About VieW
"What is it that makes a world a world?"
Mike Heim, Virtual Realism
With the advent and apparent financial success of Linden Lab�s Second Life virtual world environment, the medium of 3D multi-user virtual worlds has finally emerged into the mainstream. After more than ten years of mostly research applications, there is an effort to promote the use of virtual worlds in education at a production scale. This is primarily driven by a strong cohort of enthusiastic higher education, corporate training, museum and government users of the Second Life environment.
The Media Grid recently launched the Immersive Education (IED) initiative, an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. IED has identified Second Life, Croquet, and Wonderland for the first tier of target platforms in their effort to establish open standards for the educational use of the medium, and recognizes the importance of incorporating as many platforms as possible into their Grid system. All of these projects have their merits and growing user bases.
Primary examples
- Second Life
- More than 1,000 educational institutions have established a presence in this for-profit environment. Rezed supports a community for educational communities primarily focussed in Second Life.
- Croquet
- The Croquet Consortium and other research groups have been developing peer-based open source environments based on the Croquet platform.
- Active Worlds
- Active Worlds hosts a universe for educational projects, AWEDU. Cornell University ran the SciCentr outreach program for ten years, migrating the content and programs to EDUni-NY at GST BOCES in Elmira, NY in 2009. Several K-12 educational research projects including River City, Quest Atlantis, and EDUni-NYare housed in independent universes using the Active Worlds system. Indiana University also supports more than one Active Worlds universe and IBM uses this system broadly for corporate training. The National Institute of Aerospace has founded NIA Universe with support from the Virginia Beach City School District.
- Wonderland
- Sun has recently announced its Wonderland platform and a $250,000 partnership with NMC to flesh out its application to education.
Background
Recognizing the need for a resource that will identify and compile information on the various virtual worlds systems, the Federation of American Scientists has developed a wiki. This site listed approximately 75 active virtual worlds in November 2008, ranging from Tapped In to Second Life, and the numbers are growing.
Yet there has been very little communication among user communities. Each educational program has chosen its environment based on solid and serious considerations. Issues include privacy, ownership of content, access to servers, demands on user hardware, and bandwidth, as acknowledged by the NMC in a February 2008 announcement of their partnership with Sun.
Educational users, from K-12 to corporate, have also created plug-ins and devised work-arounds for the shortcomings of each environment. Each of these represents a feature that could be incorporated into next generation platforms, or designed as interoperable plug-ins.
As we move forward with the development of open source and improved commercial systems, we have the opportunity to speed the production of useful tools by creating a shared compendium of features, the Taxonomy of Virtual Worlds for Education. This is similar to an exercise in design-based research where users provide direct feedback to the developers. In the case of the Taxonomy workshop, we intend to include students, educators, educational program providers, evaluators, and technology researchers directly in the process. Each has her or his own perspective to contribute.
The Need
From experience, educators have found that each virtual world system has both attractive and detractive features when considered for use in K-12 educational settings. This workshop is intended specifically to flesh out the landscape of educational virtual world applications:
- What would the ideal systems for STEM learning look like?
- In particular, what are the best ways to manage tasks specific to education, such as social interaction, student assessment, teacher support and development?
- How do we address issues of access, usability, system architecture, intellectual property, user identity and security?
- What tools are currently available for assessment and what do we need?
- How do we match software to teaching strategies?