Share Paper: Virtual Environments in Education: Establishing a Continuum of Educational Affordances of Three Worlds and Games—Second Life, Glitch, and World of Warcraft

  1. Stasia Weston, University of South Alabama, United States
  2. Rebecca Reese, University of South Alabama, United States
Friday, March 29 11:50 AM-12:10 PM Nottoway

Abstract: Using part of Aldrich's (2009)continuum of virtual environments, this paper uses educational affordances to explore the connections between three virtual worlds/games and where they fall upon the spectrum. We view Second Life as an "anchor" for virtual worlds with it's "tabula rasa" affordances such as user created materials, collaborative potentials, avatar customization, etc. World of Warcraft falls on the gaming end with quests as objectives, little or no user created content and collaboration through guilds. Glitch, the newest of the three, has little so far in the way of research but features a mixture of the affordances found in both ...