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This chapter describes pre-service teachers' teaching practices of didactic methods based on cognitive apprenticeship. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate potential of Second Life® as a space for teaching practices of pre-service teachers. The participants were 160 college students who were completing a practicum at Korea National University of Education. These students enrolled in four sections of teaching methods and educational technology, which was one of the requirements for their teaching certificate. The students were placed in groups of three to five students according to their majors. In Second Life, they practiced their teaching and participated in the evaluation of other groups' teaching. They discussed Second Life's potential, such as a space for expanding their teaching experiences and explored possibilities for using it as an environment for teaching practices. The authors believe that readers will find that Second Life can offer a valuable environment to promote pre-teachers' understanding of teaching techniques.

This paper provides a general comparison between the ethos, methodological mission, and theoretical standpoint of the New Iowa School, established by Carl Couch and his students and Second Life, a three dimensional virtual world that invites particular forms of sociation. Despite differences in orientation and purpose, as well as biases in communication, we propose that the methodological and conceptual emphasis underlying the research generated from New Iowa School experimental studies can provide a useful framework for research into the virtual worlds created in Second Life. In the course of citing similarities and differences between the New Iowa School and Second Life, we also note that contrived worlds in laboratories and virtual worlds in user domains not only have relevant analogical processes to outside, in situ social worlds, but consist of social stages for performances that have application to the various social stages constructed by actors in the real world. In conclusion, we suggest that the New Iowa School and Second Life represent different but compatible realities in their own right, that the conceptual depth associated with the New Iowa School can inform research into Second Life interactions, and that each offer insights into the external worlds inhabited by real actors who navigate across time and space in their everyday lives.

Second Life, as a three-dimensional social medium, provides an unparalleled opportunity for people to interact with each other and their surroundings in unfamiliar and innovative ways. After a brief introduction to the discipline of Studies in Religion at the University of Queensland (UQ), this chapter will examine some of the key characteristics of MUVEs in general and of Second Life in particular, with a view to assessing its suitability as an environment for learning based on andragogical and constructivist methodologies. Further, it will explore the original conception and development of the UQ Religion Bazaar project within Second Life.

The UQ Religion Bazaar project was originally conceived in 2007 and developed through 2008. It consists of a Second Life island situated in the New Media Consortium educational precinct and boasts a number of religious builds including a church, a mosque, a synagogue, an ancient Greek temple, a Freemasons' lodge, a Zen Buddhist temple and a Hindu temple to Ganesha. The island was used in two large first-year classes and for supervising distance postgraduate research students.

Using the perspectives of dramaturgy and symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Carl Couch this study focuses on paid sex work in the hypermodern, virtual world of Second Life. Using seventeen semi-structured interviews and six months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that the employment of sexual scripts, carrying off a successful erotic scene, and the creative use of communication and embodiment are highly valued in escorts’ performance of Second Life sex work. Escorts craft an online persona that is a digital representation of the self, which is manifested in the embodiment of their digital body or avatar. In addition to digital representations of the physical self, Second Life allows for multiple methods of computer-mediated communication, and escorts are able to re-embody the first life body through the trading of first life pictures, voice cybersex, and web cam cybersex. The data allow the conclusion that most escorts are unwilling to re-embody the first life body for reasons of personal safety and the desire to restrict access to the first life self. I find, however, that there is a porous boundary between first life and Second Life in which the first life self comes through in the Second Life persona. In the concluding remarks, I explore the implications this study has for the negotiation of privacy for new social media actors who are reluctant to fully disclose their lives yet perform a persistent, archived persona for friends and followers on the Internet. This study contributes to a small, but growing, body of literature on Second Life and expands the existing work on embodiment and privacy in the digital realm.

The ability for learners to interact online via their avatars in a 3-D simulation space means that virtual worlds afford a host of educational opportunities not offered by other learning technology platforms, but their use also raises several pertinent issues that warrant consideration. This chapter reviews the educational use of virtual worlds from a design perspective. Virtual-world definitions are explored, along with their key educational characteristics. Different virtual-world environments are briefly contrasted, including Second Life, Active Worlds, Open Sim, and Minecraft. A wide variety of virtual-world uses in schools and universities are examined so as to understand their versatility. Key educational benefits of virtual worlds are distilled from the literature, such as the ability to facilitate 3-D simulations, role-plays, construction tasks, and immersive learning. Emergent issues surrounding the use of virtual worlds are also analyzed, including cognitive load, safety, and representational fidelity. One higher education and one school level vignette are provided in order to offer more detailed insight into the use of virtual worlds in practice. Recommendations for learning design and implementation are presented, based on the thematic analysis of contemporary virtual-worlds research.

This chapter explores how Jass Easterman (the author's avatar name) teaches education students concurrently, both pre-service teachers and postgraduate, in Second Life. It discusses how a virtual world can be a valuable teaching and learning tool for the whole group even though they have a variety of overall goals and learning outcomes. Jass brings distant university students located around the world studying at the one institution together to liaise with each other in Second Life. She has created an innovative tutorial model where students go on virtual tours, visit other educational institutions, attend guest lectures, undertake role play activities, and go on Web quests and learn basic building and scripting skills, all from their own homes. Adult learning theories and communities of practice, in a virtual world, underpin all activities. Why Second Life was chosen for these students and what the students say about this type of learning are discussed in this chapter. The value of this tutorial model will be explored and reflected upon and conclusions made of its efficacy.

Recovery seems to be one of the most important mechanisms explaining the relationship between acute stress reactions and chronic health complaints (Geurts & Sonnentag, 2006). Moreover, insufficient recovery may be the linking mechanism that turns daily stress experiences into chronic stress. Given this role recovery has in the stress process, it is important to ask in which contexts and under what circumstances recovery takes place.

Participation in online courses in both traditional universities and newer for-profit organizations is burgeoning. Indeed, students entering higher education increasingly have experienced online education at the secondary and even primary levels. Students have immense wherewithal with digital media use through messaging, gaming and mobile platforms. Reference librarians in the epoch of Wikipedia and Google are experiencing a steady decline in the number of in-person reference questions. However, disruptive innovations in teaching technologies such as multiuser-virtual-environments (MUVEs) now enable quasi-face-to-face consultations by librarians with students. The use of virtual environments might well be bolstered by the unsustainability of the traditional brick-and-mortar based educational facility grounded interaction due to the new financial strictures on many educational institutions and their stakeholders. In many ways libraries and other elements of higher education are evolving away from physical onsite usage to an online interface that in many ways reflects gaming interfaces. That is, geographically separated learners can meet with librarians together as teams to get informational and technical support through a variety of platforms and interfaces. This chapter is a report on providing the support of an experienced reference librarian through the Second Life virtual world interface. Included are descriptions of Second Life sites and resources and how they might be utilized for library functions. Educational venues in Second Life are describes and explained, as are learner avatar use and Second Life educational experiences. Second Life is a technology that invites experimentation and growth for those in higher education.

A social movement is sweeping the globe in the form of Internet delivered and open access sharing spaces. People are connecting in new ways while personalizing their daily experiences with shared websites called Web 2.0 technologies. This chapter looks into the implications of taking these technologies beyond social interactions into the learning experiences of students. With a literature review and case study analysis, the goal of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of what is needed to appropriate quality instructional strategies to the online university course room including social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Second Life®, and wikis. Following a brief history and descriptions of the Web 2.0 sites and functions, the reader is introduced to the design expectations typical of instructional designers (IDs) with definitions and standards from the field's literature. Support is offered from the business and educational literature for incorporating leadership into design practice through vision, strategy, and theory-based decisions. Definitions, benchmarks, and examples of instructional strategies and activities for learner engagement complete the theoretical framework for the chapter. Given the added complexities of advanced technologies, this chapter suggests evaluating social learning through an ID leadership perspective for a more informed recommendation of Web 2.0 online affordances. Following a case analysis of Second Life®, a 3-D virtual world used for learning activities, implications for ID practice are discussed, along with the various benefits and barriers of adopting Web 2.0 technologies. In the conclusion, suggestions are given for future research on the potential for integration of Web 2.0 affordances into online learning designs for rich, engaging learning experiences.

This chapter discusses two instructional designs that sought to leverage the multiuser virtual environment Second Life to support learning and instruction with both undergraduate and graduate students at two different universities. We examine each of these curricular developments in depth and provide findings from research conducted with each. Using data collected from students and faculty, we describe 11 research-based virtual world design principles that emerged from each experience that include such suggestions as Create opportunities for sustaining virtual community beyond a task and Expect your learners to go off-task. These principles may be used by readers to guide future designs that use virtual worlds to support learning.