Augmented, Alternate and Virtual Realities in Higher Education

A New York City school teacher has crafted a version of Minecraft for schools

As part of the MA Education in Virtual Worlds' Designing Curricula module I presented an assessment paper that looked at the development of game-based learning to teach literacy skills. This paper ...

Investigating how the affordances of virtual world environments might be employed in immersive literature.

Over the last eight months, as those who are regular readers will know, I have been studying through the University of the West of England for myMA Education in Virtual Worlds. Four papers over; Orientation in VWs, Designing Curricula in VWs, Simulations and Role Play and Scripting and Building; I thought I’d now take the time to share some of the results of these invigorating, busy, sometimes frustrating but overall worthwhile and satisfying months of study and research.

The places were virtual, but the fun was real Thursday in a virtual-reality open house on the University of Georgia campus. Visitors could operate a robotic flyer, fire a Glock 9mm pistol complete with recoil, or ride a bicycle through some scenic countryside.

About VWBPE

Ever taken a class online? What about in World of Warcraft? Or Eve Online? Second Life? These are just some of the examples of new ways in which educators are using virtual worlds for teaching and educating their classes in new an exciting ways.

And the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference is where they all come in order to get new ideas of reaching out and connecting with others that have a similar passion for discoving what these technologies have to offer. 

Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is a global grass-roots community event focusing on education in immersive virtual environments. This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice. All educators are encouraged to present, attend and take part in this discussion of collaborative deeper learning and co-presence in virtual worlds and games.

This confernece is FREE to all attendees

Who attends VWBPE?

Over 2000 attendees representing 90 countries participate in 150-200 online presentations including theoretical research, application of best practices, virtual world tours, hands-on workshops, discussion panels, machinima presentations, and poster exhibits.

What We Need

While the conference itself is free to all attendees, the conference does cost. Our ability to provide program varies from year to year depending on the amount of sponsorship and contributions we receive. Funding received also is used to record, catalogue, and archive presentations in an open source format that is available to all educators without restriction. 

We are asking the community to help donate or sponsor up to a maximum of $16,500 which would be more than sufficient for server rentals, machinima, broadcasting, accessibility for persons with disabilities, incidental expenses, and ongoing hosting expenses for the archives.

There's a new spin on the popular online video game already big in classrooms. The World of Classcraft is ready for you to power up your learning.

The purpose of this project was to use virtual world technology in a fully online course to assist preservice teachers in examining their stated and implied beliefs, attitudes, and expectations about social roles related to gender. Second Life was explored as a viable means to enhance interactivity and engagement in an asynchronous entirely online class. Data was generated by a social roles questionnaire, a perception survey, journal entries and written final examinations. Results showed that students’ initially held beliefs about social roles as determined by the questionnaire did not significantly change; however, data generated from journals and final exam indicated that experiences exploring gender and social roles in a virtual environment were powerful and transformative, leading to new insights into gender roles and how these roles impact our beliefs about ourselves and others and how teachers and students are impacted by these beliefs. Preservice teachers surveyed indicated agreement with the idea that Second Life makes online coursework more interactive.

Today new details have been released about the upcoming VWBPE 2013 (Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education) conference which is scheduled for 24th July through to the 27th July 2013. The VWBPE 2013 team are calling for SL Mentors, Helpers and Gurus to assist during this year’s big conference. They are needed to help students, educators and residents in Second Life make VWBPE 2013 the best conference ever.

VWBPE 2013 is organized by educators and volunteers of Second Life who do a excellent job each year. Presentations provide information anything from Second Life, OpenSim, Social Media and Virtual Worlds. The new details is that VWBPE 2013 will be held on 4 worlds which has never been done during previous relating VWBPE virtual conferences. This year should should be very interesting and hopefully VWBPE 2013 will get more visitors this year because of the new changes.

Augmented reality; the wave of the future or today's reality? Aurasma will help you realize it's here....NOW!

Aurasma is a scanning app that activates when it hovers over a pre-designated trigger image. You can make absolutely ANYTHING a trigger. Aurasma recognizes triggers when you follow specific channels where those triggers reside. The items that can reside within the triggers (called AURAS) include: images, animations, links, videos, etc. This technology opens up tremendous possibilities for classroom integration.

Sebastien ‘VR Geek’ Kuntz is one of the world’s foremost experts on virtual reality and explains why good content is crucial

We want to purchase a server and materials to host Virtual Biology Islands using OpenSimulator.

Biological Interactive Objects for Science and Education (BIO-SE) is a group of educators (University staff, as well as independent educators) that are using virtual worlds and virtual technologies to deliver teaching to students worldwide. We have virtual learning activities on genetics, molecular biology, chemistry, ecology and also an archeology virtual-world simulator. We have developed most of our tools in Second Life, a commercial virtual world platform where one rents “real estate.” We have been migrating our content to the OpenSimulator platform which is a similar technology as Second Life but open-source thus removing the rental costs but requires dedicated server hardware. We are currently hosting a collection of virtual simulators with our biology activities on university desktop computers, but we need our own dedicated servers to maintain the presence of these OpenSim servers.

World of Classcraft is an educational augmented-reality multiplayer role-playing game. Played in the classroom, students play as one of three classes, gaining awesome powers, while risking a terrible death.

Students gain experience points for good actions and take damage for bad actions. As they gain experience points, students level up and gain powers that can be used in the classroom.

In abuse testimony, children are portrayed by the defense highly suggestible. As a result, child witnesses are often not believed. On the other hand, suggestive interviewing methods have been shown to undermine young childrens accuracy, invalidate testimony and lead to false convictions. The NICHD investigative interview protocol provides potential interviewers with an effective, standardized interview method to obtain accurate information from children. Unfortunately, the protocol is difficult to teach. Training programs reliably increase interviewer knowledge but often fail to affect interviewer behavior (1). The most effective approach is practice with feedback (2). However, simulated interviews suffer from adult simulatorҒs difficulties in accurately portraying child witnesses limitations (3). For ethical reasons, children are not utilized for mock child abuse interviews.