Second Life Educational Environments

Second Life is an open ended virtual world that is popular with educators interested in the potential of this technology. The environments in Second Life are created by the inhabitants. You can create an account and download the software for free. Below is a list of places you might enjoy visiting to [...]

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Virtual Worlds 101 – Part 2

Types of Virtual Worlds

There are a large number of virtual worlds in existence with memberships that vary from a few thousand to several million inhabitants. For the most part they can be seen as falling into one of two categories, the open-ended, non-structured (sandbox) virtual worlds, and the theme based, game-like Massive Multiplayer [...]

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Virtual Rejection

For my second visit to the virtual world of Everquest, I created a new character (an elf) and began exploring the surrounding area. I noticed activity on a nearby hill and upon coming closer spotted a group of avatars defending the hill from an onslaught of foul looking creatures (orcs as [...]

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Finding Neverland

My First Virtual World Experience
In 2001, ten years after my my first computer game experience with Sid Meier’s Civilization, I was teaching an online course entitled Psychology of the Internet. Our text was a title by the same name authored by Patricia Wallace. Although somewhat dated (1999), it’s still a good read, filled [...]

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Thinking Games

After using Civilization in 1991 for a semester, my next use of educational computer games occurred in the mid 90’s when a few “thinking games” were added to a critical and creative thinking course. The development of the this new course “The Mind at Work, The Mind at Play” was inspired by the [...]

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CIV in the Classroom

(Follow-up to the Sept. 1 post)
Using the computer game Civilization in the classroom back in the early ‘90’s was a bit of an adventure, but we learned a lot from the experience and there were several surprises. I used the game in a social psychology course and my history colleague used it in [...]

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How it all began: Civilization

I had been using a computer for just a few years back in 1991. Like many teachers, my early educational use was primarily for basic tasks such as creating my syllabi and tests and computing grades. The Internet Age had not yet dawned. I found myself wondering if the [...]

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