Virtual Worlds

The phone rings. The caller begins with the familiar, “I’ve been thinking...” and the rest of the conversation centers on how to pilot an emerging instructional technology. Faculty who are early adopters of technology are experimenters and risk-takers; they broaden the landscape of effective teaching and learning with technology. Yes, they push the envelope, but they also offer partnership for identifying what’s scalable and sustainable for broader use. Our panelists will share their campus perspectives on adopting emerging technologies from Web 2.0 to virtual worlds, their successes and challenges, and the partnerships they’ve formed.

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters of virtual lands, more than 13 million “residents,” and a thriving economy. Large numbers of colleges and universities—or, in some cases, individual departments or faculty—are active in Second Life, not only for academic purposes but also for campus visits, recruiting activities for prospective students, and fundraising. Second Life lets educators easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different strategies for a physical space affect learning, and a similar approach can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

Educational games and simulations can engage students in higher-level cognitive thinking, such as interpreting, analyzing, discovering, evaluating, acting, and problem solving. Recent technical advances in multiplayer, user-created virtual worlds have significantly expanded the capabilities of user interaction and development within these simulated worlds. This ability to develop and interact with your own simulated world offers many new and exciting educational possibilities. This article explores the technical capabilities and educational potential of these new worlds. Additionally, it presents and illustrates a model, which uses interaction combinations, to identify course content and topics having educational applications in virtual worlds.

This panel discussion examines both the process and product of teaching in Second Life from the perspectives of instructors and an instructional designer. Participants will see how instructors use Second Life to teach foreign languages and nursing, illustrating the breadth of possibilities virtual reality offers to introduce students to other cultures and clinical procedures. The experience enhances students' critical thinking, decision making, and diversity awareness.

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. This session will cover the advantages, disadvantages, and challenges of all three approaches.

Critique_It is an online virtual classroom critique system originally developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Croquet and ported to Second Life. The critique is a rudimentary instructional methodology in the arts that can be applied to most other disciplines. Critique_It provides an environment for simulating authentic learning strategies and allowing the possibility for feedback from peers and experts from outside the campus.

Current theories suggest that learning is facilitated when embedded in the context in which it will be used, but the constraints of the traditional classroom make implementing this difficult to impossible. This session will focus on exploring how new technologies such as virtual environments can situate learning in a "real" virtual context, motivate students while helping them develop scientific habits of mind, and support teachers in leading complex scientific inquiries.

The presentation will give a development perspective to incorporating a virtual field trip into a newly created online entomology course. The field trip in the traditional course took students to a local farm to uncover the varying species of bugs at the farm, as well as where they lived and what they ate. As the course went online, the 3D virtual environment enabled virtual students to share experiences similar to those of the traditional students while learning the same content.

An online virtual case-based management system was developed to provide an interactive learning portal using simulated case scenarios, collaborative learning, decision support, and real-time assessment of student motivation and decision skills. Learn how to dynamically create and implement online case scenarios using virtual characters, speech, and other media-rich content.