperts (1980) ideas on constructionism. In many ways, role-play simulations are similar, typically introducing more human players to the microworld. Role-playing games are also closely related to role-play simulations for education. Indeed there now exists a very large and growing population of internet role-playing games (RPGs) and a large body of literature on gaming which this review is not able to survey.1 This study investigates role-plays that could be considered part of the serious gaming movement (Stone, 2005). Even though serious games can be fun, the essential difference is that their purpose is a perceived tangible social or educational benefit to the players. The purposes and roles included in most online role-playing games, on the other hand, are intrinsic to the games themselves. Thus the work of ludologists such as Frasca (2006) and Crawford (1982) focuses on the use and design of recreational videogames, and does not include a sophisticated consideration of the way that the situation changes when certain players are in a position of authority and players actions are monitored and assessed.
For examples of work on relevant game design theory, see Spector (1998) and Salen & Zimmerman (2004). A recent survey of the literature around online role-playing games and education is provided by Bonk & Dennen (2005).
1
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Examples of online role-playing games noticeably crossing over into what is usually referred to as real life are now becoming commonplace. For example a spate of articles appearing in late 2004 and early 2005 reported a particularly noteworthy occurrence: the sale of a virtual island in a fictional place inhabited by players of the online role-playing game Project Entropia.
A 22-year-old gamer has spent $26,500 (13,700) on an island that exists only in a computer role-playing game (RPG). The Australian gamer, known only by his gaming moniker Deathifier, bought the island in an online auction. The land exists within the game Project Entropia, an RPG which allows thousands of players to interact with each other. Entropia allows gamers to buy and sell virtual items using real cash, while fans of other titles often use auction site eBay to sell their virtual wares. Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia. (BBC News, 17 Dec 2004)
This is the first time land has been sold that cannot be physically touched, let alone inhabited or mined for resources most people would recognise. Perhaps strangest of all is the fact that the buyer has a reasonable expectation of making a healthy profit through mining for virtual assets, subdivision and resale to the Project Entropia community. Events such as this arguably blur the accepted boundary between reality and play and lend weight to Rheingolds (1991) notion of an emergent virtual reality. However Aycock (1993) uses Baudrillards ideas to argue that the distinction between reality and play is no longer meaningful. The construction of identities in online communities shows that neither reality nor pretence is as simple as it once seemed, and that in fact the modern experience of the real is primarily playful. It can be argued that roles are not always about play, however. When considering the way that individuals and technology interact in relation to concepts of identity, the topic of power must also be examined. Actor-network theory (ANT) argues that social theories must take into account the special nature of humans and their relationship with technology. Thus every human interaction is sociotechnical (Latour, 1994: 806). ANT does away with the distinction between human subjects and non-human objects in order to investigate the way that humans and nonhumans are actors linked through numerous sociotechnical associations (Latour, 1994: 804). It should be noted that this notion of agency is contested by the work of authors such as Pickering (1995: 9-20) and Ihde (1990: 26). Online networks arguably provide a new mechanism for surveillance over students. Foucault (1984) provides a useful and provocative model for thinking about the effect of
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surveillance on individuals. He argues that it is through the construction of a hierarchical apparatus for observation that individuals are subjugated and redefined, citing examples such as the design and layout of military camps that allow every action of the soldiers to be seen (Foucault, 1984: 189). This slightly darker view and its effect on the way that individuals interact within online education systems must be taken into account. For example, Foucault argues that educational examinations use techniques of observation together with techniques to normalise judgement in order to qualify, classify, and punish (Foucault, 1984: 197). Online systems provide new opportunities to capture and observe interactions in a more comprehensive way. Reality itself is clearly an important consideration here and theories regarding reality are the subject of ontology. The idea of performance can be applied to the question of ontology rather than roles or identities. Mol (1999) provides an after-actor-network theory of ontology she calls ontological politics. This model argues that realities have become multiple, going further than perspectivalism, which contends that there are multiple versions of truth. According to ontological politics, reality is enacted rather than observed, resulting in different, related versions of reality that may have tensions between them. Baudrillard (1988: 166) argues that the abstraction of reality is now used in preference to reality itself, resulting in the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. This switch involves not merely representations of reality, but simulacra: objects of simulation. Rather than existing alongside reality, simulacra come to replace what they simulate, just as Iconoclasts feared icons would replace God.
The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. (Baudrillard, 1988: 166)
Poster (2001) considers Baudrillards (1988) evocative notion of a simulacral world in terms of online communications, placing it in its historical context after print and broadcast media, and concludes that it has important implications for the nature of identity and subjectivity:
In this technocultural landscape the subject/object relation changes. Instead of supporting a stable, centred identity, subjects are constituted as diffuse, fragmentary, multiple. (Poster, 2001: 14)
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Research Questions
It is argued in the educational literature that online educational role-plays are systems developed to improve learning by situating students in an environment that allows them to act. Educational theory contends that these systems are more engaging than traditional lectures because they provide a context that encourages students to act and do rather than just listen and read. It is argued that online role-plays are particularly useful in allowing students to acquire professional skills, and that they provide various affordances such as anonymity and new combinations of communication modes. The literature in social theory and social studies of technology takes a different view to certain concepts in the educational literature, including the construction of identity through performance and the nature of reality. In addition, theories such as ANT ask us to consider all actors in the sociotechnical network in order to understand how society and technology are related. There is currently very little literature concerning online educational role-plays that attempts to reconcile these two different frames of reference. In the light of this, the research contained within this study uses social theory and sociotechnical theory to address the following questions:
1. How do students become engaged with their vocational identity and other identities through the use of online role-play systems such as The Campaign? 2. How does The Campaign as a sociotechnical context mediate identity? 3. To what extent and how are the roles in online role-plays shaped by: a. b. c. the constraints and affordances of the online system; the requirements and liberties of the situation that is simulated; and the individual agency of the role-playing actors.
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Methodology
Primary sources
The DRALE Online online role-play simulation was used in undergraduate teaching at the Law School at The University of Melbourne between 1998 and 2005. The technical design documents used for the development of this system were used as a primary source for this study. The Campaign online role-play simulation was used in postgraduate teaching in the Media and Communications Program in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne during 2004 and 2005. Students enrolled in the Strategic Political Communication subject in the second semester of 2005 were approached to be involved in the study.
Data collection
Data collected during this project consist of the following specific elements: 1. Direct observations of students and the lecturer engaging in the role-play. Two classroom sessions totalling 4 hours of face-to-face observations were undertaken. The first observation occurred at the midway point and the second at the end of the role-play. Detailed field notes were taken. 2. An analysis of all online communications and log records of asynchronous communications recorded by the system. This includes communications amongst students and between students and their lecturers. In addition, students provided some emails that occurred outside of the system for analysis after the conclusion of the role-play. 3. Five individual semi-structured interviews of approximately 30 mins duration were conducted with five students from the selected cohort. The technique for these interviews as described by Robson (2002: 278) allowed for a flexible design based around broad topics. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Follow up questions were sent to some students, who responded by email. 4. Technical and educational design documents from DRALE Online. 5. Technical and educational design documents from The Campaign.
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Analysis
The interviews were transcribed in full using Transcriva2. The resulting transcripts, along with selected extracts from the students communications and extracts from the design documents for both DRALE Online and The Campaign were then analysed qualitatively using TAMS Analyzer.3 These documents were initially coded according to broad themes related to the research questions and those that emerged from repeated analysis. Significant themes were then investigated further through repeated refinement and the generation of sub-themes. The resulting coded sections were then collected for comparison in spreadsheet form. At each stage, as the analysis became more refined, the original texts and audio recordings were revisited. This methodology drew upon grounded theory coding techniques in social science described by Strauss (1990) Neuman (2003) and Seale and Kelly (1998). Field notes from direct classroom observations were used to aid in the description of the students face to face activities and the lecturers involvement both in setting up the role-play and playing her role in the Press Conference. The lecturer and the students who were interviewed were contacted later with specific follow up questions, and responded by email. These data were then interpreted through the lens outlined in the part two of the literature review. That is, theoretical constructions of actors, subjects, identities, roles and performances, drawn from social theory and sociotechnical studies were brought to bear on the empirical data. This approach is discussed in more detail in the next section.
Theoretical approach
The point at which this study departs from other examinations of educational role-plays is its focus on the identities and realities of the actors engaged in the role-play, including not only the role-players (Students and Lecturers) but also system designers (including Educational Designers, Programmers, Graphic Designers, and Video Producers), technologies and other players and stakeholders. The author acted in the role of Educational Designer in both of the cases studied, and attended classroom activities, so to this extent the study involves a participant observation approach as described by Robson (2002: 314-315) in that the author acts as an observer. It considers the multiplicity of the
Transcriva is an audio transcription tool by Bartas Technologies. TAMS Analyzer is a qualitative data analysis tool by Matthew Weinstein, Kent University. See Weinstein (2006).
2 3
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identities of these actors to ask how these are defined and perceived. It also considers the dynamics of how, why, and where the role-play projects were constructed. It uses a casestudy approach in order to provide a rich empirical description of the context of the events, roles and relationships of two online role-plays (Robson, 2002: 177-181). The question of performance of identity versus role-performance is of particular interest to this discussion, and leads to a consideration of personal or individual ontology4, and the concept of multiple ontologies (Mol, 1999). What can be made of the role-plays status as a simulation if personal ontologies are in themselves performances? To what extent are performances constrained by the systems, and the actors who developed them (deliberately or accidentally)? What affordances are provided by systems, roles and scenarios? What freedom do role-players have in constructing themselves? The implications of these issues for the future design of role-playing systems will be discussed.
I refer to ontology here drawing on Heideggers (1999) definition as a doctrine of being.
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Case Studies
Case Study 1: DRALE Online
The first case study is on the development of a system known as DRALE Online. This system was developed at The University of Melbourne during 1997 and used until 2005. An analysis of the documents used in the design of this system provides an example of the context of the development of a relatively large online role-play used over 8 years by over 200 undergraduate students each year. This analysis informs the discussion to follow. I was one of a small team who developed the system through a project located at the Multimedia Education Unit (MEU) and lead by Prof Martin Davies at the School of Law. During the spring of 1997, I was invited to a meeting with Prof Davies to talk about the development of an online role-playing system that would be used during 1998. Prof Davies had previously worked as an amateur and professional actor, and was interested in introducing role-play as a teaching and learning strategy using online technologies. I had previously seen a demonstration of a role-playing system known as Everybodys Business, developed by a team lead by Roland Maxwell from the Melbourne software design firm Acumen Multimedia (later named Acumentum). As a result of this connection, a project was set up including Acumen as the developer, and with Roland Maxwell on the team. Dispute Resolution and Legal Ethics (DRALE) is a subject taught in the Law School at The University of Melbourne. While it is not compulsory, undergraduates must complete the subject in order to qualify for admission to practise law. The subject aims to introduce students to practical and theoretical issues relating to the resolution of disputes and the ethical responsibilities of a lawyer. This includes the ethical duties owed to the law, the court and the client and involves the students in practical tasks such as handling case files and communicating with other parties, including opposing law firms, senior partners, the client, the court, and other agencies. Students need to learn the mechanics of the dispute resolution process as well as the ethical issues involved in the process. For example, clients must be asked for direction at critical stages, and all documents that go out of a law firm should be counter-signed by all partners in the firm. DRALE Online is a system that was developed to simulate this process in a webbased environment. This is not a distance-learning unit, and students who study this unit
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also participate in face-to-face lectures and tutorials. Actual case files were modified to remove identifying information such as company names and then placed on the system. Each student was assigned to a law firm, and these firms were then made either plaintiffs or defendants, and matched with an opposing firm. When each student logged in, they had access to the appropriate case file, consisting of a set of documents as background to the case. They were required to read and understand the file, adding their own documents during the course of the role-play. Students had access to communications tools that allowed them to send messages to the opposing firm and to their Senior Partner (played by a tutor), to file documents with the court, or to serve documents as writs. In its first use, around 240 Law students used the DRALE Online for almost a full year, working with four different case files. The role-play simulation accounted for 40% of students assessment for the DRALE subject. Assessment was based on file notes that students produced within DRALE Online when they complete the role-play for each case. The system was also used during the summer semester for the Juris Doctor (JD) course.
Figure 1: The connections to be simulated by DRALE Online. DRALE Online was designed in response to a specific set of learning problems. With 240 fulltime students, many of the difficulties of simulating legal processes are logistical (Figure 1). The idea was that students would form mock legal firms with 5 or 6 students each. These firms would be matched together in plaintiff/defendant pairs in
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order to simulate real cases. Each student must have access to dozens of documents which make up each case file, and then create and send dozens more to exchange first with team members within the firm, and then to the opposing firm, or to the court. Multiple versions of each document must be managed as letters, writs or file notes are drafted and re-drafted. Over the course of one year four such cases would be covered, allowing students the experience of taking on case files at various stages acting for both a plaintiff and for a defendant. At times this would require students to manage multiple overlapping case files, as would be necessary in a real world legal firm. The role-play software design process involved meetings between the lecturer for Dispute Resolution and Legal Ethics and a team of educational designers, programmers, and graphic designers drawn from the University of Melbourne and an external multimedia company. Most of the early meetings involved Prof Martin Davies (the Lecturer and Project Leader) Roland Maxwell (taking on the role of Project Liaison and Software Designer for Acumen Multimedia) and myself (Project Liaison and Educational Design for MEU). A design document called a Functional Specification was drawn up by Roland Maxwell during the spring of 1997 in consultation with the team. It called for a database-driven structure to allow the delivery of case files in a dynamic way that would provide access based on individual roles and teams. The system would be delivered using the World Wide Web, and a technology called Cold Fusion was chosen to do the job of interfacing between the database and the Web. Schematic drawings were made of each screen (Figure 2) and the visual design of the software was developed based on the sorts of things commonly found in a legal practice papers with post-it notes, pink ribbons, in and out boards, and rubber stamps. The Graphic Designer, Myrawin Nelson, visited Prof Davies legal practice in order to research these elements of the look and feel (Figure 3). The online documents were designed to match those used in professional legal practice as closely as possible. Four case files used in actual legal disputes were selected and then edited to change the identities of the parties involved for privacy reasons. Real cases were used, and the legal processes were replicated in the DRALE Online system, in order add to the sense of authenticity in the role-play exercise. The first case file was made available to students during first semester of 1998. Students were asked to form their own firms, given instructions on how to use DRALE Online through a demonstration during lectures, and provided with a The Roles Actors Perform 27
Web based manual. Once students had nominated their firm, this information was placed on the database along with their student identities and other information. They were asked to enrol online, where students nominated a unique login and password. The system then allocated students to their pre-assigned firms, and matched firms in pairs of plaintiffs and defendants. This resulted in 48 firms, with some firms having an extra team member due to uneven numbers. When the students logged in, they were presented with a To Do screen (much like that shown in Figure 2) which displays fellow members of their firm and the login status of each, as well as any unread items in chronological order. To Do items were marked with due dates to encourage time management, and additional personal tasks could be added as reminders using a submenu item on the left of the screen.
Figure 2: The DRALE Online design process: a schematic design of the To Do list. By clicking on a button labelled File, the student could move to an index of all documents relating to a particular case file. Submenu items listed up to four cases so that documents did not get mixed in together. Each case document was listed in chronological order with title, author, creation date, document type, and status in rows. The student could click on the documents title to view the document. Document types included court documents, file
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notes, letters, or miscellaneous (other). Each file documents status could be draft, authenticated, signed, received, or sent. The status was determined by the documents author, or by the system if appropriate. For example, a file note was typically written by a lawyer who was handing over a case to another lawyer, and would be signed. A writ that was to be served would be in draft form until four partners from the firm had agreed that it was ready to be sent. When the draft had been written, each student received it in his or her To Do list, where they had the opportunity to mark the document as OK to send or Dont Send. The default setting, No response, remained until one of these was selected. Once four of the five students had counter-signed the document in this way, it became signed. It would then be sent to the court (through an office called the Prothonatory) for authentication before being served. This changed its status again, which was reflected in the file index as well as on the document itself. Figure 3 shows a writ that was received by the Supreme Court Prothonatory as having an authentication stamp.
Figure 3: DRALE Online: A Case File screen with authenticated document.
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Some of the above design decisions and features, such as the arrangement of students into legal firms with their own letterhead, the layout of court documents, and the processes of communication attempted to replicate as literally as possible the documents and processes as they are in the Australian legal system. Other design decisions and features did not, either because they are features of an educational environment, such as the option to contact a Tutor, or because simulation would be too difficult. Thus DRALE Online hybridises features of a legal system and features of a university system of education.
Case Study 2: The Campaign

The Campaign was conceived as a role-play scenario by Dr Sally Young at The University of Melbourne in the winter of 2003. Dr Young had decided to put in a grant application to the Facultys Information Technology and Multimedia (ITMM) scheme for money to develop a system. Dr Young and I met during August in order to work on the application, and I was named as Project Manager on the grant, although later I took long service leave and Dr David Hirst filled this role. The planned system would enable an online role-play between political advisers and journalists covering an election campaign, conducted over 8 weeks, and culminating in a live press conference. Students would be divided into two teams: Political Advisers and Journalists. Each student would then be paired up with a member of the other team. The application described the dynamic between the roles in the following way:
It is the political advisers job to try to influence their journalists reporting. It is the journalists job to get behind the spin and report the campaign. This relationship is not only highly interactive but also, as in the real world, both cooperative and competitive. (Extract from ITMM Grant Application, August 2003)
In September, Dr Young was notified of the applications success, and work commenced on developing the concept at Teaching, Learning and Research Support (TeLaRS) in early 2004. It was decided that The Campaign system would be developed using a courseware delivery system developed at The University of Melbourne called NEO (NEO, 2006). Specifically, the project would make use of a subsystem known as the Strata collaborative framework, which was being designed to provide the necessary role, group, document templating, messaging and administrative functions necessary to perform a roleplay exercise of this nature. The Campaign project would comprise the first significant test of this role-playing capability for Strata.
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Figure 4: The Campaign Log In Screen During the first few months of 2004, a Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document was drawn up by Dr Hirst in consultation with a wider team including the Lecturer, Programmers, the Graphic Designer, and the Video Producer. The system would simulate the final 4 weeks of an election campaign over 8 weeks time, with content specific to each week of the campaign being time-released at 2 week intervals. The SRS described a structure that would enable students to log on as either a Journalist or an Adviser (Figure 4), with Tutors logging in from a Tutors page. The student role-play participants would see documents that would pertain only to their role, and would be able to create new documents such as articles and press releases to be saved in a Work Folio or sent to another role-play participant. A To Do list would list a series of tasks to be completed during one week of the campaign, and a place-marker function would display the current weeks To Do list. At various stages throughout the role-play, the To Do list would link to Media clips (Figure 5), including a radio campaign announcement, a video clip of the Campaign launch, a video clip of a TV news story about a bushfire, and a radio talkback segment relating to a sex scandal that emerges during the campaign.
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Figure 5: The Campaign To Do List The scenario was designed to include some surprise events that would be introduced primarily through the use of these media clips and leading to ethical dilemmas. Advisers or Journalists have their own specific tools and resources, including reference lists for research material and online references material, and different work items to complete. Advisers would be able to write a press releases, while Journalists would write newspaper articles. Each would write various other documents, for example Advisers would write a campaign itinerary, launch plan, damage control reports, and a plan for a media stunt, while Journalists would create questions for the live press conference. The completed Work Folio was to be assessed at the end of the role-play. Students were also provided with access to a discussion area which included a Technical Support forum for all students as well as forums for items specific to the roles that posed a Question of the Week. Responding to these questions was compulsory. The Campaign was first used in Semester 2, 2004 and again in Semester 2, 2005. After the first running of the role-play, Dr Young made the following comments, indicating that the role-play was educationally successful.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much students entered into the role-playing. I was concerned they might think it babyish to take on roles etc but they were actually really
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enthusiastic. Some really relished the Machiavellian chance to be a spin doctor, and others became investigative journalists to rival Woodward and Bernstein! It was, as everyone warned me, more work than I expected for the subject coordinator, but I think it was well worth it. I enjoyed it as much as the students and worked cooperatively with them (roleplaying as the journalists editor and the advisors candidate) in a way that broke down some of the traditional student-teacher barriers. There was less distance and formality and more collegiality which is appropriate for postgraduate students. We felt like part of a team. It helped me to get to know the students better and to see them learning in a more immediate way than I would normally. (Hirst, Riddle and Young, 2005: 258)
This account indicates that the involvement in the role-play heavily engaged students and their lecturer in their roles, while redefining their traditional roles in interesting ways. The Campaign system was designed for the most part to simulate a political campaign as experienced by a Journalist or Adviser as closely as possible. However it included certain features, such as the instructions to the students and the Discussion area, and the process for submitting documents for assessment that replicate university educational processes. Like DRALE Online, the online system described above represents a hybridised partial replication of two existing social systems: a political campaign and the traditional university education system.
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Results and Discussion

Getting into the role
There are many ways in which we can interpret the behaviour of participants in The Campaign as they established their roles. For the purposes of this discussion, we are interested in the ways in which students become engaged with one or more identities. The way that they become engaged with their identity as workers, or what I choose to call their vocational identity is of particular interest to this discussion and to the educational purposes of the role-play. We are focussed also on how the online nature of the role-play affects this engagement. Poster (2001) applies Althussers (1977) concept of interpellation to online communications, and my interpretation of the communications within The Campaign will follow and extend this path. Althusser (1977) uses the term subject to refer to the social construction of the individual through ideology. I do not intend to debate the distinction between identity and subjectivity, except to say that the subject can be taken as a sociopolitical view of the self. Here I use the term identity to refer to all aspects of the self (cultural, political, personal and so on) that go into making a person who they are. What is important to my thesis is Althussers notion of social construction. At the commencement of the role-play exercise, students were allocated roles in teams of Journalists and Advisers, and then paired (Table 1).
Journalist James Kirsten Frida Yvette Brian Guido Graham* Advisor Thea Noni* John Heather* Xuan* Stacey* Josie
Table 1: Student roles in pairs in The Campaign. 5 Participants were asked how they went about getting into their role, including what they had been told in class, what they learnt by consulting the system, and what they drew from their own experience. Three of the students interviewed felt they lacked a good understanding about the role they were going to play, and indicated that they were uncertain about how to play the role when they began. Noni chose her role as an Adviser
5
Student names have been replaced by pseudonyms. Asterisks indicate students who were interviewed.
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because she felt she already knew what would be expected of a Journalist and preferred to explore a more unfamiliar role6. Xuan said he had a feeling of panic when confronted by the challenges of his role, and Heather felt the expectations of acting in the role of Adviser were huge. All of these students referred to relying on their own research (guided by a reading list in the system) and what they could learn from reading documents that were provided to them during the exercise. At the commencement of the role-play, Advisers were given access to a set of electronic documents specific to their role including a Letter of Offer of Employment, a Staff Card, and various messages from their Candidate intended to direct their attention to the tasks expected of them in their role. Journalists received equivalent documents and directions from their Editor. These documents provide a kind of character profile for the role and an outline of the role-play scenario. Students who were less confident tended to use a pattern of studying documents, engaging in set tasks, and then contacting their partnered student by email or at face-to-face meetings. This approach was in contrast with that of students who were more confident of their knowledge of their chosen role. Graham chose the role of Journalist because he had already worked in print media, and was intending to get into political journalism as a career. This student said he felt confident about what was expected of him in terms of a journalistic style of writing. In general, students felt more familiar with the expectations of Journalists than those of Advisers through their exposure to newspaper and television political journalism, and they regularly engaged in analysis of these media in the Strategic Political Communications course. Another confident student was Stacey, who played the role of Adviser and was already working full time in the public service in close daily contact with professional advisers. While these students still made use of the written material, they drew much more upon their own experience and their personal and professional acquaintances to attempt to develop a more sophisticated understanding of their roles. This can be seen from Staceys response when asked how she prepared for her role:
in my professional role I have a lot of contact with the Ministers office, and the Advisers in the Ministers office. Both at an informal level, in terms of, you know, the urgent phone call saying shes going on talk back in 10 minutes or were in Parliament in 5, or whatever, as
6
Roles are indicated by capitalisation.
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well as in a formal way in terms of us providing briefings etcetera to them. And the other thing I would mention in context is that in a non-professional capacity I also know a number of people who have been advisers. So for me in terms of being an adviser in the role-play it was very... I already had a very clear and probably reasonably comprehensive view compared to a lot of people in the general population about what that means, how those people operated, and um, what that role was really and the role they played. Including a good friend of mine thats been an adviser in various capacities in a number of years who, you know, Ive had debates about from my position as a public servant, in terms of you know you advisers you always just want to know x, y and z and the important thing for us is x, y and z were not the same. Those sort of things. So in terms of approaching exercise I had really clear templates already in my head of what it took to perform that role, and what the imaginary Candidate would be looking for. (Stacey, interview, 3/11/05)
This passage reveals that as a public servant, Stacey saw herself as someone who is quite different from a political adviser, but who has an intimate knowledge of the sort of work an adviser does, including an understanding of an advisers distinct perspective on things. By way of comparison, the following comment from student Heather illustrates the typical approach of those who were less confident about their roles:
Yeah well um, Sally had actually set out a few readings for us, in order to know what is expected of us, and through those readings we were then able to know what we were supposed to do and how we were supposed to carry on the campaign. And through the small small tasks that she gave us, each time, every task had a reading accompanied to it, so that in itself was helpful. (Heather, interview, 2/12/05)
Less confident students appeared to carefully test out what they were learning about the expectations of their role as they went. Heather and her partner chose to meet face-to-face initially, following up with communication online. Heather commented during the interview that she found it easier to express herself in general when not having to meet face-to-face, despite expressing the view that more personal contact would have added to the sense of realism. In that sense, the unreality of the role-play assisted her in getting into the role. In fact a number of students indicated that communicating online in their own time gave them more confidence in expressing themselves in role. The role-play simulation was easier for them when communications were stripped back to text. When students came to communicating with each other, they were able to choose the way they would approach the task, however they were initially directed to make contact within The Campaign online system. The online extract in Figure 6 shows an initial contact message, and the way it was displayed in the System. Graham signed off his messages as Political Correspondent above the title of the fictitious newspaper The New Times, which was typical of students engaging in online communications with the system. The general choice of language of the message is formal,
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beginning with Dear Ms Adams:, and ending with Yours faithfully, but its message is encouraging further contact and indicates a strong willingness to work collaboratively. Almost all of the students tended to use this friendly and professional tone in their initial contact in The Campaign.
Document details Date:10/08/2005 Author:Graham Armstrong Status: Read
Title:
Upcoming Jenny Jones campaign
To:
Josie Adams (USER)

Content:
Dear Ms Adams: The New Times has recently been informed of the candidacy of your client, Ms Jenny Jones, for the seat of Werriwa in the upcoming federal elections. As a relatively fresh face on the political scene, at least at the federal level, we believe Ms Jones' campain and contestancy will be of great interest to our readership, and as such we are very keen to establish a good working relationship with yourself and the rest of her campaign team. Any information and assistance you can provide us with in this regard would be much appreciated. As I will be working closely on the campaign, and your client's candidacy in particular, please forward all correspondence to myself, Graham Armstrong, at either this email address, or in the case of hard copy, to the New Times office. I look forward to hearing from you. Yours faithfully, Graham Armstrong Political Correspondent The New Times
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Figure 6: Journalist Graham makes intitial contact with Adviser Josie. As can be seen in Figure 7, as soon as this initial contact was made, Grahams messages began to assume a more informal tone, although he continues to use his title and employer at the end of his messages. The message is briefer and more conversational, starting with Hi Jo: and including a number of word contractions, with Thanks again in place of Yours faithfully. There is no doubt that building a good working relationship was high on the agenda, because Graham referred to the dependence of Journalists on the Advisers to feed them content during the role-play. It should be noted that not all Journalists took this approach, however in Grahams case the perception was that the Advisers were really in control of the way that the role-play played out. Most of the students I spoke to felt that Journalists were somewhat dependent on Advisers in this way. Thus the role-play is establishing a sub-text of power distributions at the same time as asking students to go through the pragmatic or instrumental requirements of the role.
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Document details Date:24/08/2005 Author:Graham Armstrong Status: Submitted
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campaign lauch
To:
Content:
Hi Jo: Thanks again for all of your assistance with the Jenny Jones nomination, it's been a real help. I'm assuming you've read the coverage we gave her in The New Times last week - nothing too out of left field I hope? I'm looking forward to working with you on the campaign launch. Is there anything in the works? As soon as a press release becomes available I would love a copy, otherwise I will be in touch shortly. Thanks again, Graham Armstrong Political Correspondent The New Times
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Figure 7: Journalist Graham makes follow up contact with Adviser Josie. In general as student confidence in their roles increased, their conversations with each other became more conversational, while still continuing to include strong indicators of the profession of their role in terms of linguistic style and format. The process was relatively speedy, with this more relaxed attitude to online conversations appearing only one or two weeks into the exercise. Graham interpellates Josie as an Adviser through the use of careful linguistic practices he associates with being a Journalist. He, in turn, is interpellated as a Journalist through his communications with her. Both are also interpellated by the System in numerous ways. For example, each time they log on by clicking a button marked Journalists or Advisers (Figure 4). They are greeted with a Letter of Offer of Employment, and obtain a Staff Card. Their Journalist/Adviser pair is reflected as a Group in the software, allowing communication with each other through a Mail Tray function. These features are to be expected of a role-playing system built around the concept of authentic learning. In DRALE Online, the System was designed to interpellate the students as lawyers, along with visual cues such as the pink ribbons and rubber stamps associated with legal documents (Figure 3). An initial File Note addressed the students as lawyers and set up the scenario, templates for legal documents were provided, and the system automatically added a company letterhead to all correspondence.
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What is perhaps most relevant to this discussion is that these characteristics are successful in signifying something to the students, referring to a complicated set of social meanings, and that these meanings are then passed on. Althusser (1977: 170) argues that the mechanisms defining roles that individuals play in society are the means by which the social structure are reproduced, using vocational training as an example. The analysis of design of and communications within these online role-plays reveals the particular linguistic techniques through which this mechanism is realised. At the same time these social meanings engage the students in their vocational identity, they reproduce themselves. It can be seen from the discussion above that the students who felt more inhibited in playing their roles in The Campaign needed to expose themselves to the sorts of behaviours that would be expected of them in those roles (through class readings, for example). While they sometimes met face-to-face with other students to negotiate the nature of their roles in the role-play, they also used the online communication as a way to take their time and test out the way they should interact in character. Students who were more sure of themselves already had an understanding of some of this detail, so sometimes reported spending less time reading background material. Yet they all still spent time and effort researching their roles, sometimes asking experts to whom they had privileged access (as in Staceys case). Their online communications revealed that they spent a relatively small amount of time and effort negotiating the precise tone and language required, yet they still used social interaction as a primary means of obtaining knowledge about how they should act.
When the system breaks down

The relationship between the System, the Students, their Lecturer, and others involved in The Campaign can be understood as a sociotechnical network, calling on actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour, 1987). Using an ANT lens, the System in The Campaign contains inscriptions of what has been rehearsed in the human/social realm and imported into the nonhuman/technical. Moreover the System, together with its underlying specifications, rules, and dependencies, can be thought of as an actor in a sociotechnical network. In The Campaign, the System interacted with the Lecturer and the Students, but also with Journalists, Advisers, the Candidate, the Editor, Programmers, Educational Designers, Graphic Designers and others.
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The System served a purpose in some way or other to each of the other actors. To the TeLARs team, for example, it was a good opportunity to test out some technology that was under development. The Lecturer had been able to make a successful grant application, and the role-play provided a means of assessment. In turn, the students need for assessment defines their relationship to the System and the Lecturer in important ways. They have an interest in the Systems success, at least to the extent that the exercise does not become more difficult to complete. The failure of the System in small ways to maintain its timekeeping role, the Lecturers distress, and the Students calm response attempting to avoid accessing documents out of sequence is therefore instructive. Most of the time when talking about The Campaign in the classroom, Dr Sally Young played the role of the Lecturer, not the role of the Candidate. The students acted as Students, and did not engage with each other in their roles as Journalists and Advisers. However at certain points the students were addressed by Dr Young in their roles as Journalists and Advisers, and given feedback on their progress. By four weeks into the exercise students had already submitted several press releases or articles and were beginning to reflect on their roles in class. The Lecturer reminded the students to watch your spelling and punctuation, telling the Journalists that an Editor would pick up on such things very quickly. Advisers should be similarly careful with anything that would be released to the public. This was a rare occasion when Journalists and Advisers were interpellated in a personal setting, and represents a momentary shift from the role of Lecturer to the roles of Candidate and Editor. The Lecturer explained to the Students that they should come to her for more specific feedback, and that they will have an opportunity to re-edit it before their work is accepted for assessment. In this way in the face-to-face setting Dr Young moved subtly and quickly between her role as Lecturer to Candidate/Editor in order to address the students as Journalists and Advisers. By addressing the students on the topic of the specific linguistic features of their work, the Lecturer moves into her role as Candidate/Editor. By addressing the students on the topic of assessment, she moves back into her role as Lecturer, calling forth the role of Students. Similarly, by being given feedback on their presentation, Students are briefly interpellated as Journalists or Advisers, while simultaneously interpellated as Students. Most of the directions of this nature were mediated by the System, however. The Roles Actors Perform 40
During this class, one student commented about being confused about the chronology of events. Dr Young explained that the To Do list is in chronological order. Another student, Graham, explained that there was actually a problem with the System. If you click on the breadcrumbs you can get access to everything inside the whole campaign. He then went to the display computer in the seminar room and quickly demonstrated that it was possible to view items that are not supposed to be revealed until later in the role-play by clicking a link at the top of the page and then clicking the back arrow in the browser. Because of a programming quirk, students used this the back arrow to ensure that items they had accessed were checked off as seen, indicated by a marked checkbox next to each item (Figure 5). This enabled them to track their own progress more closely, but it sometimes resulted in revealing certain items too early. The Lecturer appeared somewhat alarmed about the problem, but commented wryly: you students are far more IT literate than last year. The Students discussed the fact that the System had failed, and even though they found it slightly confusing, they did not express surprise or concern. When the Lecturer asked the Students how many people knew of the problem, all of the Students raised their hands. However, they all said that they had avoided accessing the materials ahead of time. Instead of exploiting this knowledge, the students continued to interact with the System for the most part as Journalists and Advisers. The System failed to play its role properly, but the students continued on in their roles, despite the possible advantages of doing so as Students. Reversing the previously accepted order, the Systems dependency on the human actors emerges. The very fact that the Students made important choices about the way they interacted with the System (such as maintaining the correct time delay in accessing documents) shows that the Systems role is determined by the human roles just as their roles are determined by the System. The extent and specific ways in which the System mediates identity as part of this sociotechnical network will be a key topic taken up in the next section.
Going off the radar

Part of the role of the System was to monitor what students did. All discussions were recorded, and everything the students did in the System was logged. Foucaults (1984) ideas about observation and its effects on individuals come into play here. By analysing the effect
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of surveillance, we can get a clearer picture of the way the sociotechnical network mediates the identities of the role-play participants. The relevance of this question to the particular roles students chose to perform and the way they went about performing them was made apparent somewhat by chance, due to a minor technical problem that emerged with the System. Student-to-student communications, handled by a function called the Mail Tray, sometimes failed. As this was crucial to the way that the role-play was conducted, students found other ways to contact each other, most of the time using private email. An analysis of some of the communications students engaged in when they were outside of the System reveals that they almost always contacted each other as Students, while inside The Campaign System they were almost always in character as Journalists and Advisers. When asked about how and why they did this, students were quite forthcoming. Stacey commented that the layout of the pages and menus in the system made it clear that this was an Adviser space, saying, the very act of logging on emphasises that, as it demands a very clear and conscious act of entering a gate. She added that she had the feeling that the Lecturer could assess their communications in the System, and that material in that space was a public, class space rather than one for private interaction between individuals. Thus the System interpellated Students in a complex way. While on the radar, in order to play their role as Student in a conscientious way, they must play the role as Journalist or Adviser. Outside the system, the student may act as a Student without the added layer involved when playing the assigned role. Despite this, the process of contacting each other in private outside the system involved some interesting negotiations in terms of how in role the interactions would become. Figure 8 illustrates this using one of the first email messages Stacey sent to her Journalist partner Guido during the role-play.
Hi, Guido, It was a pleasure to meet you the other day. You will recall that we were discussing whether or not Jenny Jones would stand for Warriwa. Well, you might be interested to know that she has now officially announced she will stand. Ive attached an advanced copy of the press release for your information. Please do not hesitate to call if you have any questions, want to follow
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up on anything, or I can be of any other assistance. Regards Stacey Carruthers Senior Adviser to Jenny Jones
Figure 8: Email extract from Adviser student Stacey to Journalist Guido. Reflecting on this email, Stacey commented that it was particularly interesting because it was more in her role as an Adviser than later messages:
I was actually being Adviser me in that one. That message was sussing out how far in role he was prepared to be, ie. whether he was prepared to play the game outside the system. I quickly concluded he was not, though, so it just became chit chat between people in a class together, talking about our adviser and journo selves in third person (and with a certain amount of disapproval, I think you will find!). (Stacey, email, 26/2/06)
Other students reported communicating out of role when outside the system. Graham said he used his email communications with his Adviser partner were on a student-to-student basis when the Mail Tray failed, but they were strictly in character within the System, where he knew that what he said could be read by the lecturer:
Anything that was going to be assessed, you kept to your role, because you knew that there was going to be that external presence there keeping you in check. Anything that was in the online world, you kept to your role, in terms of that website, specifically obviously. (Graham, interview, 25/11/05)
Noni said she used email to bypass problems with the System and in this mode the students engaged as friends but also as participants in the role-play:
Possibly this was because we felt off the radar. There were a number of request[s] for work and information, so that either one of us could complete the nex[t] section of work. This information was freely given. however while the relationship was friendly, i would hesitate to say that i had anything close to control over how the reporter decided to portray my can[d]idate. (Noni, email, 5/3/06)
This comment reveals that the Students were still driven by their tasks but either did not feel the need to keep up their assigned roles when communicating in a more private online setting, or alternatively, felt the need to reassert their roles as Friends and fellow Students when they could. While off the radar, they would typically send a short informal note in the body of an email message while sending a more formal document in their Journalist or Adviser role as an attachment. These messages became increasingly informal as the exercise went on, which is illustrated by the email messages in Figures 9 and 10.
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Ciao Ive just finished my article. Im pretty sure it sounds a little ingenuous, but its the best I can do. Thank you for all the information you gave me. Im trying to express something more than a simple description of the campaign. So I decided to be a little skeptic about Jenny. Especially I subtly critic her locally-oriented profile. Its a role play and I try to act as I really had something to say about the topic. If theres anything that you want to tell me, I will be on line after 6 PM. Thank you again Enjoy your day off
Guido (Attachment: guidos_test.doc)
Figure 9: Email extract from Journalist student Guido to Adviser Stacey.
sorry for not answering, but I am a kind of lazy pig. I also have problems with: 1 my e-mail that doesnt work 2 my assessments that are pretty shit 3 my mind that at the moment is in Italy (disaster!) Anyway your work is just perfect. It sound like it has been written by a without-moral professional Political Adviser, and that's what is required. We dont like it, but its what you had to do. On the other side, I ve no idea of what is your strategy for the sex scandal. I pretended to inerview the man involved in the scandal (exclusive!!!)and I tried to avoid any judgment about Jenny. The article is bad, but my intention is to criticize the other media for the diffusion of the affair as a political issue. I hope to see you tomorrow, have a good day. guido
Figure 10: Email extract from Journalist student Guido to Adviser Stacey. Guidos approach is similar to the descriptions I received from all of the students I spoke to about private email communications during the role-play. It is clear that the rules of engagement that normally applied within The Campaign system were quickly dropped in this mode. Guido exhibits a somewhat cynical characterisation of Advisers and the media
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alike, while differentiating his own performance as pretending. None of this sort of discussion occurs within the role-play system. The behaviour of the individuals involved in The Campaign on and off the radar illustrates an important aspect of the role of the System as an observer, and as well as in mediating the observations of the Lecturer. The very fact that the students feel as though their actions are being logged is enough to constrain their actions and enforce their ascribed roles within the system. Related to this is the facility of the System as a means for assessment, combining these techniques of observation with normalised judgement (Foucault, 1994) as a means of qualifying, classifying and punishing the Students. Examples of the functions specifically relating to techniques of observation of this kind include the Work Folio and Discussion area in The Campaign and File Notes in DRALE Online, each of which were assessed by Lecturers and Tutors. Thus we get a fuller picture of the way that the System mediates the performance of roles. Not only does it afford the movement in and out of roles by interpellating the actors involved, but it also has an important role in constraining and normalising their behaviour through a process of surveillance. The private and public communications between students in The Campaign and their relation to the formation of identity can also be analysed using the concept of performance. Sociologist Erving Goffman (1959: 166) describes communications out of character such as these as going backstage. According to his theory of the presentation of self, when two parties or teams interact, they tend to stay within character. That is, they maintain the line that is acceptable to all parties present. However at moments of crisis, or when the audience is no longer present, they may engage in backstage familiarity. Performances backstage can include mock role-playing and uncomplimentary terms of reference, and are commonly characterised by derogation of the audience and what Goffman calls staging talk: discussion and analysis of aspects of the staging. Moreover in the case of The Campaign, communications of a collusive nature between Journalists and Advisers that may be unacceptable inside the System are possible in email. The expressive equipment (or front) for Journalists and Advisers can be used inside the System and dropped outside of it. Thus by comparing the initial email (Figure 8) with subsequent emails (Figures 9 and 10) we can see Guido and Stacey move from using the front of their ascribed roles to engaging in staging talk (Its a role play and I try to act as I really had something to say about the topic) and team collusion (We dont like it, but its The Roles Actors Perform 45
what you had to do). The purpose of these communications is obviously to set up a commonality, not between Journalist and Adviser, but between Student and Student. It is important to recognise here that in establishing this solidarity, Guido and Stacey can be seen to be setting up another front that is acceptable to them. It is not a matter of dropping an artificial front to reveal a reality. Rather it is the change of audience that determines the need for a new front to be established. In other words, when they are off the radar, classmates interpellate each other as classmates. Goffmans thesis is that it is through presenting ourselves in different ways that we construct the self. It is my thesis that online role-plays such as The Campaign provide the means for another front through which the self can be performed. The Campaign interpellates Guido and Stacey in the unfamiliar roles of Journalist or Adviser in order to make these roles more familiar, but it does not prevent them from interpellating each other in other ways as well. The existence of one front (the student-student emails) cannot be used to argue for the disappearance or irrelevance of another (the System) despite the students insistence that the latter is pretending. As Aycock (1993) argues, reality and pretence are not as simple as they once seemed. Cynical performance is at one end of a spectrum for Goffman, with being taking in by ones own act at the other (Goffman, 1959: 30). If we accept that we perform ourselves in everyday life, it cannot be said that Guido and Stacey are really students who are performing as Journalist and Adviser when they also perform themselves as Students.
The complexity of relationships

Goffmans (1959) model of the performance of the self is useful when considering the specific ways in which the identities of actors are interrelated and mediated in The Campaign. A significant aspect of the role-play scenario was that Advisers and Journalists were required to interact quite closely in order to establish the storyline. The relationship that developed between Stacey and Guido both on stage and backstage over the course of the role-play was quite complex, and is illustrative in the context of this discussion. Each week all of the students answered a Question of the Week on the Discussion area in the System. Towards the end of the role-play the Question of the Week asked students to reflect on the appropriateness of their relationship. Guido said the relationship had been fruitful, and revealed that he had made a conscious decision to play a more provocative role than some of the other Journalists, The Roles Actors Perform 46
describing himself as a partially biased left orientated European Journalist, who tried to push the Candidate towards a more aggressive campaigning to achieve that coverage that she needs. He also referred to criticising the Candidates monotonous behaviour in order to add interest to his article:
I chose a critical supportive approach, in which I tried to advise my adviser accordingly to the European (but also Australian) tradition of the biased but non-partisan journalism. (Guido, The Campaign discussion forum, 14/10/05)
Staceys reflection in the Discussion area was that her relationship with Guido was friendly and cooperative and symbiotic. She also thought that the watchdog journalist can be of value to advisers during a campaign: the material s/he produces provides feedback on how campaign strategies may be being received by voters. A number of other Students used the word symbiotic or mutual when referring to the relationship they had with their partner, and the few who mentioned pushing their relationship as Guido does still felt that they were in some way dependent on one another. These interrelations are another example of the sub-text of the System. Graham commented in his interviews that as a Journalist he felt as though the development of his role depended somewhat on his Adviser, Josie. He explained that this was partly to do with the way that the role-play had been set up, because in most cases it was up to the Advisers to establish the narrative as they wished. However, the imaginative freedom that was given to the Advisers had a flow-on effect to Journalists.
As it turned out it ended up being a lot of fun because of the fact the campaign Advisers were given a lot of leeway, it kind of followed that I had a lot of leeway as well, so it ended up I did have a lot of control over the characterisation of the Candidate and a lot of stuff like that. (Graham, interview, 25/11/05)
So Journalists could be creative in their responses to Advisers innovations in the narrative. Yet there were still some tensions between the roles. As a Journalist, Graham felt as though he was dependent on Josie to give him the basic storyline, when he would have liked to write something on the basis of more wide ranging sources. Stacey, on the other hand, was frustrated because she said that Guido had refused to send her his articles as he wrote them, so she felt that she did not receive feedback on the work she was doing in her press releases. These tensions are no doubt part and parcel of many role-plays that include roles pursuing different and competing aims, but they also go to show how deeply these
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particular students became involved in the somewhat co-dependent Journalist/Adviser relationship. In fact, an understanding of the Journalist/Adviser relationship as competitive but cooperative is exactly what The Campaign was designed to provide. What this creates for the individuals involved in the exercise is a mixture of tensions, both between the individuals and between their own roles. Not only are they negotiating their roles within The Campaign, but as we have seen they are also often negotiating and interpellating multiple identities as Students, Friends, Lecturers, Workers and so on. Moreover these various identities are in different stages of development and negotiation, and may sometimes be in conflict with one another.
Suspending disbelief
Many simulations last for only a few seconds or minutes, and a lot of role-play simulations last an hour or two at most. The Campaign was conducted over 8 weeks, and the original version of DRALE Online lasted a full university year. Over a period of this length, there is an added dimension to the challenge of suspending disbelief (Schank, 1997: 37-38). Students were asked to identify features of The Campaign system that made the role-play feel realistic or authentic to them, and those that made it feel unrealistic or simulated. The features that were most commonly mentioned as lending an air of authenticity were the short video and audio clips that were used throughout the exercise to indicate weekly events that added colour to the scenario, and initiated the ethical dilemmas. These included fictitious media items such as a video of a doorstop news interview with the Candidate, and a radio talkback item that revealed a controversy about a relationship that the Candidate had had with a previous student. The production values and format of these items were carefully designed to simulate TV and radio clips. Other artefacts that the students mentioned as important were the documents such as the background briefing information about the Candidate and memos from the Candidate or Editor that followed up on the media items. The fact that these were all presented week by week in chronological order was also significant in terms of the way the students perceived the realism of the scenario. However the artefacts themselves were not the only important aspect for many students. A lot of the discussion around authenticity centred on the interactions that
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students had with their partners and the Candidate. Xuan typifies the view that interaction with other actors is a key to realism in the following interview extract.
Hmmm, actually the interaction... because honestly like, I think, because I have... First Im a student, because Im doing this subject, and second Im required to do such a role-playing assignment, so, when I am doing The Campaign, giving advice, I will feel all kinds of shift between the role I am a student, I should finish this assignment well, and another thing is that, then on the other side Im an adviser, I should give our advice and suggestions. So I sometimes feel there is a kind of ambiguity between these two different roles and identities. And the interaction is... were getting instructions first and we give responses back, and the adviser, I mean the candidate, as well, she will put some feedback on the WebRAFT, and also I can see other peoples... like my adviser colleagues, or the Journalists feedback about my work or about the situation, they are all online. So just feeling like you did something first, like you did something first, like you give the news release, and the Journalist will give you feedback, and write something about it. And then you read it, like youre doing the campaign and you write something first and you can read the article on the newspaper or the magazines about your candidate. So this kind of interaction makes you feel like its quite realistic, that its a real situation. (Xuan, interview, 27/10/05)
Clearly Xuan feels that the act of engaging with others in his role is what makes the role-play seem authentic. This idea that the online Systems function is to enable students to easily shift into their roles is something that most interviewees expressed in one way or another. Conversely, when something went wrong with the way the System worked or if there was some inadvertent reminder that they were actually Students, they baulked. So when Graham discovered the problem with the System that accidentally revealed future documents, he said that seeing what he wasnt supposed to be, the effect was kind of jarring:
Its kind of like flipping forward in the book and finding out how it ends. Before youve even started. So that was a big problem in terms of, you know, the site structure and the way it was designed. (Graham, interview, 25/11/05)
In certain places on the website, students were given instructions on how to proceed. For example, the log on screen began with the words Instructions. This page contains everything you need to enter The Campaign. Underneath some items in the To Do list there were hints, such as Request Adviser send you their press release on the Candidates background ASAP. Xuan felt that when he logged into the System, he entered his role as Adviser, but these hints forced him out of his role as Adviser because they addressed him as a Student.
This suddenly gets you back from the second identity of Adviser to the identity of a student. Because you are doing an assignment. Yeah thats very strong... pulling you back. Because when youre clicking, we click Adviser or Journalist first, and at this stage you feel youre an Adviser and then you expect like what am I going to do this week. And like you and you would have seen some feedback on the last week. But when you start doing this weeks tasks, but because Im not doing Political Science or other stuff, so I will go to
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the research help and some more examples, so then you will suddenly get pulled back to the situation that you are doing an assignment, and second you are doing an election campaign. (Xuan, interview, 27/10/05)
Other points where students felt that the sense of authenticity broke down included when the Mail Tray function failed, forcing students to use email where they addressed each other as Students, and when Dr Young used her own email address as a contact point for the character of the Candidate, whose character name in the role-play was Jenny Jones. Others mentioned that the scenario was (perhaps necessarily) somewhat simplified, and that in real life there would be many more one on one consultations: Journalists with Editors, and Advisers with Candidates. These would also include face to face meetings, which were for the most part absent from the role-play. The particular images used to represent people in the System were quite important to some students. Xuan said that he felt it was easier to disassociate the character that Dr Young and his partner were playing from their normal roles as Lecturer and Students. This helped him to get into role. However, Heather mentioned being particularly put off by the fact that Jenny Jones was played by an actor in the media clips. By discussing the points where students felt a sense of realism in the online roleplay, we can distinguish those particular characteristics they regarded as important to maintaining the front. Following Papacharissi (2002) we can apply Goffmans hierarchy, separating front into setting (the environment of the performance) and personal front (the appearance and manner we use to perform). In The Campaign the main setting is online, and includes on-screen versions of objects we often associate with offline environments. These include the To Do list with its chronological order and time-release function, the media items, the background articles, documents such as press releases and itineraries, and other elements of graphic design of the interface such as icons, colours, and text formatting. All of these details go into making a setting that enhances the feeling of a political campaign, and were in turn used by students in the performance of their roles. Their comments indicate that it was through performing their roles in this setting that a sense of authenticity was obtained. Appearance and manner, constituting the personal front of the roles, are those aspects through which students present themselves within the System. It is to be noted here that
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the students were not given any way to present a physical appearance within the system. There were no avatars or photographs specific to them. In The Campaign, performance occurs primarily through the careful use of linguistic techniques associated with each role: Student, Lecturer, Candidate, Journalist, Adviser, and so on. Thus for example the Advisers rely on Journalists to apply a professional appearance to their communications, and to write and articles in the appropriate manner, while Journalists rely on Advisers in the same way.7 The tendency of online communications to lack the familiar face-to-face signs is what Poster (2001: Chapter 1) calls the culture of underdetermination, and is a key ingredient in his argument for an unprecedented degree of performative self-constitution in online communications. In an environment that invites self-constitution, the emphasis shifts from interpellation by dominant actors and ideologies to interpellation between individuals who know they are each self-constituted. These identities are diffuse, fragmented and multiple, which we can see from the way the participants strived to keep their roles as Journalist or Adviser in focus above the competing roles of Student and Friend.
Freedoms and constraints

So far we have mostly considered the extent to which roles in online role-plays are shaped by the online System, including its constraints and affordances. However a discussion of online role-plays should also consider the requirements and liberties of the situation that is being simulated, and the agency of the individuals involved. This involves analysing the particular scenario, the rules of engagement, and the way that the participants interacted with each other. At certain points in the role-play scenario, the Students were forced to take decisions, some of which had an impact on other roles. For instance, in the first week Advisers were asked to decide how they would deal with the press. They had the option of withholding their Candidates media itinerary or providing it to the Journalist. Similarly, Journalists had decisions to make that would affect Advisers. The most important of these was whether to cover the story of a sex scandal involving the Candidate and a past student who also turns out to be the son of the owner of the newspaper. Each student reflected on
There may be a temptation to infer that in an increasingly online world we should be teaching students to communicate online in more realistic ways. This is not my aim, however, and an analysis of the benefits and problems of online educational role-plays is the focus of future work. I am attempting to show that it is
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the decisions they made in the Question of the Week in the Discussion area. During interviews, students were asked about how much choice they had, and what impact their decisions had on the other roles. All students indicated in the interviews that they had a great amount of freedom in terms of the way they chose to play their roles. For example in response to the question about the degree of freedom, Noni said the following:
Well I found the exercise extremely free in terms of the imaginative component, which again is something thats suppressed in a lot of stuff, so that creative side of developing your kind of I spent a lot of time thinking about Jennys character, because I wasnt necessarily writing things that were about myself as a media Adviser, I spent a lot of time thinking about Jenny and what would have been the reasons for her to be in... you know... the scandal, how would that have been a thing that could have occurred for this type of person that Id created, and how would she react to a question related to her choices in terms of how spectacular she wanted her launch to be, and how creative she was in those positions. (Noni, interview, 26/10/05)
It was left to the Advisers to make up much of the background detail about their Candidate, with the only limitation being that they must be consistent from be beginning of the role-play to the end. A fairly small amount of biographical information was also provided to them at the beginning of the exercise. This lead to Noni feeling as though she could be creative, and meant that she felt forced to consider how the Candidate would react in certain situations. She also commented on how being forced to consider these issues gave rise to a reaction that helped her to assume her role:
I guess there were points where we were asked questions that were not specifically related to assessment that forced us to confront decisions we would have to make within that identity, for example do you give this information to your Journalist? And when that came up in terms of the itinerary of the campaign, I made the decision to give it to her progressively over the period of the campaign rather than give it to her at the whole stage, so I guess I wouldnt have thought of that if that question wasnt asked, so The Campaign was motivating me to assume a professional character. It was forcing me to think about something that I may not necessarily have considered without that prompting question, so, in that way it prompted that, but I brought with me my reaction to that prompt. So how I thought was the appropriate way for my role to react to that question was brought from the outside to the Campaign, but the Campaign prompted those decisions. (Noni, interview, 26/10/05)
The sense of freedom to innovate sparking off an imaginative response within the role-play was also felt among the Journalists. Grahams response to the same question refers to a plethora of options:
possible to understand what is going on in online role-plays in terms of performative self-constitution, and that has important implications for a consideration of identity online.
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You had the opportunity embedded into the narrative at certain points to take two very obvious courses. So that was part of the system that was actually deliberately embedded into the way that the website worked and the way that the narrative flowed. But I mean in general because of the fact, like I said before, you didnt have alternate sources beyond your campaign Adviser, every single task that you did was basically... you know it was a plethora of options you could have taken, it was basically just left up to your imagination. I mean you were constrained in certain ways, but um, ultimately I think each task left you with a lot of sort of free will, really. Free reign. (Graham, interview, 25/11/05)
Graham continued by explaining that he believed the extent of free reign detracted from the realism of the exercise, because the participants constructed so much of the story. However he also felt that the ability to contemporise made it more fun. Despite the overall feeling of freedom, some of the interviewees indicated that the choices they made within the system were constrained in subtle ways. Noni referred to bringing her own reaction, and Graham said he was working within a self-imposed narrative because of his own expectations of the role. Also when I asked Graham whether he thought he could have chosen to play a bullying Journalist, he indicated that that would not have been fair on his partner:
I suppose I could have broken the mold and tried to... I mean it was mentioned that we could you know approach other campaign Advisors if we wanted to, but realistically thats not an option, because it doesnt just impact on me, it impacts upon my campaign Advisor as well, not within The Campaign, but externally in terms of the assessment. So its not something I would see anybody doing unless they were just, I dont know, sociopaths. (Graham, interview, 25/11/05)
Stacey was the most outspoken on this issue, saying that her choices were significantly limited by the way that the scenario was set up:
Um, I think my imaginary Adviser was reasonably characterless... um and I think that is because... and probably the character... to the extent that there was a character expressing itself... through what tended to be fairly bland and formally professional material... was probably set purely by the tone of those few pretend Candidate snippets. So the tone of the little note from the Candidate saying oh, Ive got a bit of a problem about a relationship with a student, um, probably that and the doorstep interview... I think probably my choice about the pretend character of the adviser was pretty much set by the cues of those two things, I think. Um... combined by the fact I knew that the LGAs in the imaginary electorate practically duplicated Julia Gillards electorate, and um... sort of a number of her cohort, so I placed the imaginary character, combined the visual image and the tone of that note into an imaginary context that I... well sort of a real context that I knew about... and also I guess the other thing was that um, as somebody who has dealt with Ministers and elected representatives a little bit, youre always reasonably formal. Even if theyre very informal, you dont be as informal back to them as they are to you, even if theyre very friendly open people theres always a sense of... and theyll quickly get pissed off if you dont appear to be showing an appropriate amount of respect, which is fair enough. Um, I mean theyre there to represent the whole population, they cant be treated as you would best mates. (Stacey, interview, 3/11/05)
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Staceys own knowledge of the inner workings of political life was clearly the most detailed of the students I interviewed, and this appears to have given shape to the way she played her pretend character. However she also mentioned a number of times that she had spent a significant amount of time consulting professional colleagues about the way she should play the role, so she clearly felt as though she still needed further detail on the appropriate behaviour for an Adviser. The sense of freedom felt by the students so strongly associated with imagination and engagement is certainly an important factor motivationally, and supports the educational literature (Vincent and Shepherd, 1998; Ip, Linser and Naidu, 2001). However, considering the rules of the role-play alone cannot complete an analysis of the degree of freedom enjoyed by the actors in an online role-play. In The Campaign, the only explicit rules the students were given were to act in their assigned role and to maintain a narrative consistency from beginning to end. It can be argued that the most important constraints were actually imposed by the actors themselves through a socially negotiated process. So even though Graham felt he had free reign he worked within a self-imposed narrative based on a notion of the Journalist role that was constructed largely from his prior understanding but was also becoming more and more carefully defined during the exercise. Stacey described her role as Adviser as reasonably characterless, yet she went to great lengths to analyse and play the character in what she regarded as an appropriately bland manner, drawing on subtle cues in the role-play material as well as conversations with her work colleagues. Guidos decision to play a partially biased left orientated European Journalist determined the choices he made in his interactions with his Adviser. In Getting into the role we saw how students met with their partners and carefully tested the waters online. What emerges from this analysis is a pattern in which the assigned roles were subtly constrained, both inside and outside of the online role-play.
Roles and identities

The analysis contained within this research argues that theoretical models drawn from social theory and sociotechnical studies provide a new way to view online educational roleplays. These theories also lead to a number of further questions relating to the specific ways in which roles differ and depend on one another, how the performance of roles
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relates to the performance of identities, and how roles and identities in these systems relate to reality. Using these questions as a guide, this analysis will now attempt to develop a more detailed picture of roles, identity and reality in online role-plays. During the interviews, the students participating in The Campaign were asked to identify factors that distinguished the roles of Journalist, Adviser, and Candidate from each other. They were also asked about dependencies between roles, and whether they noticed any new roles emerging that they had not previously considered. A number of students referred to the dependence of Journalists on Advisers in terms of the creative development of the scenario. Graham felt that if he had been a journalist in a professional environment he would have had more sources to work from. Yet as an Adviser reflecting on the Journalist role, Noni commented in her interview that Journalists had two sources of inputtheir Editor and the Adviserresulting in a kind of a dual source of information creating the context and creating the authenticity to a greater extent. Advisers only had one: the Candidate. Despite these slight differences in the way that their roles were perceived, and the fact that they were dependent on one another in some ways, most of the students indicated that they did not feel there was a big difference between the roles in terms of privilege:
In terms of how The Campaign dealt with both roles, I feel completely even, I didnt feel that one side was biased with a more privileged position. (Noni, interview, 26/10/05) I think they are equally important. (Xuan, interview, 27/10/05)
However, Stacey felt that the Candidate role was quite different in the sense that what they did was held to public account.
Um.... I mean I think theres a crucial difference between an adviser and to a lesser extent the journalist and the candidate in that an adviser is basically never publicly accountable for anything. They are faceless, pretty much, as far as the broader world is concerned. (Stacey, interview, 3/11/05)
Although Stacey was no doubt partly reflecting more broadly on Australian politics and journalism, she continued by expressing her disappointment because her partner had chosen be deliberately very faceless, even though she had tried to encourage him to engage with her so that she could see how her press releases were being portrayed in the media. Students readily identified distinctions between assigned roles in The Campaign and the familiar roles of Student and Lecturer. So for example when asked what particular things distinguished the Lecturer from the Candidate, Graham answered her language
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definitely changed. Students were also clearly aware of the way their own language changed as they moved into their assigned roles during the exercise. The students were asked whether they thought that their involvement in The Campaign caused any new roles to emerge. Some students didnt believe there were any emergent roles, however Xuan said that constant shift between student and Adviser caused a mixture of the two, resulting in a new reflective, analytical role:
Hmmm... I think a new role will be... I think its quite true that a new role will be like, ahh, like when you are half student in a real situation and half... maybe 60% for student, 40% role for the adviser or journalist. Like when you meet in the real situation in the class or out of class, you will try to talk about The Campaign or the assignments... thats also half-half with your journalist or other advisers. At that moment I think its a kind of mixture of your two identities. (Xuan, interview, 27/10/05)
Noni was not sure that there was a new role being created, but had noticed that having a partner depend on her work changed the way that she approached the exercise. As a result, she took more of a concern for her partner than she would have otherwise. Even though she had a friendship with her partner prior to The Campaign, she now had more contact with her. Roles in The Campaign were interrelated in expected and unexpected ways. Differentiation between the performance of roles in the System was mainly linguistic, and the clearest distinctions were between traditional roles as Lecturer and Student and assigned roles as Candidate, Journalist and Adviser. Students were aware of the differences between their assigned roles and those of professional advisers and journalists. New roles can emerge through the role-play, suggesting that multiple roles can be recombined and developed. This suggests that an active engagement in and analysis of vocational practices through role-play involves a process of constituting identity rather than only reflecting on an objective reality. This question of how roles relate to identities is an important one. One of the main aims of The Campaign was to use role-play to engage students with professional practice in a way that is meaningful to them and useful in their future careers. At the beginning of the exercise, the students were informed that the intended learning outcomes of The Campaign exercise were to increase the accessibility of ideas about communication and journalism; increase the degree to which the learning environment models professional practice; gain
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first-hand experience in creating media products; and to foster deep learning of strategic political communication. In the context of this discussion I have attempted to make a distinction between the terms role and identity while suggesting that they are linked in important ways. While roles can clearly sometimes be temporary, ascribed, and even poorly defined, identities tend to be taken on with greater care, persist in a more enduring way, and are associated with an image of who we are. Identities inscribe a stronger source of cultural meaning (Castells, 1997: 6-7). Yet both roles and identities are performed by individuals, and both can be multiple, parallel, diffuse and fragmented. An analysis of vocational identities in The Campaign suggests that roles in this context are a way for individuals to begin to performatively selfconstitute new identities. Students who used The Campaign were asked to reflect on whether they thought they had developed their own sense of identity in their current or intended profession. All of the students I spoke with thought that their vocational identity had been developed to some extent by their involvement in the role-play. Noni talked about the fact that her degree was not professionally focussed, so she felt that the exercise had given the mainly theoretical approach a practical grounding. I asked Noni what particular occupations she felt the exercise was grounding her in.
Yeah I guess the questions very interesting because it is that movement and transition from being a student to being a worker, and most of us, including myself, are kind of half/half at this stage of studying, so you're half student, half employee, so I guess it does kind of start blurring that line between student and worker, or part of the work force. (Noni, interview, 26/10/05)
Noni commented that she did not have a very developed idea about which profession she saw herself going into, yet she still felt a sense of transition to herself as a worker:
I personally really appreciate that cross-over and developing my identity and my kind of professional persona, or however it wants to be said, to get ready for full time work or to more clearly think about the workplace role. (Noni, interview, 26/10/05)
The sense of blurring of the roles of Student and Worker echoes Xuans explanation of being 60% Student and 40% in his assigned role. Students using Vincent and Shepherds (1998) Middle East role-play also reported a similar blurring of roles in relation to taking the role-play a little too far. However in the case of the participants in The Campaign, the sense of cross-over is portrayed in a positive way. Turkles (1995: 192) The Roles Actors Perform 57
suggestion that of online role-plays blur the lines between self and game, self and role and self and simulation also appear to be borne out here. Students did not necessarily feel that their vocational identity was fully formed through the role-play. When Heather was asked the about this, her initial response was that the exercise was too short for her to develop an identity as an Adviser because it had only lasted a few weeks. However when I asked her if the sense of being an Adviser she had at the end of the exercise was more developed than when she started, she said it was. Staceys extensive professional experience as a Policy Adviser in the public service might have been expected to cause her to feel that she had not developed her vocational identity through the exercise. Yet she also indicated that her sense of vocational identity had developed, drawing a distinction between the professional knowledge she had about Political Advisers and the act of playing the role:
I think my professional identity probably did sort of develop to an extent through the process. Because I was bringing my professional knowledge to the role, but I wasnt really bringing my professional role to the role, if you know what I mean. So my professional role provided content it was probably more my knowledge of other players in my professional environment that I brought to the role that I um I think I think the act of doing the roleplay did actually bring me a lot of learnings about both dealing with the Advisers in the Ministers offices that we have to deal with all the time more effectively. (Stacey, interview, 3/11/05)
Staceys case was unusual among the students I interviewed because she already had a well-developed sense of her professional self in a closely related field. She was undertaking the course in Strategic Political Communication as an elective in a Masters course sponsored by her department. She said that the way she perceived herself in the course was altered by fact that her work paid for her degree:
Its a very different student role from something that youre just enrolled in independently and are paying for for yourself for your own satisfaction and achievement. Im a student in my professional capacity rather than in my personal capacity almost... it's a bit of both. So thats a sort of quite different student role in itself. (Stacey, interview, 3/11/05)
Goffman (1959) argues that it is through playing roles that we develop our sense of self. This analysis of The Campaign suggests that it is this same process that enables students in online role-plays to develop their vocational identities.
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Conclusion
This study is necessarily limited by a number of factors, and its results must be read in that context. Firstly, the two case studies were both at the same traditional Australian higher education institution, and only one of these has been investigated in great detail. The number of students who were interviewed was necessarily small due to limitations in time and the small number of students taking part in the exercise. Future work on online roleplays could aim to study a broader range of disciplines, a wider variety of synchronous and asynchronous technologies, or online role-playing games. This thesis has argued that although online role-plays are clearly useful for learning, they are not as authentic as they are usually portrayed; particularly in so much as the nature of authenticity itself is problematic when considering identity. Too often the literature treats authenticity and identity as straightforward and unproblematic. Certain aspects of online role-plays that are unreal can be seen to enhance the ability of students to take on new roles and learn new professional skills. This suggests that future work may involve a reconsideration of the application of the theory of authentic learning to online role-plays with regard to epistemology, and a consideration of theories incorporating aspects of performative self-constitution. Students are engaged in their roles by a combination of overt and subtle social and cultural inscriptions through a process of interpellation. They interpellate each other, and are interpellated by the online system, as students and ascribed roles. The social meanings inscribed in these online role-plays reproduce themselves through this process. When outside the gaze of the system, students engage in forms of communication that they avoid while inside it. This illustrates that the system constrains the performance of roles in important ways through techniques of observation realised by the logging and assessing of student work. The multiplicity of roles supported through these systems creates complex relationships between the participants, and sometimes reveals unexpected conflicts and dependencies between roles. The underdetermined nature of online communication affords students an easy way to move between roles, but creates a new sense of multiple and parallel roles and identities that can become blurred and fragmented. There is a suggestion also of emergent or hybrid roles resulting from this multiplicity. The apparent
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freedom students had in playing their roles in the scenario is balanced by subtle constraints that are placed on them through perceived expectations and self-imposed rules, and through negotiation with other actors. Educational theories of situated cognition (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989) suggest that role-plays work because they place learner within situations in which they must act. According to this theory, authentic activities are ordinary practices of the culture (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989). However, following the theory of performative selfconstitution, we might reinterpret the situation as the setting. Yet in order for roles to be performed, we must include the personal front of the actor in any description of learning. A limitation of authentic learning that emerges from this view is its lack of an account of the appearance and mannerin other words, the individuals expressive equipment, including those elements that are conscious and those that are not. The theory of authentic learning focuses on an account of how social interactions with the real world enhance learning, however by doing so the importance of these aspects of the individual are downplayed. In addition, by considering that situational learning may have more to do with providing learners with a setting that enables them to self-constitute a role, the importance of authenticity is thrown into question. One advantage of this is that we may be relieved of the burden of proving that a learning environment is actually authentic. The theory of academic learning as situated cognition (Brown, Collins and Duiguid, 1989) is criticised by Laurillard (1993: 22-23) on the basis that it is incomplete. She argues that learning in higher education settings concerns descriptions of the world (second-order experience) as well as experience of it. Naturalistic learning contexts such as role-plays should allow students to undertake a process of reflection and abstraction in higher education. Bereiter (1997) makes a similar point when he contends that rats in mazes engage in situated learning, while humans do much more, including creating an abstract world of knowledge objects. While agreeing with these limitations, my analysis attempts to further problematise authentic learning by suggesting that it depends on a limited view of epistemology. That is, educational theory about situational cognition and authentic learning is based on a conception of the learning process as being about acquiring knowledge of the real world. Thus according to Laurillard (1992) learning outcomes in authentic learning environments
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are an aspect of the situation, an aspect of the relation between learner, activity and environment. My thesis suggests that although critiques such as those by Laurillard (1992) and Bereiter (1997) develop the concept beyond experience to abstraction, they still imply that learning occurs through interacting with an objective reality. This particular view of ontology is contested, however. The work of Mol (1999) for example argues that reality is enacted through a process she calls ontological politics, in much the same way that this thesis has argued that identities are performed. Even if we are willing to accept that there is an objective reality, the challenge for theories of authentic learning is to adequately explain how we can determine the authentic nature of tasks in a satisfactory way: if the authenticity of a situation is important to learning, we need a way to determine how a simulation corresponds to reality. That is, how do we know that something is really authentic? Who decides which of the simulated practices are ordinary ones? Further, it can be argued that online role-plays such as The Campaign and DRALE Online are not actually simulations at all, because they do not actually represent something in the real world. As suggested above, these online role-plays are hybridised versions of scenarios based on situations combined with the traditional university education system. Online role-plays could more accurately be called simulacra (Baudrillard, 1988) rather than simulations to the extent that the actors self-constitute their identities without reference to the real.
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The roles actors perform: role-play and reality in a higher education context

The Roles Actors Perform

The Roles Actors Perform

RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...............................................................................................21 METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................... 22

CASE STUDIES ............................................................................................................ 25

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ......................................................................................... 34

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 62

The Roles Actors Perform

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Part 2: Performance, identity, and reality

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I refer to ontology here drawing on Heideggers (1999) definition as a doctrine of being.

The Roles Actors Perform

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Figure 3: DRALE Online: A Case File screen with authenticated document.

The Roles Actors Perform

Case Study 2: The Campaign

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Results and Discussion

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Roles are indicated by capitalisation.

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Josie Adams (USER)

The Roles Actors Perform

Document details Date:24/08/2005 Author:Graham Armstrong Status: Submitted

The Roles Actors Perform

When the system breaks down

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Going off the radar

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Guido (Attachment: guidos_test.doc)

Figure 9: Email extract from Journalist student Guido to Adviser Stacey.

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The complexity of relationships

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Freedoms and constraints