Does research show that Second Life is a good educational environment?

Since much of the educationally-oriented activity on Second Life has gone on within the couple of years at the most, there is not a lot of hard data to pass along to administrators about the value of this particular virtual environment. (Harvard's course CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion was first offered in 2006 - not the first Second Life course - it was but one of the first to recieve a lot of media attention.) In spite of the lack of hard data about Second Life in particular, some educators on the SLED discussion list point out, virtual worlds have been around for 20 years and research has been done on those environments. Milosun Czverik (SL name) suggests trying ERIC and other education databases to search for research on virtual worlds. Use terms such as massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), 3D multiuser virtual environment, MUVEs, computer simulation, video games, Active Worlds, Second Life.


Mark Pepper has an Annotated Bibliography of Second Life Online Educational Resources at
http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~mpepper/slbib Among other links, Pepper includes:

Ixchel, Anya. (2006). My Teaching Semester in Second Life: Pitfalls, Challenges and Joys
http://www.slatenight.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=40



Freitas, Sara de. (2006) "Learning in Immersive Worlds: A Review of Game Based Learning." Prepared for the JISC e-learning program.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/elearning_innovation/gaming%20report_v3.3.pdf



Stoerger, Sharon (2007) It's Not Whether You Win or Lose, but How You Play the Game: The Role of Virtual Worlds in Education.Annotated Bibliography
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~sstoerge/virtualworlds.htm



Additional documents:



Livingstone, Daniel, (Ed.); Kemp, Jeremy, (Ed.) (2006).
Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop, Part of the Second Life Community Convention (1st, San Francisco, California, August 18-20, 2006). "...14 papers from presentations and posters from the Second Life Education Workshop at the Second Life Community Convention, presented at the Fort Mason Centre in San Francisco, California in August 2006." ERIC document: ED493670.
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/1b/ef/03.pdf





Life Science Informatics Trends Analysis for Community College Program Builders -

Volume 3: Virtual Worlds: http://bellevuecollege.edu/informatics/VWTAFinal.pdf
An excellent introduction and overview education and Second Life from Spring 2007.

Educators Coop
Published Research Papers
http://www.educatorscoop.org/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=categories&category=1

Syllabi
http://www.educatorscoop.org/index.php?module=documents&JAS_DocumentManager_op=categories&category=2

SaLamander Project http://www.eduisland.net/salamanderwiki/index.php?title=Literature_review (more generally on gaming and distance education)

More on Second Life

I'd tried using PBWiki to post some info about Second Life, but I'm not very happy with that - especially know that I don't have any collaboration going on. I'm going to try switching my content here. Let's see what happens...Why teach in Second Life? Because users are getting used to online gaming environments!

A April 24, 2007 press release from Gartner suggests that 80% of Internet users will be on some sort of virtual world in the next few years. "Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a "second life", but not necessarily in Second Life, according to Gartner, Inc….”
(http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503861 ).


Worlds of Warcraft has over 10 million users as of January 2008. Games capture users attention and keep them engaged. Can we provide the same sort of environment for education? More than 300 educational institutions, museums and libraries are exploring Second Life. (April 2008)


Nick Yee has done research on electronic and online games and user behavior.
http://www.nickyee.com/cv.html