Composing (with/in) extended reality: How students name their experiences with immersive technologies

Abstract

• Students have overall positive associations with XR, but generally have more positive associations with consuming XR projects than producing them. • Students tended to pair terms focused on the challenges of producing XR with positive terms like interesting, creative, and exciting. • Students did not use the language or metaphors of writing/composing to describe their production of XR projects. Instead, they used terms like produce and create , and those with course-based exposure to XR were more likely to use more architectural metaphors, such as construct or build, than those without such exposure. • Teachers of computers and writing can reflect on the language and metaphors they use in relation to composing XR technologies to enhance access to and inclusivity of these critical digital literacies. While scholars of computers and writing would readily recognize XR technologies as composing technologies, different terminology used to describe these technologies and the act of creation could make it hard for students to recognize the rhetorical features and possibilities of their XR work. As scholars of writing, we need to know how students understand the technology in their own words to think about how to support their critical digital literacy work with XR. In this article, we share survey results revealing patterns in the ways students name and describe work with XR technologies. This data provides an opportunity for instructors and scholars of computers and writing to reflect on their own naming practices and on the power of naming in both reflecting and shaping students’ dispositions towards technologies and towards themselves as users and composers of them.