Welcome to Virtual World Leaning!  The goal of this blog is support your appetite for Virtual World learning. I’ll lead with some basics but the objective is for you to build upon what you learn and through your own research and experience, add to this blog. Let’s get started.

Virtual worlds are playing an increasingly important role in education, especially in language learning.

 

Virtual worlds such as Second Life are used for the immersive,collaborative and task-based, game-like opportunities they offer language learners. As such, virtual world language learning can be considered to offer distinct (although combinable) learning experiences.

• Immersive: Immersive experiences draw on the ability to be surrounded by a certain (real or fictitious) environment that can stimulate language learning.
• Social: Almost all 3D virtual spaces are inherently social environments where language learners can meet others, either to informally practice a language or to participate in more formal classes.
• Creative: A less-developed approach to language learning in virtual worlds is that of constructing objects as part of a language learning activity.There is currently little documentation of such activities.

Six learnings framework

The “Six learnings framework” is a pedagogical outline developed for virtual world education in general. It sets out six possible ways to view an educational activity.

• Exploring: learners explore a virtual world’s locations and communities as fieldwork for class.
• Collaborating: learners work together within a virtual world on collaborative tasks.
• Being: learners explore themselves and their identity through their presence in a virtual world, such as through role-play.
• Building: learners construct objects within a virtual world.
• Championing: learners promote real life causes through activities and presentations in a virtual world.
• Expressing: learners represent activities within a virtual world to the outside world, through blogs, podcasts, presentations and videos.