EDUCAUSE Review Articles; Second Life; and Articles, Papers, and Reports

The authors used Second Life to teach a course designed for non-science majors who need to fulfill their natural sciences university requirement. The students were required to do a creative project, Second Life was introduced as an innovative way for students to express their projects.

When using a roadmap, one can take many different paths to reach a desired destination. Similarly, institutions can take many different turns along the road to implementing an ideal virtual world for higher education.

The use of virtual worlds expands on the campus-based and online classrooms, enhancing learning experiences. Classes in virtual worlds offer opportunities for visualization, simulation, enhanced social networks, and shared learning experiences.

In an effort to honor of Charles Darwin’s legacy, the University of Cincinnati has planned a two-year celebration of the sesquicentennial anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. A re-creation of Darwin’s historic journey to the Galapagos Islands and see indigenous species in their natural habitats in Second Life is one of the many celebration projects.

Genome Island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Genome/118/145/53) was created to explore the potential for creating an interactive laboratory environment in the 3D virtual world of Second Life. College and university science courses that include a laboratory typically, because of the constraints of class scheduling, separate the lecture and laboratory components into different time blocks, and one of the challenges of college/university science becomes the meaningful integration of the two experiences. Virtual worlds offer the opportunity to eliminate the lecture/lab boundary by immersing students in an environment to be investigated.

Virtual worlds can become an important tool in an educator’s arsenal. But using this tool requires a shift in thinking and an adjustment in pedagogical methods that will embrace the community, the fluid identity, and the participation—indeed, the increased conversation—that virtual spaces can provide.

The University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) officially entered Second Life following a number of years of exploration and experimentation in the virtual world. Its virtual island, KUMC Isle, is managed by the university’s educational technology group, Teaching and Learning Technology (TLT), and hosts a number of classes and projects each semester for both on-campus and online students.

Literature Alive! in Second Life creates immersive literary environments that have redefined the ways literature is shared in virtual environments.

Beyond the capabilities that virtual worlds offer us at the moment, it is the possibilities that we can imagine for the future that may be the most compelling. Virtual worlds technology, like the Internet in general, is changing the way we access and experience information and the way we can access and connect with each other.

In the spring of 2008, students from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (IU) and the Jenkins Graduate School of Management at North Carolina State University (NCSU) “virtually” came together, using a variety of Web 2.0 tools and the virtual world Second Life, to learn about managing the services lifecycle and to apply what they learned to two corporate-sponsored projects.