A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> Second Life (SL) is currently the most mature and popular multi-user virtual world platform being used in education. Through an in-depth examination of SL, this article explores its potential and the barriers that multi-user virtual environments present to educators wanting to use immersive 3-D spaces in their teaching. The context is set by tracing the history of virtual worlds back to early multi-user online computer gaming environments and describing the current trends in the development of 3-D immersive spaces. A typology for virtual worlds is developed and the key features that have made unstructured 3-D spaces so attractive to educators are described. The popularity in use of SL is examined through three critical components of the virtual environment experience: technical, immersive and social. From here, the paper discusses the affordances that SL offers for educational activities and the types of teaching approaches that are being explored by institutions. The work concludes with a critical analysis of the barriers to successful implementation of SL as an educational tool and maps a number of developments that are underway to address these issues across virtual worlds more broadly. <s> BIB001 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> This paper describes and reflects on the development of the Schome Park Programme (SPP), which was established with the specific aim of extending our thinking about schome, which aims to be the optimal educational system for the 21st century. In an earlier stage of the Schome Initiative, it became clear that people find it almost impossible to break free from established conceptions of education. Open virtual worlds like Second Life® virtual world offer opportunities for people to have radically different 'lived experiences' of educational systems and thus seemed to be the ideal vehicle for exploring alternative models of education. The SPP therefore set out in late 2006 to use Teen Second Life® virtual world to support the development of the vision of schome, informed by current understandings about learning, pedagogy and the 'tools' available to us today. This paper provides an overview of the first three phases of the SPP and briefly outlines the research methodologies used within it. This leads into a discussion of the potential of virtual worlds to support pedagogical exploration, which in turn leads to consideration of three dimensions of practice that emerged from the SPP. These three dimensions, which correspond closely with a framework developed in post-compulsory education, are illustrated by use of descriptions of activities and other data from the SPP. The paper concludes by raising questions about the extent to which pedagogical practices will change in the future as a result of the opportunities offered by virtual worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] <s> BIB002 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> Second Life (SL), an immersive virtual environment, is increasingly being adopted in education for both formal and informal teaching and learning uses. This paper addresses the process of developing a demonstrator presence in SL, the potential of the system for formal teaching and some practical ideas on how to successfully integrate such emerging technologies into practice. <s> BIB003 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> The authors use their own experiences with social software to argue for the need for caution in its uses in education. They particularly draw attention to difficulties in engagement, the effects on identity, an emphasis on superficial issues, lack of coherence, and problems with authenticity and trust. While Facebook and Second Life appear to have potential for educational applications, the disquiet associated with them may need to be taken into account: and this can affect both students and their teachers. One of the authors is a student on an online course and extracts from her blogs and journal capture the emotional and psychological effects of engaging in these new worlds at the time it happened. Both authors have noticed changes in their responses over time and point to the need for integration and coherence for “virtual identities” to play an appropriate part in higher education. The paper raises more questions than it answers and suggests that there is an urgent need to theorise online identity, th... <s> BIB004 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> While many reports espouse the potential impact that 3-D virtual worlds are expected to have on teaching and learning in higher education in a few years, there are few empirical studies that inform instructional design and learning assessment in virtual worlds. This study explores the nature and process of learning in Second Life in a graduate interdisciplinary communication course in fall 2007. Literature suggests that 3-D virtual worlds can be well suited for experiential learning environments. In this study, the actual instructional effectiveness of Second Life as an experiential learning environment for interdisciplinary communication is empirically examined using mixed research methods of journal content analysis, surveys, focus group, and virtual world snapshots and video. <s> BIB005 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> The purpose of this article is to present the results of a study conducted to investigate how the attributes of 3-D technology such as avatars, 3-D space, and comic style bubble dialogue boxes affect participants’ social, cognitive, and teaching presences in a blended problem-based learning environment. The community of inquiry model was adopted to analyse and interpret data collected from transcripts and group interviews. The results indicated that although the attributes of 3-D technology promoted participants’ social presence, this positive online social experience did not completely contribute to participants’ cognitive presence due to inherent technology attributes. Additionally, critical technical and instructional features of the 3-D environment were required in order to further enhance teaching presence and overall learning experience. <s> BIB006 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> Utilizing the same technologies pioneered by the embedded journalists in Iraq, the University of Central Florida (UCF) teamed up with TracStar, Inc to create a small-scale, satellite-based expedition transmission package to accompany a university film and digital media professor into parts of Utah and the Moab Desert that had a historical significance to American Western Films. The expedition took the group to many locations where scenes from John Wayne and John Ford movies were filmed. Students along on the trip camped out and suffered similar tough conditions as did the original film crews, experienced the wilderness, and participated in lectures and interviews with locals, who supported the films and acted as extras and stunt persons. The project brought a live experience back to the university campus in which students personally interact firsthand with the people, places, things in as real a manner as what the remote travelers encountered. This article presents details about the experiences of the first implementation of the live broadcasts from the remote desert and the reactions of focus groups to the experience. One group watched archived broadcast, convinced that they were live. Their impressions and reactions were recorded and analyzed and compared to those who were part of a control group. Conclusions and recommendations for future trips are introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] <s> BIB007 </s> A REVIEW OF E-LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES - Opportunities for Teaching and Learning <s> Virtual Worlds <s> The effective teaching of fire investigation skills presents logistical challenges because of the difficulty of providing students with access to suitable fire damaged buildings so that they can undertake authentic investigation tasks. At Charles Sturt University (CSU), in the subject JST415, Fire Investigation Cause and Origin Determination, the novel approach of providing students with a CD based virtual environment based on the scene of a burned down house, as an alternative to having them undertake investigation of a real fire scene, has been implemented. This paper describes a quantitative and qualitative study exploring the effectiveness of this teaching resource. A key finding from this study was that students felt that the virtual fire investigation task had important advantages over undertaking a real investigation task, even though there were some limitations in the overall degree of realism of the experience. The results also suggested that students found that the visual fidelity and navigation capabilities provided within the environment were quite adequate for carrying out their fire investigation activity. Importantly, students also felt that the ability to revisit the virtual scene as many times as they wanted, at a time convenient to them, gave it advantages over a real investigation task if they were to be provided with only one or the other. <s> BIB008
A virtual world is a simulated environment through which users can interact individually or with others to use and create objects. Virtual worlds include multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), and eSimulations, which are ideal for classroom teaching situations. MUVEs are "environments that support learning activities such as experimentation, exploration, task selection, creation, and dynamic feedback ... [and] ...provides opportunities for social interaction, collaboration, an increased sense of shared presence, partially dissolved social boundaries, and lowered social anxiety" (Jarmon et al., 2009, p. 170) . With a MUVE there is no predetermined narrative. MUVE designers have the freedom to define and create the environment most suitable for their teaching context BIB001 and use it as an alternative model of education BIB002 . Second Life (SL) is by far the most popular MUVE and applications can be found in many disciplines and educational contexts BIB002 ; BIB001 ; BIB003 . In SL the user is represented by an avatar, a graphical image that represents a person, and can interact with other avatars in a 3-D virtual environment. SL offers an alternative space where learners can gain experiences that may not be possible in the real world. These include hypothetical or imaginary experiences or those involving large risk BIB004 ); BIB005 ; or where these experiences would be too expensive to produce in real life BIB003 BIB002 suggests that they are also "spaces which encourage playfulness and testing of boundaries". There are some concerns about the MUVE as a learning environment. "The omnipresent artificiality of identity within these spaces and the concomitant challenges to frameworks of trust and truth may leave some students feelings distracted, isolated, or even disconnected" (Boon and Sinclair, 2009, p. 108) . This finding is supported in the literature BIB006 ; BIB001 ). Another concern is that educators are ill prepared to take advantage of these new technologies BIB002 , which could seriously complicate student/teacher interactions. ESimulations are computer-based simulations that are delivered via a computer network and, increasingly, from mobile screens. The major benefits of eSimulations are that they are interactive, stimulating and enjoyable for learners and they provide single-user or team interaction in realistic or real-world scenarios where trial-and-error learning in a risk-free setting is possible (Cybulski, 2007) . Many other attempts have been made to provide simulated learning experiences to students including: • The use of live broadcasts using a small-scale, satellite-based expedition transmission package into remote areas which brought a "live experience" back to students on campus BIB007 ). • The creation of a virtual learning environment on CD that emulated a fire investigation activities scenario BIB008 ). • The utilization of a fictitious telecommunications organisation (website) as a context for engaging students in professional practice (Goold et al., 2006) .