Research into Virtual Worlds in Higher Education: The Cloudscape

Cloudworks is a kind of social network for educators, which enables people to create 'cloudscapes' - that is collections of links to resources (clouds) about particular topics. Clouds can be added to cloudscapes by anyone with an account and an included discussion tool encourages conversation around the resources.

I've been collating research on using 3D Virtual Worlds in Higher Education, and used Cloudworks to both make the list available and enable others to add to it. If you are interested in using Virtual Worlds like Second Life for learning and teaching, this list might be useful to you or you might like to develop the resource further.

If you're not sure what we mean by 3D Virtual Worlds, have a look at the session notes for 'The World of Virtual Worlds' beginners guide session. This goes through definitions, examples, uses and contains lots and lots of links to resources.

Virtual Worlds in Education: Journals

For those interested in using virtual worlds in education, there are 3 'special issues' of journals looking at specifically that. These are a good starting point to survey what work is going on in this area.

• ALT-J's September 2008 issue "Learning and Teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds" covers a wide range of introductions to issues such as using gaming worlds, and socialisation within virtual worlds. [EHU Library Link]
• The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Vol 2, No 1 "Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual Worlds" specifically looks at education. This issue includes looks at simulation based training and science in Second Life. The other issues of the Journal will have articles relevant to certain areas of interest so explore them too.
• Finally, there is the British Journal of Educational Technology's May 2009 issue of which about half the issue is devoted to virtual worlds. [EHU Library Link]

If you know of any other good resources that you'd like to share, why not leave a comment below.

[Image by Peter Beaumont]


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