Working in a virtual world creates new opportunities available for both students and teachers and introduces new challenges to their skills and resources. In particular, virtual worlds such as Second Life (SL) offer revolutionary and innovative modes for learning. These learning spaces are referred to as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) (Gredler, 2001;Jenkins, 2005). The guiding principle for the adoption of new VLEs by educators is that the particular features of each new Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-based tool should be used to provide specific benefits to the students' learning environments. While virtual worlds like SL are visually very rich environments where many types of stimuli and materials can be made available to students, the question is: what 'mainstream' university campus activities may be carried out completely within VLEs such as SL? We propose to explore this question and identify the potential to support teacher and learner interactions and activities within a virtual campus space of SL.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.