Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute argued the case for two end states – 3D video conferencing or computer generated virtual worlds on the one hand and virtual reality environments on the other. (Or something to that effect – refer to one of his many publications for the definitive version.) John Kirriemuir of Virtual World Watch summarised his latest snapshot survey of Virtual World activity in HE & FE. Daniel Livingstone brought us up to date with Sloodle and then went on to predict how technologies might converge in the future.

Martin Oliver of London Knowledge Lab (LKL) challenged the use of the term ‘affordance’ in virtual world research. Diane Carr also of LKL gave us the deaf person’s perspective on communications in Second Life – voice was not a welcome addition for this community.

Others wrote about the event at the time – see Daniel Livingstone and Heather Williamson (JISC). Most of the presentations are available on the site above.

Several weeks on I am reflecting a bit further ….

A room full of enthusiasts tends to be quite optimistic about the future of virtual worlds, even if the organisers Eduserv have come to the end of their funding stream for new developments, but for me ‘the elephant in the room’ is ongoing lack of uptake by the mainstream.

In the school of Health & Bioscience at UEL we are using SL in a very specific way for simulation and problem based learning in healthcare settings. Elsewhere in UEL, very few are using it. The only other educational use I am aware of is a limited pilot in the school of Psychology offering tutorials and the possibility of a virtual conference later in the year.

In a post in January 2010 Stephen Downes, in reference to another post by Alja Sulčič, described SL as ‘not dead but niche’. I tend to concur, whilst acknowledging that the same could be said about quite a few technologies e.g. Twitter. On the other hand, I also feel that if those institutions already active in SL can find ways to share their developments and resources beyond their own institutions in the form of OERs or their VW equivalent (e.g. Leicester have recently made a deposit in Open Jorum ), there is a possibility of wider use. A welcome aspect of any open offerings would be more end user tools, such as UEL’s embryonic web-based case editor, that enables academics to manipulate Second Life objects without any technical knowhow. Only a small minority will ever rise to the challenge of building letalone scripting in SL. Many, in fact, still struggle with the most basic aspects of more common place technologies such as the VLE.

Where next? My crystal ball points towards increased activity in simulation for health education and other subjects and for problem based learning generally but without a more open approach and user friendly development interface this type of growth will be limited. And one other thing – Second Life’s dominance of Virtual Worlds may recede as OpenSim and the like come of age.