Second Life

Project Wonderland is a 100% Java and open source toolkit for creating collaborative 3D virtual worlds. Within those worlds, users can communicate with high-fidelity, immersive audio, share live desktop applications and documents and conduct real business. Wonderland is completely extensible; developers and graphic artists can extend its functionality to create entire new worlds and new features in existing worlds.

stats for your SL sim

I might be missing the point - but IMHO this is a 3D singles club/Contiki tour/dating service with porn options.

IBM Research IBM Research: IBM Virtual World Guidelines

excellent article on students' reactions to SL as a teaching and learning tool with pre-service teachers.

It was in April 2008 when our Head of the Department asked us to develop specifications of our department's presence in Second Life. We searched for literature sources but the key papers or pointers came from our very generous colleagues on the SLED List. The papers, particularly, Jennings and Collins, 2007, offered useful insights in terms of how the learning spaces in Second Life are designed but there weren't any papers or reports that captured experiences of students, educators and designers Or any guidelines - eg do's and dont's of how learning spaces should be designed… So the question that we started with in our research is: How should 3D learning spaces be designed for learner engagement?

Second Life Community Gateways

Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life was a research project at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London. The project was funded by the Eduserv Foundation. The team worked part-time on the project from June 2007 to May 2008. Update: We are teaching more MA sessions in Second Life in spring 2009. Introduction: During 2007-2008, the project team, Diane Carr, Martin Oliver and Andrew Burn, researched learning in two online, social worlds, Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Virtual Worlds, Real Libraries: Librarians and Educators in Second Life and Other Multi-User Virtual Environments Edited by Lori Bell and Rhonda B. Trueman Foreword by Stephen Abram Eighty percent of Internet users are expected to engage in some form of virtual world activity by 2011 (Gartner Research Group), and librarians and educators are already there. This fascinating book-the brainchild of two pioneering virtual world librarians-is designed to help libraries and schools recognize the importance of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) and consider ways of getting involved as they proliferate.

Project Goals Our goal is to help develop mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction by 1. developing basic standards for metadata and content representation; and 2. investigating preservation issues through a series of archiving case studies representing 1. early games and literature and 2. later interactive multi-player game environments. Key deliverables includedevelopment of metadata schema and wrapper recommendations, the archiving of key representative content and the development of generalizable archiving approaches for preserving this content. Our approach is intended to address both the pressing need to preserve the bits and available representation information of early and significant works now, and the need to begin to address more difficult issues surrounding long-term preservation of more recent multi-player interactive virtual worlds.

Second Life Deutschland/auf deutsch