It turns out that virtual worlds are at their best when they look nothing like a traditional campus. Professors are finding that they can stage medical simulations, guide students through the inside of cell structures, or present other imaginative teaching exercises that cannot be done in a physical classroom.
OpenSimulator, and it is essentially a free knockoff of Second Life
The most ambitious attempt to build an education-friendly virtual world is a project called Open Cobalt,
Any college with a spare server and some staff time can use the OpenSimulator software and play God to a virtual world.
The main request is the ability to limit access to students in a course, which the group can do.
To counter these new options, Linden Lab is testing a product that would let colleges install a world on their own servers and limit access to students and professors. Case Western is among those trying it out for its virtual campus.
Maybe 3-D online environments are just one of those technologies that sound cool but never fully materialize, like personal jetpacks. Trying to make the World Wide Web look like the real world misses the new kinds of things the Internet can do.
"We don't really understand what we can do and what we can't do with this tool for education yet, so it's more exploratory now," said Peter J. Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University who studies virtual worlds. "We know there's something here, but we don't know what yet."
It turns out that virtual worlds are at their best when they look nothing like a traditional campus. Professors are finding that they can stage medical simulations, guide students through the inside of cell structures, or pre sent other imaginative teaching exercises that cannot be done in a physical classroom.
"This guide avoids some of the obvious things, like using Google Docs for collaborative writing, and instead focuses on some of the lesser-used Google tools options"