The Story of My “Second Life”

Tom Hanson, Editor, OpenEducation.net passed along a couple of articles that got my attention and earned the site a spot on my blogroll. If you’re not reading OpenEducation.net, you should be! Here are the two articles in question:

Virtual Worlds Offer Meaningful Educational Opportunities for Children

and

Virtual Worlds – Westminster Professors Discuss Research

Let’s get one thing clear up front: I do NOT feel personally qualified to evaluate or assess bonafide academic research other than as an interested observer. That said, the researchers’ PDF (linked here) presents itself as a collection of preliminary findings, including interesting observations about online socialization tendencies, dominant types of player orientations relative to the environment (p. 14 – 17), principles (thirteen of them!) for a successful child’s virtual world (p. 19), and a summary of the value of virtual worlds for children (p. 20). References are not provided but assuredly will be included in their final published work.

The focus of the study: observing children’s reactions during use of Adventure Rock, a colorful, richly produced BBC game with online and downloadable components.

The summaries above go into more detail than I possibly can, but again, from perusing the other posts on the blog, like “Author Reveals “The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games,” these folks GET IT. Their perspectives are very current (and reflect many of the same themes echoed by the researchers at the Princeton conference I presented at in May.)

Don’t take my word for it, check out OpenEducation.net for yourself. Site Editor Tom Hanson, a retired school superintendent with over 30 years of experience in education, is gathering an impressive collection of resources and articles for your perusal.

-kj-