Minecraft Our City, an Erasmus Project in Virtual World

The use of Virtual Worlds in Education is becoming an innovative alternative to traditional education. However, these solutions are confronted to several issues such as: lack of indicators to follow up the students’ progress, lack of well-defined evaluation parameters, difficulties for evaluating collective and individual contributions, difficulties for keeping students engaged and motivated, a very time-consuming teachers’ supervision, and the absence of tutors for guiding the learning process, among others. In this review, we explore and describe academic contributions focused on the application of Learning Analytics to improve Virtual Worlds in Education from three perspectives: Personalized Learning, Adaptive Learning and Educational Intervention. Our results highlight that most of the research focus on support decisions whose nature concerns operational non-real-time issues. Additionally, almost all the contributions focus in solving only a few issues, but none of them offer a holistic framework that could be used by teachers or pedagogical personnel for decision making.

The adoption and pedagogical use of technologies such as virtual worlds to support teaching and learning, and research in higher education involves a complex interplay of technical, organisational and personal factors. In this paper, eighteen educators and researchers provide an overview of how they perceive a virtual world can be used in education from the perspective of themselves as individuals ‘me’, their educational organisations and as members of the Australian and New Zealand Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) community of practice ‘us’, as well as the complex technology that underpins this learning environment ‘IT’. Drawing on Linstone’s (1981, 1984) Technical, Organisational and Personal (TOP) multiple perspective concept as the framework for analysis, the authors discuss their perspectives of how the personal, organisational and technical aspects of teaching through the use of virtual worlds have impacted on their teaching and research in higher education. The potential of employing the TOP framework to inform future research into the use of technologies such as virtual worlds in teaching and learning is explored.

While students do learn real-world knowledge and skills in virtual worlds, educators have yet to adequately theorise how students’ virtual world experiences bring about this learning. This paper critically reviewed theories currently used to underpin empirical work in virtual worlds for education. In particular, it evaluated how applicable these theories’ learning mechanisms are to virtual world-based learning. Eleven theories were identified from 80 journal papers. Four learning mechanisms were found to be applicable to virtual worlds: that students learn through reflection, verbal interactions, mental operations, and vicarious experiences. However, one commonly-implied learning mechanism was found to be inapplicable to virtual worlds: that students undergo a physical sensorimotor experience of the real-world phenomenon through their virtual world actions. An alternative theory is needed to explain how students’ virtual world actions might bring about learning, so as to help educators determine what exactly students can learn by performing virtual world actions.

3D multi-user virtual environments (MUVE) bring new opportunities to foreign language teaching and learning as a platform for teaching practices. Due to immersive and interactive nature of 3D MUVE, these tools have gained popularity in the field of foreign language learning and teaching. The power of virtual learning environments lies in creating immersive 3-D spaces that give users a sense of learning by doing. Moreover, the environment is interactive and is much the same as real world interaction. MUVE provides strong support for synchronous collaborations, interactions, and immersive environments for experiential and constructivist learning settings. Some key features of the virtual worlds comprise the ability to construct 3D environments that simulate real world situations, as well as the ability to have a virtual identity to create a cross-cultural self and the ability to have participants from around the world acting virtually in designated roles that convey new types of learning within this environment.

There is growing interest in the use of virtual gaming worlds in education, supported by the increased use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) for collaborative learning. However, this paper argues that collaborative gaming worlds have been in use much longer and are much wider in scope; it considers the range of collaborative gaming worlds that exist and discusses their potential for learning, with particular reference to higher education. The paper discusses virtual gaming worlds from a theoretical pedagogic perspective, exploring the educational benefits of gaming environments. Then practical considerations associated with the use of virtual gaming worlds in formal settings in higher education are considered. Finally, the paper considers development options that are open to educators, and discusses the potential of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) for learning in higher education. In all, this paper hopes to provide a balanced overview of the range of virtual gaming worlds that exist, to examine some of the practical considerations associated with their use, and to consider their benefits and challenges in learning and teaching in the higher education context.Keywords: virtual environments; game-based learning; constructivist learning environmentsDOI: 10.1080/09687760802526756

For the past decade, educators have participated in virtual world teaching. Manukau Institute of Technology entered the virtual world of Second Life in 2009. Since then foundation or bridging students have repeatedly demonstrated skill development and knowledge acquisition through the utilization of virtual world resources. A change in the way the foundation curriculum is delivered has taken place over the last two and a half years with a switch to project-based delivery. A Virtual World Club was started to support students in their project work. Over the past year, the club has attracted attention from students and lecturers that has led to a more widespread adoption of the use of virtual worlds. Plans are underway to bring MIT students into alternative worlds, and recent technical advances will be an integral part of the direction MIT will take in future years.

Games are often used as incentive based approaches in learning a foreign language. A common part of DVD based toolkits; for example, include vocabulary, sound clips of the target language, exercises for learners to record their own voice, and games. The games can be matching exercises involving sound, text and images. What is missing from such standalone tools are other active speakers. Chat rooms can somewhat address this, but students often meet other students at the same level. In contrast, the 3D multi user virtual environment (MUVE) of Second Life, also referred to as a virtual world, offers social context that can allow for voice and text communication for language learning, often with native speakers of the target language. Reward models in such social contexts can have greater effect on the engagement and motivation of language learners. This article first presents a literature review of reward models used in learning and teaching in virtual worlds. We secondly identify the elements that need to be included in a reward model for active language learning in Second Life. We describe the stakeholders' perspectives (educators and students) and suggest how the model should be integrated into the design of the virtual island or sim and into a course design.

Interest in virtual worlds and their application to learning have increased significantly in recent years. There are many different types of virtual worlds and they are used for a multiplicity of purposes including gaming, play, social networking, learning and development, work, and also business. Virtual worlds are a new tool that we can use to enhance realtime online communication and collaboration and to construct engaging online activities. They provide users with a very strong sense of presence through their avatars and also a sense of space. When we're immersed inside a virtual world, we usually feel that we're really sharing a certain space with other users. There are a number of promising examples showing the benefits of using virtual worlds in i) entertainment and social networking, ii) education and training, iii) e-commerce and e-business; iv) research and development, v) tele-working and tele-conferences; and vi) e-government and public sector information. This paper aims at concentrating on the virtual world in education and entertainment sector.

This paper examines youth storytelling during co-design of an identity-expressive educational game for learning data science.Using interaction analysis of co-design interviews with middle school students, we explore how storytelling allows participants to (a) use existing game elements to position themselves and (b) express their interests and identities through imagined game futures.We argue that analyzing youth's interactive storytelling and identity enactments during co-design can inform the development of game narratives that represent diverse youth.Our findings contribute to the design of inclusive virtual worlds for STEM learning that celebrate youth identities and experiences.We discuss implications for engaging youth voices in the co-design process and creating educational games that resonate with diverse learners. PurposeVideo games are important contexts for inclusive STEM learning, allowing players to explore and enact identities (Gaydos & Devane, 2019; Gee, 2014).However, designing educational games that connect to diverse players' lives and identities is a significant challenge.Our project employs youth co-design to create "The Isles of Ilkmaar," a virtual world that supports identity-expressive data science learning among diverse youth, particularly genderexpansive youth, cis-girls, and youth of color.In this paper, we explore storytelling as a method for engaging diverse youth in co-design.An initial analysis showed how storytelling within co-design activates youth expertise and imaginations, facilitating a transition from game players to game designers (Radke, et al., 2023).We now look more closely at storytelling episodes to understand youth's shifting positionalities within the co-design context, illustrating how storytelling allows youth to (a) refer to and take up existing game elements as resources for positioning themselves as designers and (b) author and animate imagined new game futures in which they can projectively identify (Gee, 2014) with the player character.By analyzing youth narratives through the lens of positioning, we aim to understand how youth contributions to co-design arise from and reflect the dual positionalities of game designer and future player, contributing to the understanding of how to design educational games that connect to diverse players' lives and identities.

Due to the characteristics of educational virtual worlds, the present manuscript underlines the need for a research model that considers the social context as part of its unit of analysis instead of just the individual’s cognitive process and learning. It is proposed that such a research approach could be design-based research (DBR), because the methodology employed by the DBR perspective thoroughly meets the challenges related to understanding how learning occurs inside a complex context of activities and interactions like those that usually take place inside an educational virtual environment. To accomplish this, the DBR employs an iterative methodology, which consists of repeating cycles of design, implementation, analysis, and redesign. This systematic procedure allows theory to emerge during the process and, thus, using DBR a researcher not only understands how to improve the quality of a certain virtual world, but also addresses theoretical issues regarding the theoretical background on which her design was based to revise and extend it. The main objective of this article is to propose the use of design-based research as a viable methodology to do research in a virtual world like Second Life and to describe in detail how to do it. First, the design-based research approach is explained in terms of its origins, its methodological resources, and its theoretical underpinnings. Secondly, considering the characteristics and affordances of virtual worlds, an adaptation is proposed and explained to employ it for a virtual world research project. Finally, an example of a research project is built to show how the proposed design-based research methodology can be applied to plan it and revise its underlying theory.

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

In this paper, we explore how the application of multimedia design principles may inform the development of educational multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs). We look at design principles that have been shown to help learners manage cognitive load within multimedia environments and conduct a conjectural analysis of the extent to which such principles can help manage cognitive load in the highly immersive “beyond multimedia” environments that 3-D educational MUVEs represent. We frame our discussion as a design practice analysis of the River City MUVE, a science inquiry environment that has middle school students collaborating to develop and test hypotheses regarding illnesses sweeping a virtual town. We analyze the current River City interface design using a framework describing cognitive overload scenarios and associated approaches to manage cognitive load. We also discuss the potential difficulties that may be seen as multimedia principles are applied to 3-D MUVEs. Our discussion describes a blueprint for research implementations that we are undertaking to systematically investigate the effect of an educational MUVE interface design based on multimedia principles—implementations that we hope will provide an action framework for other MUVE researchers to use in their own studies.

Information and Computer Technologies have produced new generation interaction methods and services to support human activities, offering evolutionary learning procedures. 3D Virtual Worlds are sophisticated platforms supporting a set of human activities, enriching the way we learn, work and socialize. They are platforms that can support a constructivist learning approach of medical students, based on methods at the edge of technology inducing a team spirit and enhanced collaboration experience. In our work, we introduce the concept of e-learning through virtual worlds in medical and healthcare education, providing a literature review on the field. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of virtual worlds in healthcare, we provide a comparison of the most popular platforms, while some open research issues are being considered in the conclusion.

Virtual world and other 3D Web content has been treated as a separate domain from the traditional 2D Web, but is increasingly being integrated with broader web content. However, search engines do not have the ability to crawl virtual world content directly, making it difficult for users to find relevant content. We present an intelligent agent crawler designed to collect user-generated content in the Second Life and related virtual worlds. The agents navigate autonomously through the world to discover regions, parcels of land within regions, user-created objects, and other users. The agents also interact with objects through movement or ‘touch’ to trigger scripts that present dynamic content in the form of note cards, chat text, landmark links, and web URLs. The collection service includes a focused HTML crawler for collecting linked web content. The experiments we performed are the first which focus on the content of a large virtual world. Our results show that virtual worlds can be effectively crawled using autonomous agent crawlers that emulate normal user behavior. Additionally, we find that the collection of interactive content enhances our ability to identify dynamic, immersive environments within the world.

The development of an educational 3D virtual world requires a complex skillset, which includes programming, modeling, texturing, animating, and quest/level designing. When these skills are distributed across multiple workers, the workers must negotiate a shared understanding of their intermediate work products, which ultimately culminate in the virtual world. This paper is an ethnography of the intermediate work products (“artifacts”) and processes used in the development of Virtual Energy World—a 3D virtual world for instruction on sustainable energy issues. The resulting artifacts and processes have utility as a general development framework for both educational virtual worlds and video games.