NZ: Literature review on virtual worlds
The dynamos at SLENZ have published a literature review titled Engaging with Second Life: Real Education in a Virtual World.
Written by Ben Salt, Clare Atkins and Leigh Blackall, it provides a superb overview of research undertaken to date and covers a wide range of education-related topics including learning design in Second Life, applying behavioural [...]
Virtual worlds are big: market research
US-based market research firm In-Stat have released a research paper entitled ‘Virtual Worlds and Web 3.0: Examined, Compared, Analyzed‘.
To see the 58-page report in full you’ll need to pay US $2,995 (that’s only $51.64 per page folks!), but the overview is:
virtual world businesses earn nearly 90% of their money from sale of virtual items
[...]
SL5B Closure: Annual Prizes and disruptive technology
Today saw the closing address by Linden Lab’s board Chairman, Mitch Kapor.
Dusan Writer has an excellent write up but the take home messages for me were:
1. The announcement of an annual ten thousand dollar prize for achievement in Second life. Judges will be drawn from a wide range of sources including Second Life residents. [...]
ViZiMO at Tokyo Metropolitan University
We’ve covered Hidenori Watanave’s work before and we were pointed to an interesting project recently completed at Tokyo Metropolitan University.
A three-week workshop was held with the theme ‘Translating real space into virtual space’, with eighteen students taking part. An application called ViZiMO was used to create the final works, and fascinating those works are:
You can [...]
Linden Lab release 4th podcast: education and Second Life
Linden Lab’s intermittent series of podcasts continues, this time with a focus on education projects in Second Life.
Get it here or you can read the transcript.
$100,000 in virtual learning prizes up for grabs
The New Media Consortium (NMC) have announced they have 100 thousand US dollars available to fund up to twenty “innovative open-source learning experiences”.
Read all about it here – I get really inspired by the momentum that’s behind education in virtual worlds now.
‘Envisioning the Educational Possibilities of User-Created Virtual Worlds’
The title of this post is the title of a fascinating article, which was recently published in the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AAEC) Journal.
You can get the full-text (PDF) version online by clicking here.
The abstract for the article:
Educational games and simulations can engage students in higher-level cognitive thinking, such as [...]
