5.3 Virtual worlds and gaming - There is significant interest amongst educators in Europe in the potential application of digital games, or digital games technologies and in the use and affordances of Multi User Virtual Environments (MUVE).
Many European Higher Education (25 March 2007) institutions have established a virtual presence in the most widely used MUVE in education , "Second Life" (Over 46% of those registered do so form a European connection with France having the highest number of registered users, February 2007 ) There are a wide number of educational projects in Second Life and the "teen grid", an under eighteen section of Second Life, including the "global kids" project. For a comprehensive listing of current educational activity in MUVE please refer to
http://www.simteach.com/
The use of MUVE presents real pedagogic and interoperability challenges to educators across a number of domains including Accessibility, Assessment, Authentication and validation, network capability, security, the proprietary nature and in the existing business models of developers .
There are projects exploring the relationship between these kinds of applications and existing institutional systems, IMS Simple sequencing in games and the Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) in MUVE. One of the most interesting and challenging projects is the current work undertaken by Livingstone and Kemp (2007) with the "Sloodle" project , a "mashup" of the open source virtual learning environment (VLE) Moodle and Second Life. they argue that both environments provide largely complimentary affordances.
Work across these domains is still very much at the exploratory stage.
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