What virtual world platforms do you use for your students?

[Rich White]

Secondlife? Wonderland? Webkins? Lively?

[Maggie Veres]

Wright State University has land in second life. One of our business classes uses it to complete a virtual project exploring some of the businesses in SL. My undergrad students are offered extra credit to visit the virtual campus, photograph themselves reading the questions I put on a kiosk. They then must respond and post their picture in WebCT.
I am a bit concerned about forcing them to participate in a virtual world, but the extra credit incentive works for some.

[Carlos Raul Lopez Reatiga]

Dear Rich,
I am a SecondLife User but I do not use it with my students because of the technical requirements needed to be there. That is, most of our students do not have enough space in their hard disk and do not enough RAM memory either. This makes navigation very slowwwww.

I think there should be a way to fix this problem.

I once screen-captured one of my "trips" in SecondLife and showed it to some groups. They were amazed and promised to suscribe and play with it in order to know it more, which they did. The results were kind of frustrating when they realized that it was not that fast in their poor internet connections at home, and some other reasons.

I have also used Lively but it didn't fit my expectations because of the poor quality of the graphics.

Warm regards!
Carlos Raul

[Rom]

I am still exploring the use of virtual worlds using Project Wonderland. My students are creating a classroom using Wonderland.

[Carlos Raul Lopez Reatiga]

Does MOODLE count?
WiZiQ?
Scribblar?
UStream?
DimDim?

Warm regards!
Carlos Raul

[Ramesh C Sharma]

Dear Carlos,
greetings,
I am not sure, pl correct me.
Can we call Moodle as a platform for vw, or a LMS is different.

ramesh

Carlos Raul Lopez Reatiga said:

Does MOODLE count?
WiZiQ?
Scribblar?
UStream?
DimDim?

Warm regards!
Carlos Raul

[Cheryle Mcglothlin]

Carlos,

I don't think Moodle will classify as a VW--It is a wonderful product and we use in extensively in our K-12 environment as LMS. We are looking at other options for Virtual World--Anybody try Openism? I have an open source guy that is looking at it. I love Second Life and Activeworld and several others, just can't afford them.

In my little part of Ohio, I think that vw is where online learning should be and where it is going! Can't make the conference in real life or virtual, taking my comps. But will be looking for information from all of you on it!

Carlos Raul Lopez Reatiga said:

Does MOODLE count?
WiZiQ?
Scribblar?
UStream?
DimDim?

Warm regards!
Carlos Raul

[Rich White]

We have been leveraging Opensim for around 18 months now .. it has really come a long way .. Our private grid is called GreenbushGrid http://grid.greenbush.us .... we also leverage a version of Cobalt called Edusim: http://edusim3d.com ... We hope to look into Wonderland when .05 is mature this summer.

[Kae]

I'll take a really broad approach to this.

Second Life and World of Warcraft currently.
By Fall semester hope to have Metaplace, Forbidden City, Muxlim Pal and Spore as at least projects.
And we'll keep looking to see what we can use.

K.

[Matt]

We've been using Wonderland 0.4 for a little over a year and are ramping up to port all of our work from that platform to the new Wonderland 0.5 release.

[Steve Bronack]

We've used a combination of Activeworlds and Qwaq successfully for a number of years now. We have a presence in SL, but not really for instruction. We are in the exploratory stages with RealXtend, which holds real promise, IMHO.