EDUCAUSE Review Articles, Virtual Worlds, and Interaction and Engagement

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.

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.

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

In this article, we describe our collaborative research toward creating a “mixed reality teaching and learning environment” (MiRTLE) that enables teachers and students participating in real-time mixed and online classes to interact with avatar representations of each other. The longer-term hypothesis is that avatar representations of teachers and students will help create a sense of shared presence, engendering a sense of community and improving student engagement in online lessons.

The ACT experience is designed to immerse students in a high-tech playground where they can acquire civic knowledge and skills, as well as experiment with civic behaviors and democratic participation.

Virtual worlds have great potential in education, but much needs to be learned about them. One of the biggest questions is whether the best venue is the public mixed-use virtual world, a private education-only space, or a hybrid.

Whether it is Second Life or another virtual world, this foundational movement is not going away. It is improving. It is moving forward. The question to be addressed in the coming months and years is how higher education and, subsequently, individual institutions will determine the best way to continue to move forward with virtual worlds.

In March 2007, the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) purchased Wolverine Island in Second Life (SL). From even the early planning stages, the Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) were deeply involved in the University of Michigan (UM) SL activities. The primary role of health sciences libraries is to support the core functions of the academic and healthcare institutions they serve. Traditionally, this has taken place through activities related to collections, services, instruction, and reference in environments related to education, research, clinics, and service and outreach.1 Here we will explore in what way these roles are similar or different for an academic health sciences library working in virtual worlds, with highlights of our engagement and immersion in SL.

To learn more about videogames in academe, the author spoke with five leading-edge thinkers in the field: James Paul Gee, J. C. Herz, Randy Hinrichs, Marc Prensky, and Ben Sawyer.