AVATAR: Added Value of teAching in a virTuAl woRld

I recently came back from Rome where we (our group from the University of Hertfordshire) attended the first in a series of meetings related to the European AVATAR project. It aims to establish which conditions in a 3D virtual world are most conducive to the practice(s) of learning and teaching. To that end, one of the requirements is to establish which virtual world is best suited to the task. Readers of the blog will be aware of my work in Second Life and how, besides development,  I have been undertaking research into how the medium is able to facilitate communication and learning.

One thing on a lot of peoples minds is how we define a virtual world (for the purposes of education). Evidently, a simple 3D Virtual Learning Environment will not suffice. The task is to find (or event construct) a 3D multi-user environment with an integrated set of building tools and a freely accessible library of 3D models. This sounds very much like an exact description of Second Life, the only problem being that there is reluctance in adopting the platform across the board.

For all its problems, Second Life has shown us what happens when you give people, with no background in 3D, a simple construction set and the means to work together. Some of the things people have built range from entire virtual settlements to railway networks spreading over significant areas of the landmass. There is no longer any doubt that this medium has removed the most stubborn barriers (lingual, social and taboo alike) and encourages cooperation between individuals. The only problem lies in its implementation.

People do not like the idea of Linden Lab (the creators of SL) being in charge of all the content contained inside the environment. It's too big a responsibility for them to handle and, to be frank, they charge too much money. SL has gone out of its way to recreate a lot of the problems which exist in the real world, namely a lack of space. This is virtual space which is distributed at a cost, it's almost a license to print money (were it not for server maintenance fees it would be).

One of the most important requirements of the virtual world we need to find/create is that it be open source. Again, Second Life's open-source equivelant, OpenSim, seems to be a likely candidate. Time will tell what the final decision will be, but rest assured there's going to be an extremely critical analysis and that SL no longer has a free ticket.

I leave you with a video of some of my previous work in SL.