MUVEs and Second Lives

This was a presentation given at the annual King's [College London] Institute of  Learning and Teaching conference, a mainly internal affair aimed at highlighting current educational research within the institution and disseminating good practice. The talk itself formed a general, if critical, introduction to Second Life as a social virtual world and articulated the abundant issues that make SL a challenging yet compelling arena for teaching activities. What was noticeable when putting together these slides was just how *much* is going on in SL, to the extent it was difficult to capture the richness in a short session like this. One of the key threads that ran through the talk considered how the first phase of simply diving in-world and trying things out is being extended by a second phase of serious research activity - evidenced by the number of grants that have been  secured by new projects such as MUVEnation, (Open)Habitat and LLL3D. Some of the early empirical data gathering that I have carried out with fellow researcher Margarita Perez-Garcia has been a study of the non-formal learning opportunities made available to SL citizens in the form of hands-on workshops. The emphasis in this work has been to explore how teachers in short duration SL competency building classes have appropriated virtual spaces and have made use of tools and techniques that may be valuable in understanding what good practice is in MUVE-based teaching. The slides show the culmination of the preliminary data analysis in the form of a taxonomy of practices and a matrix that elaborates four areas of teaching that are formed by axes addressing control of the environment and pedagogical approach. The conclusions are that good practice in these workshops is exemplified by maintaining a close control over the teaching space combined with a reflective and  process orientated  teaching approach.

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