For those of us who will not be at the AERA conference in New York City, we can join the Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning (ARVEL) special interest group’s launch party via Second Life: Monday, March 24, 7:00 to 9:00 pm slurl.com/secondlife/EDTECH105/132/24 Or, in person: Hilton New York – Petit Trianon, 3rd Floor [...]

Two interesting pieces of news emerged on virtual worlds: At the Virtual Worlds Conference, IBM and Linden Labs announced plans to develop a set of open standards that would allow avatars to traverse from one virtual environment to another. Multiverse Network is building tools that will allow virtual world developers to access and incorporate elements [...]

From Ars Technica: Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google [...]

Cristobal Cobo notes that people at the Argentinian Ministry of Education, Science and Technology are taking interest in our joint knowledge seminar, offered by the University of Minnesota and FLACSO Mexico. The course blog and wiki are taking shape already… For more information, click on one of the links, below:

Two articles surfaced recently regarding Second Life. First, CNN reports that over 60 educational organizations are using Second Life to explore how to promote learning in the virtual world. Whereas there is a concern that mainstay online education providers do not provide a sense of community or social interaction, virtual, three-dimensional online communities may fill [...]