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 Google’s [...]

As we stated in yesterday’s top ten list, human-surpassing intelligence will guarantee that the future is far more different than we can imagine. Our second top ten list plays off ideas from Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is near, Hans Moravec’s Mind children and Robot, and the work of Vernor Vinge. Onward Singularitarians!

Accelerating returns: S-curves of [...]

Brock Dubbels is looking for more people that belong to (or that can soon join) the American Educational Research Association (AERA) – for a Special Interest Group (SIG) especially for 3D Virtual Worlds, such as Second Life.
http://www.simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=ARVEL
The Applied Research for Virtual Environments for Learning (ARVEL) special interest group at AERA, “is a community of educators, [...]

For those of us in Minneapolis/St. Paul, this looks good:
eLearning Games and Simulations workshop

May 24: 8:30 – 4:00
Normandale Community College

Learn what your students already know
Games and simulations are powerful tools – changing the way we learn
Hands-on Instruction Enables You to Play the Games Yourself
Seated at your own computer, with an instructor as your guide, [...]

I just received this note from Janet Cohen:
John -
You are going to love this one – from the Feb 2007 Wired.
A Second Life for MTV by Mark Wallace
article is not online yet, but this article explains the part you’ll like, MTV is calling their Virtual MTV a Leapfrog Initiative!
http://www.mediavillage.com/jmr/2006/12/04/jmr-12-04-06/
I’ll try to [...]

At yesterday’s Horizon Forum meeting, Chris Dede delivered a presentation via Skype on using multiple-user virtual environments in educational contexts. These environments, he argues, allows students to co-design and co-instruct their own educational experiences, allowing for guided social constructivism and learning that goes beyond what traditional schools try to accomplish through test-based assessments.

Scott McLeod [...]

Join us for the next Horizon Forum meeting!
Tuesday, December 12, 12-3 p.m.
Room 303, Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota, East Bank Campus
300 Washington Avenue, S.E. Minneapolis
Dr. Scott McLeod, Director of the University Council for Educational Administration Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), will discuss the skills that students need to survive [...]

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 [...]

This is a great article!
Online education often provides too much explicit knowledge and too little tacit knowledge and social interaction. In this article, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas identify an avenue for tacit knowledge production in virtual settings. As virtual reality is becoming more-and-more preferred over the real world, perhaps the “Leapfrog U” [...]

From the IST program:
If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about [...]