Immersive Virtual Worlds for (E-) Learning

Abstract

Virtual worlds are becoming more popular and important for the information society, allowing people to meet “face-to-face” and at the same time be distributed across different places. This offers numerous possibilities of revolutionizing the way learning is realized over long distances and at a given location. However, current uses of environments like Second Life make it very clear that there is a lack of interaction, and the learning concepts that are tailored to these kinds of collaborative environments result more or less in the replication of “always the same,” but this time in a virtual world. An example is a typical lecture that is now available as an in-world podcast. This chapter examines current state-of-the-art approaches of learning in and with virtual worlds in relation to the features of such environments and then proposes a research agenda tailored to making the learning experience truly interactive, collaborative, multi modal, and situation- and context-aware.