ACM TechNews

'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds Made for Learning

Chronicle of Higher Education (12/21/07) Vol. 54, No. 17, P. A22; Foster, Andrea L.

Immersive Education is a multimillion-dollar effort to build educational virtual reality software within commercial and nonprofit fantasy spaces such as Second Life. The project uses interactive three-dimensional graphics, Web cameras, Internet-based telephony, and a variety of other digital media. At a recent meeting at Boston College, Aaron E. Walsh, founder of the project and an instructor at Boston College, along with two other researchers demonstrated how virtual spaces can be used for more than entertainment. The project's goal is to build three-dimensional, interactive worlds and lessons that will grab students' attention in the same way popular online video games do, except without the violence and futility of video games. "It's important to allow educators to mix and match media types to construct a virtual learning environment that's right for their students," Walsh says. Critics say promoting video games in schools and colleges corrupts and diminishes education, but Immersive Education has managed to collect a large number of impressive supporters, including Boston College, Harvard University, Amherst College, Columbia University, MIT, Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, Japan's University of Aizu, NASA, Sun Microsystems, and the New Media Consortium, a higher-education technology group. Now in its third generation, Walsh's virtual world allows for high-resolution graphics, more realistic avatars, the use of Web cameras, and the sharing of documents.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i17/17a02201.htm

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