Virtual Worlds for Student Engagement

doi:10.4236/ce.2012.326118

Paper Menu >>

Journal Menu >>

Creative Education

2012. Vol.3, Special Issue, 796-801

Published Online October 2012 in SciRes (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ce) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ce.2012.326118

796

Virtual Worlds for Student Engagement

Atul Sajjanhar

Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Aust ralia

Email: [email protected]

Received August 24th, 2012; revised September 2 2nd, 2012; accepted October 10th, 2012

In this paper, we study the scope of virtual worlds for student engagement in higher education. The moti-

vation for the study is the gap in opportunities for interactivity that exist for off-campus students com-

pared with on-campus students. A student taking a course at a university, while located in a different geo-

graphic location, has limited opportunity for student-student and student-teacher interaction; this effects

student engagement significantly. We conduct a feasibility analysis for engaging students in a virtual

world; Second Life is used as the test-bed to create the virtual world environment. We present preliminary

findings, the promises and the limitations of Second Life as an immersive environment for engaging stu-

dents.

Keywords: Student Engagement; Virtual Worlds; Second Life

Introduction

The notion of student engagement is based on the assumption

that learning is influenced by how a student participates in

educationally purposeful activities (Coates, 2005). Learning

management systems (LMS) such as Blackboard, Desire to

Learn and Moodle are used extensively in attempts to engage

students. The drawback of traditional LMS is that they are re-

duced to simply an online repository of resources; interactivity

is passive and manifested as discussion forums or teacher blogs.

Such an LMS is referred to as object-centric. Stutzman (Stutz-

man, 2007) makes a distinction between object-centric and

egocentric networks.

An egocentric social network places the individual as the

core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn,

Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego

element at the center of the network. Examples of object-centric

networks include Flickr (social object: photograph), Dopplr

(social object: travel instance), del.icio.us (social object: hyper-

link) and Digg (social object: news item).

Indeed, Coldwell et al. (Coldwell, Craig, & Goold, 2011)

have argued whether the adoption of LMS supports student

engagement. Grant et al. (Grant & Clerehan, 2011) note that

these systems lack embodied experiences. Contemporary edu-

cational theory, however, emphasises the need to have contex-

tual embodied experience for student engagement (Migdalek,

2002).

There are several vendors which provide Multi-User Virtual

Environment (MUVE) or virtual world which afford a contex-

tual embodied experience and have the potential to offer stu-

dent engagement aligned with real-world experiences. Second

Life (secondlife.com) is a 3D virtual world developed by Lin-

den Lab. Another popular vendor of 3D virtual world is Active

Worlds (www.activeworlds.com). River City Project and Ac-

tive Worlds Educational Universe (AWEDU) are examples of

projects developed by Active Worlds for educational purpose.

In this paper, we focus on Second Life (SL) because it is the

most mature of virtual world platforms which is reflected by its

high usage figures compared with other competing platforms

(Warburton, 2009; Dalgarno et al., 2010). According to War-

burton (Warburton, 2009), SL combines the object-centric and

egocentric aspects:

SL combines both aspects to some degree. Ultimately, what

the residents of SL and other virtual worlds do so well is pro-

vide a reason (we can call them social objects) around which

people can connect together and want to continue those connec-

tions.

SL is used in pedagogy and education (Spence, 2009). SL is

used in medical and health education (Boulos, Hetherington, &

Wheeler, 2007); it is used for teaching languages, including

Arabic (Kern, 2009) and Chinese (Henderson et al., 2010). It is

also used for researchers to collaborate (Novak, 2010). Nergiz

Kern is an English teacher and teacher-trainer with extensive

experience in SL. She observes that the immersive and col-

laborative nature of SL appealed to her (Kern, 2009). SL pro-

vides an immersive experience by enabling avatars; an avatar is

the virtual representation of a human. SL also contains virtual

representations of real world objects. An avatar can view and

interact with in-world objects. SL provides an interactive envi-

ronment with capabilities for avatar-avatar and avatar-object

interactions. The scenarios presented above represents a model

which facilitates students to engage. We provide an overview of

SL in Section 2. The development of a scaffolding virtual re-

gion to realize the affordances of SL is described in Section 3.

In Section 4, we discuss the impact of the proposed system on

student engagement. Conclusion is presented in Section 5.

Overview of Second Life

SL is a 3D virtual world developed at Linden Lab. Key

building blocks in SL are described in this section.

Second Life Viewer

SL uses a client (viewer) as the 3D browsing software. The

viewer receives data from SL server and renders the 3D virtual

environment providing a graphical interface. The official view-

er supplied by Linden Lab is the SL viewer. SL viewer code is

A. SAJJANHAR

released as open source which allows developers outside of

Linden Lab to offer customized viewers, namely, third-party

viewers.

Linden Scripting Language

Linden Scripting Language (LSL) is the scripting language

of SL. Interactivity of in-world objects is controlled by LSL.

Editing LSL is used for customization of the appearance/be-

havior of objects and enhancement of the functionality; resi-

dent-developed libraries can also be used for this purpose.

Avatar

In order to become a SL re sident, one needs to create a virtual

representation of him/her, namely, avatar. An avatar is referred

to as the digital alter ego in (Boulos, Hetherington, & Wheeler,

2007). An avatar is customizable i.e. the clothes, hair, skin

color, eyes can be selected to portray the in-world persona of an

individual. A teacher needs to carefully decide the appearance

of his/her avatar in order to make the students feel most com-

fortable. An avatar enters the SL virtual world by teleporting to

a region using the SLurl (SL URL) which is used to identify

each location uniquely. Avatars can also navigate by walking,

flying and riding on virtual vehicles. For a specific location, an

avatar may have the role of a visitor or land owner. Land owner

has privileges to add/remove/edit objects in their land parcel.

The privileges of a visitor are granted by the land owner.

Second Life Bot

SL allows the creation of a bot account similarly to a human-

controlled avatar account. A bot is script operated and allows

user-interaction, role-playing and automation. Some typical uses

of bots in SL are: detect spammers/abusers; invite residents to a

group; and greet residents (Linden Research, Inc., 2011a).

Affordances of Second Life

For SL to be effective, it should be able to accomplish the

well-documented tasks performed in traditional learning envi-

ronments. Davis (Davis, 2009) has proposed categories of tools

in traditional learning environments. We use these categories of

tools to define the key affordances of SL, in the educational

context, as manifested by avatars.

1) Avatars can communally or on-demand access course ma-

terials using appropriate in-world media objects to: listen/view

audio/video streams and presentations.

2) Avatars can interact with in-world objects. The in-world

objects can be educational (for example, shared whiteboard) or

social games requiring single player or multiple player partici-

pation.

3) Avatars can voice/text chat with neighboring avatars

(owned by student or teacher) or scripted agents (bots).

4) Avatars have access to tools for personal organization.

Examples of relevant tools are: space for storage of files; and

calendar.

While providing features of traditional learning environments,

these scenarios provide opportunities for game-based learning

and cooperative learning. Opportunities exist for experiential

learning and performative learning (Warburton, 2009). We

develop an experimental land parcel to realize the affordances

listed above. The proposed land parcel provides scaffolding for

in-world activities suitable for student engagement.

Acquiring Virtual Land

Virtual land is required to conduct educational activities such

as lectures, discussions etc. Virtual land in SL is purchased

directly from Linden Labs or on auction from other users who

are selling their land. SL has an in-world unit of currency,

namely, Linden dollars (L$) which is readily exchangeable to

US dollars; it is used to purchase land and other goods/services.

Land parcel available for purchase is either developed or unde-

veloped. Developed land has buildings and objects but costs

more. Objects in developed land can be edited or removed by

the owner. Undeveloped land is a vacant plot which needs to be

developed from scratch according to personal taste of the owner;

although cheaper, it requires substantial time and effort and the

additional cost of purchasing objects (refer Section 3.2). A land

parcel can be designated a sandbox. A sandbox is a parcel of

land which is available to SL developers for testing. A sandbox

may be owned by Linden Lab or by a resident and is designated

for public or private use. A sandbox is a land parcel which af-

fords development privileges to users. Sandboxes are periodi-

cally cleared, removing any objects that users might have been

left behind.

152 institutions are listed in the SL education directory

(Linden Research, Inc., 2011b); these include accredited col-

leges, universities, and schools which own land in SL. The

distribution by region, of institutions using SL, is shown in the

Figure 1.

Majority of the institutions with SL presence are located in

USA; institutions in UK and Germany have majority SL pres-

ence in Europe; Singapore and Taiwan lead the tally in Asia.

Common uses and characteristics of land occupied by institu-

tions are addressed in the next section.

Resources

Virtual land is analogous to a vacant plot of land in real-life.

The land needs to be built up to conduct educational activities.

Common uses and characteristics of virtual land occupied by

educational institutions are examined by Jennings et al.

(Jennings & Collins, 2007). They r eported th at the common uses

of land occupied by educational i nstitutes are private sandbox es,

auditorium and art galleries; other uses include libraries, infor-

mation centers, and spaces to socialize such as pubs, gardens,

restaurants. Among common ch ara cteristics of land occupied by

educational institutions, it is reported that 76.1% of institutions

were branded w ith the official logo; 47.9% of the institutions had

some form of welcome message (bot, notecard or signage);

45.1% of the institutions had side ways, walkways, roads or other

footpaths; 45.1% institutions had teleport to other location.

Virtual objects are required to create the virtual campus so

that educational act ivities can be structured around these objects.

SL provides an inventory of objects which can be used in-world,

subject to adequate privileges within a land parcel. The default

inventory is shown in Figure 2.

SL provides prims within the inventory. Prim is short for

“primitive object” or “building block”. Prims are combined and

edited to create complex objects using the object-editing tool

provided in-world. Properties of a prim which are editable are

color, texture, bumpiness, shininess and transparency. Media

including web pages, audio, video and images can be applied on

A. SAJJANHAR

Figure 1.

Distribution by region of institutions using SL.

Figure 2.

SL default inventory.

the face of a prim. LSL can be used with objects to add interac-

tivity. An object obtained from combining prims and/or using

LSL is stored in the inventory for future use.

Building desired o bjects can prove challenging. A n alternative

option is to purchase prefabricated objects from their owners by

participating in SL’s thriving economy. SL Marketplace is used

for selling/purchasing objects using the SL currency of Linden

dollars (L$). An example of purchasing a whiteboard from SL

Marketplace is shown in Figure 3. Objects, once purchased,

appear in the inventor y. Objects are priced b ased on permissions

to modify, copy and transfer. An object sold with permission to

modify, copy and transfer is a “full perm” object; such objects

are typically priced higher because the developer relinquishes all

control (Novak, 2010). An object purchased in SL may come in a

box, as shown in the Figure 3. Such objects need to be extract ed

to the inventory. Once in the inventory, the objects are ready to

be used in-world (rezzed). Some objects allow customization.

SL allows users’ to create con tent. To achieve the objective of

content creation, SL allows uploading of images, sounds and

animation to the user’s inventory. Only file formats suitable for

in-world content creation are allowed to be uploaded to the

inventory (Linden Research, Inc., 2011c). The cost of each file

Figure 3.

Second Life marketplace.

upload is L$10.

Course Delive r y

We propose a space in the acquired virtual land which is

dedicated to course delivery. The space is described in this

section assuming that we have acquired prefabricated buildings.

The proposed space provides: media streaming of lecture re-

cordings, web content and slideshows of lecture presentations.

Media Streaming and Web Content

A variety of media can be displayed on land parcels. This in-

cludes movies, audio, and web pages. The default media player

object in the SL inventory supports quicktime movies (ending

in .mov or .mp4) when it is rezzed. Media from the local com-

puter can be streamed into SL media player by using a stream-

ing server; however, it is constrained by the upload bandwidth.

Hence, it is best to use a streaming relay provider server to

provide content to the in-world media player. The media can be

streamed so that all residents view the same content by using

the rtsp protocol; alternatively, streaming can be done on-de-

mand i.e. each resident will view different content by setting

the protocol to http (Otis, 2012). In Figure 4, we see a room

which has a media screen showing a quicktime movie. For

streaming to work, quicktime needs to be installed in the local

computer.

Web content can be displayed on a prim. SL uses the Mozilla

browser engine to display web pages. In Figure 4, we see a

prim which is a cube with one face displaying a webpage.

Slide Presentation

There are several web sites which provide slide presentation

hosting service, for example, Google Docs and Slideshare.

Slide presentation from Google Docs is shown on the face of a

prim in Figure 4.

An alternative approach for slide presentation is to develop it

in-world. Each slide needs to be converted to an image file of a

type which conforms to SL requirements. Each image is up-

loaded to the inventory at a cost of L$10. LSL is used to navi-

gate through the images by advancing slides, going back and

resetting to the first slide. Alternatively, several objects in SL

Marketplace provide the functionality to create a slide presenta-

tion from a list of images (in the inventory). The slideshow is

displayed in-world on any prim.

Collaboration

Collaboration is required in virtual learning environments to

798

A. SAJJANHAR

Figure 4.

A cube prim with different media on each face and a media player

screen.

accomplish group tasks. Collaboration is also significant be-

cause it stimulates learning, promotes feelings of belonging to a

team, encourages creativity, eases communication and increases

achieved personal satisfaction (Casamayor, Amandi, & Campo,

2009). In this section, opportunities for in-world collaboration

in SL are addressed.

Text and Voice Chatting

SL provides text and voice (VoIP) chatting. Voice attenuates

with increase in in-world distance from the speaker. SL pro-

vides the capability to log nearby chats and voice recordings.

Chat logs and voice recordings can be maintained as described

in (Linden Research, Inc., 2009). Text and voice chat can hap-

pen between human-controlled avatars or scripted agents (bots).

Grant et al. (Grant & Clerehan, 2011) use text chat in an as-

sessment task for students of Chinese langua ge: the assessment

task requires student-operated avatars to engage in text chat

with teacher-operated avatars and bots (automated non-playing

characters). Nergiz Kern (Kern, 2009) notes that: It [SL text

chat] does display Arabic letters but they are not connected so

that it is almost impossible to read. A flash program in (Waji-

hah LLC, 2007) converts Arabic into SL compatible format. It

is a functional but tedious work-around.

Shared Whiteboard

A shared whiteboard is also tested for discussion purpose.

While text and voice chatting are integral part of SL, shared

whiteboard needs to be rezzed.

Groups

SL provides the capability of having groups. As in real-world,

groups in SL are used for collaborative learning. Groups are

implicit or explicit. Students can work implicitly in groups by

going to a secluded space in SL to avoid interfering with other

groups. Implicit groups do not use the group features of SL;

such groups may be regarded as self-managed. SL allows the

formation of explicit groups; these groups can have ownership

of land and objects. The search tool in SL viewer or SL website

is used to search groups; it returned 1717 groups (in June 2012)

for the query term “education” and 2238 groups (in June 2012)

for the query term “university”. An inhabitant may join an ex-

isting group or create a new group.

1) Joining a group: There are two kinds of groups—open

group which anyone can join; closed group which requires an

invitation to join. Some groups have a joining fee in L$ which

is determined by the group owner.

2) Creating a group: It costs L$100 to create a group. A

group is required to have at least two members. The group

owner decides whether a group is open or closed and if there is

a joining fee. The owner can invite others to join a group and

also determine the roles of other group members; for instance, a

group owner can grant a group member the ability to invite

others.

Lounge

Lounge is designed for avatars to unwind. It is a good place

to socialize and chat about general interest topics. Virtual

plasma screens can be rezzed in the lounge to watch movies.

Plasma screens, chairs and other decorative objects need to be

purchased from the marketplace. Other objects of interest in the

lounge area are dartboards, pinball machine, RSS newsreader.

Many creative objects are available from the Marketplace for a

few L$ or even free.

Personal Organization

Organizational tools such as calendar and files storage are

key functional requirements of a learning platform. These tools

are readily available on the internet; however, having an

in-world presence makes them an integral part of SL—it pre-

vents users’ from having to access disparate systems. Calendar

and files storage tools are addressed below.

SL Marketplace returned 268 results for “calendar” search.

Some are full-fledged calendar systems and some provide an

in-world presence of calendar systems in the outside world, for

example, an in-world presence of Google calendar.

SL Inventory is used for files storage. Uploading files to the

inventory is addressed in Section 3.2. SL Marketplace has more

functional inventory storage and archival systems; typical func-

tions include: categorizing objects by their permissions; sear-

ching objects by applying filters on name, creator etc.

Monitoring

Monitoring in SL is important to alleviate disruptions to

teaching and learning activities. First, we list typical activities

which warrant monitoring. Second, we describe approaches to

implement monitoring i n SL .

Activities that require monitoring are listed below:

1) Avatars using obscenities in text/voice chat: it should be

discouraged to maintain a conducive environment for the in-

habitants;

2) Collusion amongst students to complete assessment tasks:

students should be warned when such activity is detected or

suspected;

3) Pirates in SL: these need to be detected to avoid intellec-

tual property theft. Rogue programs called Copybots have the

capability to copy in-world objects and marginalize the value of

an owner’s virtual land (Quarmby, 2008). Third-party viewers

may be malicious or vulnerable to copybot attacks.

4) Copyright infringement: copying course materials such as

lecture notes, presentations and other resources is likely to in-

fringe copyright l aw s.

5) Monitoring is also required to identify cases of unsatis-

factory progress such as not reading the course material, not

participating in discussions, a group that has not finished an

A. SAJJANHAR

allocated task etc.

SL provides tools which can be used as mitigating controls

for activities listed above. These are discussed below:

1) Group moderation: SL group moderator has the capability

to moderate a group’s voice and text chat. The group moderator

can exercise the option to disable text chat or mute voice chat

of a group member.

2) SL provides the capability to log nearby chats and voice

recordings. Chat logs and voice recordings can be maintained

as shown in (Record voice chat and sounds). It is appropriate to

use a bot account for these purposes in order to have an unin-

terrupted record of the data. Chat logs and voice recordings can

be vital evidence for in-world misdemeanors including aca-

demic misconduct such as collusion. The logs/recordings can

be automatically/semi-automatically analyzed to resolve dis-

putes or take disciplinary actions.

3) Copyright infringement can be enforced by SL or owners

of intellectual property.

 Enforcement by SL: An owner of intellectual property in

SL can report copyright infringement to SL administrator

which can lead to the cancellation of the infringer’s account

under Terms of Service (Linden Research, Inc., 2010).

Quarmby (Quarmby, 2008) notes that mere cancellation of

account may not be a strong disincentive to repeat the

behaviour because the infringer can enter SL with another

account.

 Enforcement by owner: An owner may enforce copyright

infringement by initiating legal proceedings. However, laws

to punish in-world transgressions lack precedence and

worldwide standardisation.

4) Agents can be used for in-world monitoring. Log files are

used to build students’ profile which includes attributes such as

learning style (reflective, sequential etc.), collaboration profile,

and progress made in the course (Casamayor, Amandi, &

Campo, 2009). Agents use Web Usage Mining (WUM) tech-

niques (Srivastava et al., 2000) to draw inferences from student

profiles and the teacher is alerted to unusual patterns. Examples

of unusual patterns are: strongly sequential student does not

perform tasks according to the order specified in the task plan;

reflective student finishes the reading very quickly etc. (Casa-

mayor, Amandi & Campo, 2009). Once alerted, the teacher has

the opportunity to intervene preemptively.

Discussion

In Section 3, we developed a scaffolding virtual world to re-

alize the affordances of SL. The aim of this research is to ad-

dress the impact of the virtual world on student engagement of

off-campus students. National Survey of Student Engagement

(NSSE) survey is widely accepted research initiative to measure

student engagement (Robinson & Hullinger, 2008). NSSE

measures the dimensions of student engagement on the basis of

the Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Edu-

cation (Chickering & Ehrmann, 1996). Although the NSSE was

created for on-campus education, the principles on which it is

based have been widely applied to the off-campus context

(Robinson & Hullinger, 2008). Hence, we articulate the impact

of the virtual world on off-campus student engagement by ad-

dressing NSSE benchmarks. NSSE is built on five benchmarks

which are addressed below:

1) Level of academic challenge: Level of academic challenge

(LAC) refers to the academic effort made by students for ac-

tivities such as studying, reading, writing, and preparing for

class (Kuh, 2003). Development of mental capacities is an im-

portant component of this benchmark; it includes five levels of

mental activities, namely, memorization, analysis, synthesis,

making judgment, and application (Robinson & Hullinger, 2008).

2) Active and collaborative learning: Active and collabora-

tive learning (ACL) refers to efforts of the students to contrib-

ute to class discussions, work with other students, and engage

in other class activities (Kuh, 2003).

3) Student interaction with faculty members: Student–faculty

interaction (SFI) relates to the nature and frequency of contact

that students have with their faculty. Contact includes faculty

feedback and discussion of grades and assignments, ideas, ca-

reers, and collaborative projects (Kuh, 2003). It is reported in

(Robinson & Hullinger, 2008) that the most common form of

interaction is faculty feedback.

4) Enriching educational experience: An enriching educa-

tional experience (EEE) involves the development of the person

to learn to work effectively with people from different back-

grounds and enables the use of technology to facilitate collabo-

ration (Kuh, 2003).

5) Supportive campus environment: Robinson et al. (Robin-

son, & Hullinger, 2008) deemed supportive campus environ-

ment (SCE) criterion not relevant for the evaluation of student

engagement in an online environment; however a virtual cam-

pus which is reflective of the physical campus reinforces the

institutional spirit (Jennings, & Collins, 2007) and the related

support structure offered to students.

Online technologies have been shown to positively impact

student engagement benchmarks (Kuh, 2003; Dude rstadt, Atkin s,

& Houweling, 2002). For instance, online technologies stimu-

late students to use higher order skills which improves LAC

benchmark; online technologies are credited with ease of com-

munication which improves SFI benchmark; having a suppor-

tive virtual campus facilitates the initiation of students espe-

cially if they lack an IT background. Advantage of SL com-

pared with traditional online learning environments is the range

of avenues it provides to address the student engagement

benchmarks. The embodied experience in SL contributes sig-

nificantly to the EEE benchmark by improving interpersonal

skills of inhabitants. SL makes it feasible to build a virtual

campus which is reflective of the physical campus; this con-

tributes to the SCE benchmark.

Conclusion

In this paper, we describe the use of SL to engage students in

a virtual world. Based on literature review and our experience,

it is observed that the technology provides a fun and interesting

approach for educators and students alike. Our observations are

summarized below:

1) The concern of technology being overwhelming is allevi-

ated by the fact that a large number of potential users, namely,

university students, are digital natives and familiar with virtual

worlds in role-playing games such as World of Warcraft.

2) SL does not require rewriting of teaching materials but is

modeled around embedding existing materials within SL; this

means that there is minimal effort required on the part of the

educator to develop a scaffolding virtual environment.

3) SL is invaluable for off-camp us learning because the spa ce

is accessible by students in asynchronous or synchronous man-

ner. Synchronous access to SL is leveraged by the educators to

800

A. SAJJANHAR

facilitate real-life-like presentations and discussions; students

use synchronous access to collaborate on projects/ assignments.

Asynchronous access is used to interact with in- world objects

(including games) and bots.

4) Besides providing an educational platform for curriculum,

SL also enhances social s skills.

5) The potential to use game-based learning in SL is promis-

ing.

While objects worked well in-world, it is found that foreign

language scripts may not be displayed correctly. Although a

work-around may exist, this poses limitations to language edu-

cators and requires regression testing of objects.

REFERENCES

Boulos, M. N. K., Hetherington, L., & Wheeler, S. (2007). Second Life:

an overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health

education. Health Information & Libraries Journal, 24, 233-245.

doi:10.1111/j.1471-1842.2007.00733.x

Casamayor, A., Amandi, A., & Campo, M. (2009). Intelligent assis-

tance for teachers in collaborative e-learning environments. Com-

puters & Education, 53, 1147-1154.

doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2009.05.025

Chickering, A. W., & Ehrmann, S. C. (1996). Implementing the seven

principles of good practice in undergraduate education: Technology

as lever. Accounting Education News, 49, 9-10.

Coates, H. (2005). The value of student engagement for higher educa-

tion quality assurance. Quality in Higher Education, 11, 25-36.

doi:10.1080/13538320500074915

Coldwell, J., Craig, A., & Goold, A. (2011). Using etechnologies for

active learning. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge,

and Management, 6 , 95-106.

Dalgarno, B., Lee, M. J. W., Carlson, L., Gregory, S., & Tynan, B.

(2010). 3D immersive virtual worlds in higher education: An Austra-

lian and New Zealand scoping study. Australasian Journal of Educa-

tional Technology, 27, 269-280.

Davis, B. G. (2009). Tools for teaching (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley

Publishers.

Duderstadt, J., Atkins, D., & Houweling, D. (2002). Higher education

in the digital age: Technology issues and strategies for American

colleges and universities. Westp ort, CT: Praeger.

Grant, S., & Clerehan, R. (2011). Finding the discipline: Assessing

student activity in Second Life. Australasian Journal of Educational

Technology, 27, 813–828.

Henderson, L., Grant, S., Henderson, M., & Huang, H. (2010).

University students’ cognitive engagement while learning in a

Virtual World. In D. Gronn, & G. Romeo (Eds.), ACEC2010: Digital

diversity. Conference proceedings of the Australian computers in

education conference 2010, Melbourne 6-9 April. Carlton, VIC:

Australian Council for Computers in Education (ACE C).

http://acec2010.acce.edu.au/proposal/498/university-students-cogniti

ve-engagement-while-learning-virtual-world

Jennings, N., & Collins, C. (2007). Virtual or virtually U: Educational

institutions in Second Life. International Journal of Human and So-

cial Sciences, 2, 180-186.

Kern, N. (2009). Starting a Second Life. URL (last checked 25 May

2012).

http://slexperiments.edublogs.org/2009/03/03/starting-a-second-life/

Kuh, G. D. (2003). What we’re learning about student engagement

from NSSE: Benchmarks for effective educational practices. Change:

The Magazine of Higher Learning, 35, 24-32.

doi:10.1080/00091380309604090

Linden Research, Inc. (2009). Record voice chat and sounds. URL (last

checked 18 June 2012).

http://www.screencast.com/users/Featured/folders/Featured/media/cf

26872f-fa66-418b-89e8-47d9f3a13b02

Linden Research, Inc. (2010). Second Life terms of service.

http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php

Linden Research, Inc. (2011a). Second Life bot. URL (last checked 15

May 2012). http://wiki.second life.com/wiki/Bot

Linden Research, Inc. (2011b). Second Life education. URL (last che-

cked 5 April 2011).

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Second_Life_Education

Linden Research, Inc. (2011c). Second Life uploading assets. URL (last

checked 20 June 2012).

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Uploa

ding-assets/ta-p/700165

Migdalek, J. (2002). Performing English: The classroom as rehearsal

space. Prospect, 17, 53-61.

Novak, T. P. (2010). eLab city: A platform for academic research on

virtual worlds. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 3, 3-33.

Otis, J. (2012) How to stream in Second Life. URL (last checked 22

May 2012). http://howto.slserver.com/

Quarmby, B. (2008). Pirates among the Second Life islands—Why you

should monitor the misuse of your intellectual property in online vir-

tual worlds. URL (last checked 25 May 2012).

http://works.bepress.com/ben_quarmby/2

Robinson, C. C. and Hullinger, H. (2008). New benchmarks in higher

education: Student engagement in online learning. Journal of Educa-

tion for Business, 84, 101-109. doi:10.3200/JOEB.84.2.101-109

Spence, J. (2009). Pedagogy, education and innovation in vir t ual worlds.

Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 2, 3-4.

Srivastava, J., Cooley, R., Deshpande, M., & Tan, P. (2000). Web us-

age mining: Discovery and applications of usage patterns from web

data. SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 1, 12-23.

doi:10.1145/846183.846188

Stutzman, F. (2007). Social network transitions. URL (last checked 27

July 2012).

http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/social-network-transitions.ht

Wajihah LLC (2007). Text conversion. URL (last checked 25 May 2012).

http://convert.wajihah.com/convert.html

Warburton, W. (2009). Second Life in higher education: Assessing the

potential for and the barriers to deploying virtual worlds in learning

and teaching. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40, 414-

426. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00952.x