Virtual Community and Interaction and Engagement

In this podcast of the presentation " Cognition, Learning, and Literacy in Virtual Worlds," Constance Steinkuehler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discusses the intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in virtual worlds (for example, collaborative problem solving, informal scientific reasoning, computational literacy, and digital media literacy) and the way these coalesce into a form of cosmopolitanism found in the least likely of places, in context of pop culture.

In this podcast of the presentation “ Virtual Learning Environments in 3D,” Phillip D. Long, associate director of MIT’s Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, looks at the evolution of online interaction from text-based collaboration such as wikis to 3D virtual worlds (VWs) such as Second Life. He discusses the potential of these immersive 3D VWs to serve as learning spaces and to become persistent new home campuses.

This was presented as a general session at Immersive Learning Environments: New Paths to Interaction and Engagement, the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative's Spring 2007 Focus Session, held at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation in Raleigh, North Carolina, March 27–28, 2007. Additional resources from the event, including session recordings and audio interviews, video, presentation materials, and photos, also are available online.