What's going in with Virtual Worlds in Education today?

Exploring current uses of Virtual World tools in educational applications.

Over the next few weeks I want to catch up with what’s been going on in the fascinating world of “virtual world” tools (like Second Life) and how these tools are being used in educational applications.

Second Life remains the “gold standard” in Virtual World applications, but there are many other VW tools available, and we will consider some of those in our exploration. When I first experimented with Second Life a year or so ago, the laptop I had at the time was pretty old, and it could not support the demands of this resource-intensive environment. This led me to conclude that widespread adoption of this type of tool would lag a bit, as the average computer at the disposal of students and educators gradually catches up to these requirements. I now have a new computer, and will see how the app performs on it, but first I want to research what some of today’s educators are doing with these types of tools.

I found this web page on the SLeducation Wikipages site, which provides examples of many educational uses of Second Life over the last few years ... [Please click here to continue reading the complete post at www.EmergingEdTech.com, where I blog regularly about the use of Internet technologies in Education. Thanks!]