ISGTW has an article about the rise in popularity of various virtual world platforms like Second Life to replace current virtual classrooms that typically consist of little more than powerpoint slides and web forums. The ‘virtual reality’ environments of Second Life and World of Warcraft offer significantly improved interactivity and realism, which greatly improve the student’s reactions.
“Extensive research shows that visual imagery can play a powerful role in accelerating learning. Evidence suggests that use of visual media can enhance problem-solving, motivation, understanding and the expression of ideas,” said Roger Murphy of the Visual Learning Lab at the University of Nottingham, UK.
Part of the “Immersive Education” initiative and the “Media Grid” standards group, they’re working to create a standard infrastructure to combine media delivery, storage, and networking into a unified environment for both educators and students.
See this news
http://alphavilleherald.com/2010/08/teen-grid-closing-philip-linden-red-eyed.html
We lost trust with SL and have not regretted our move to opens. Reactiongrid have been fantastic.
Our research is moving ahead a lot smoother now.
One of the problems with educational use of Second Life is that Linden Lab is “repositioning” itself, and has recently cut Second Life’s educational subsidies with little warning – quite a few academics and educational groups using Second Life have found themselves suddenly lacking the budget to continue running their in-world presences as a result.
Still, Second Life’s loss has been OpenSim’s gain – various OpenSim-based grids such as ReactionGrid and OSGrid have picked up quite a few virtual refugees in the last couple of months.
Interesting. Can you provide any details (specific cases, other stories online)?
At iVERG we are attempting to develop metrics for learning in virtual worlds. We now use Opensim. We conduct tasks in our virtual space and record student actions and communication for later analysis. The tasks are to develop circuits for LEGO robots to follow. Lots of fun and worthwhile research as we are making headway.