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 World Academic Resources

The following resources were collected in preparation for a meeting of members of the COPPER Carnegie leadership group (involving six colleges) that are a part of the Carnegie Academy’s CASTL initiative http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/general/index.asp?key=21 . Members will meet in a virtual world to explore the educational applications and potential of this technology. These resources may be of [...]

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Virtual World Cultures

While there are a number of specific attributes to consider when choosing a virtual world world for educational purposes, the culture of that world is of particular significance. The Internet still resembles the “Wild West” in some ways, and when venturing into cyberspace with your students you never know who or what you will [...]

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Jumping into MMORPG’s (A Guide)

A previous post focused on getting one’s feet wet in a basic virtual world. Open ended virtual worlds like There, Active Worlds and Second Life provide free initial memberships and are not overly demanding in terms of computing power. They function well as simulations of real world environments for social, entertainment, educational, and [...]

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Worlds of Wordcraft

At Vanderbilt University a first-year writing course entitled “Worlds of Wordcraft: Narrative Forms in the Digital Classroom” makes use of a variety of media to engage students in the learning process while enhancing their writing skills. Games and virtual worlds that are used in this course include Lord of the Rings Online, Dark Age [...]

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Jumping Into Virtual Worlds (A Guide)

If you’re fairly tech savvy or have spent some time in virtual worlds, this post may not be for you. If on the other hand, you have an interest in getting your feet wet in the virtual waters, but your current use of online technology is limited primarily to email and surfing the web, [...]

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Academic Interest in Virtual Worlds and Games

There has been considerable interest in recent years in the study of virtual worlds and computer/video games. This interest can be broken down roughly into the following four areas:

Pure research
Knowledge and skills acquired while gaming
Games as educational models
Virtual [...]

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Which Virtual World to Choose?

If you’re If you’re interested in taking the leap and exploring a virtual world or two where do you start? Your first decision is to determine whether you want to visit one of the open-ended non-gaming virtual worlds or one of the theme based MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role playing games).
Free-Form Worlds
The first [...]

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Virtual World Reading

You know an area of interest has hit the mainstream when one of the “Dummies” series of books is published on that topic (Massively Multiplayer Games for Dummies by Scott Jennings (2006)). In recent years a number of books have been published that examine various aspects of the virtual world experience, some of [...]

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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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