Agency and Meaning-Making in AI-Integrated Virtual Reality for Marine Environmental Education A Sociomaterial Study of an Immersive Learning Assemblage With an Embodied Conversational Agent to Enhance Ocean Literacy

Sammanfattning

Purpose: Theory: Method: Results: The aim of this thesis is to contribute to research on learning in immersive and AI-integrated environments, with a focus on marine environmental education and Ocean Literacy by examining how meaning-making and agency are enacted in a virtual reality learning activity with an integrated AI conversational agent embodied as a seal. Grounded in socio-historical and sociomaterial perspectives, meaning-making and agency are conceptualized as relational performative practices within a sociomaterial assemblage. This framework enables analysis of language-in-use as produced in the entanglement of participants, technologies, and the designed features of the activity. The study was conducted in two public museums with 63 participants engaging with OceanSpeak. The data corpus consists of 287 spoken questions and 60 spoken summaries. Reflexive thematic analysis was used, treating each question and summary as an individual unit of analysis. Analysis generated five themes from the question data (curiosity, causal reasoning, distributed and negotiated agency, empathy, and solutions orientation) and four from the summaries (emotions, eye-opening, systems thinking, and collective stewardship). Meaning-making and agency were coconstituted across human, technological, and material elements of the assemblage. Participants engaged with the AI-seal as a conversational partner, expressed moral and emotional concern, and articulated systems-oriented and collective reasoning. Engagement shifted from exploratory questioning toward more integrative and future-oriented reflections. The study contributes to research on technology-enhanced learning by showing how oral interaction in immersive, AI-integrated environments makes relational, affective, and systems-oriented learning processes observable in situ. It further contributes to marine environmental education and Ocean Literacy by illustrating how these dimensions are enacted in interaction, offering insight into how immersive experiences may engage learners in ways that reduce psychological distance to the ocean.