As technology is being integrated into educational processes, teachers are searching for new ways to enhance student motivation and learning. Through shared experiences and the results of empirical research, educators can ease social networking sites into instructional usage. The Social Classroom: Integrating Social Network Use in Education collates different viewpoints on how social networking sites can be integrated in education. Highlighting both formal and informal uses of social interaction tools as learning tools, this book will be very useful to all educators, trainers and academic researchers in all aspects of education looking for a theoretical/practical approach to resourceful teaching.

The Social Classroom: Integrating Social Network Use in Education

Merging Immersive Virtual Environments, Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence techniques provides a number of advantages to develop Intelligent Environments for multiple applications. This paper is focused on the application of these technologies to develop intelligent learning environments. Education is one of the most interesting applications of immersive virtual environments, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. We highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. Our proposal has been applied in several subjects of the Computer Science degree in the Carlos III University of Madrid. The results of the evaluation show that developed learning environment fosters engagement and collaboration and helps students to better understand complex concepts.

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An approach to develop intelligent learning environments by means of immersive virtual worlds

A Systematic Review and Environmental Analysis of the Use of 3D Immersive Virtual Worlds in Australian and New Zealand Higher Education Institutions: Final Report 2013

Three Dimensional Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are promising tools in education because of the unique affordances they offer. These learning affordances imply certain actions that in turn can lead to corresponding learning activities. There seems to be a lack of reports on which of the affordances of MUVEs for learning and teaching are used and how they are enacted by relevantly designed learning activities. This study investigates the learning activities conducted in Second Life, the most popular and widely used among the "sandbox" type MUVE platforms, as reported in 205 empirical studies, by associating them with the learning affordances they enact. As necessary step towards this goal, the study proposes a new classification of learning affordances of MUVEs and a new concrete set of learning activities based on the literature review. Learning affordances include free navigation, creation, modeling and simulation, multichannel communication, collaboration and cooperation and content presentation and/or delivery. By using the open, axial and selective coding offered by the grounded method, the learning activities that emerged from the exhaustive empirical review, are well associated with the proposed six learning affordances, validating in return the functionality of the proposed set of learning affordances. The five more general learning activities, resulting from the selective coding, are content creation, content exploration and interaction with content, social interaction, gaming, participation in representations of real life events and situations. Further research on other MUVEs is needed to establish this framework.

Learning activities as enactments of learning affordances in MUVEs: A review-based classification

Social Networking has been a global consumer phenomenon during the last few years. Online communities are changing the way people behave, share and interact within their daily lives. Most of such communities are mainly focused on sharing contents and communicating using a traditional web interface. However, social virtual worlds are computer- simulated environments that the users can "inhabit" and in which they can interact and create objects. Education is one of the most interesting applications of virtual worlds, as their flexibility can be exploited in order to create heterogeneous groups from all over the world who can collaborate synchronously in different virtual spaces. In this paper, we highlight the potential of virtual worlds as an educative tool and propose a model to create learning environments within Second Life or OpenSimulator combining the Moodle learning management system, embodied conversational metabots, and programmable 3D objects. We have implemented the proposal in a learning system for several subjects of the Computer Science degree in our university and show that it fostered engagement and collaboration and helped the students to better understand complex concepts.

/pdf/a-proposal-to-create-learning-environments-in-virtual-worlds-232ipqzg2o.pdf

A Proposal to Create Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds Integrating Advanced Educative Resources

Background: Twenty-first-century undergraduates often find eighteenth-century culture difficult to access and, influenced by popular assumptions about the period in current media theory, characterise the century as individualist, underestimating the cultural significance of social networking in literary and political history. Purpose: This study set out to teach the history of social networking as culturally significant in the production of literary texts during the eighteenth century as well as to demonstrate the intellectual and compositional potential of today's social networking technologies. A virtual reconstruction of eighteenth-century London in Second Life and a semester project requiring the student recreation of 3D social spaces like coffee houses and gardens tested the uses of social networking tools to teach research methods and build disciplinary knowledge. Sources of evidence: Evidence of student learning outcomes is provided by three undergraduate courses in eighteenth-century culture, with...

Katherine Ellison

Papers

Virtual history: a socially networked pedagogy of enlightenment

Media Scholarship and 18th-Century Studies: Media Scholarship and 18th-Century Studies