A multi-institution project called Open Habitat involving the University of Oxford, Leeds Metropolitan University, King’s College London, the University of Essex and Dave Cormier, based at the University of Prince Edward Island will help to establish best practices, tools and software, and protocols for education in multi user virtual environments (MUVEs):

“The project will generate solutions to the challenges of teaching, learning and collaboration in MUVEs. These solutions will be primarily in the form of guidelines, models and exemplars but will also be supported by the development/appropriation of software tools and services in and around the MUVEs themselves.”

Art & design and philosophy are the first course areas that will explore teaching models in virtual worlds. The group has chosen Second Life as its primary platform although will also be looking at OpenSim and Sun’s platform (I assume Project Wonderland). They chose Second Life “because of its ubiquity and relative stability”.

(I love the word relative. )

Efforts like these continue to grow. The upcoming NMC conference at Princeton will be one round-up of such research and best practices – and if you’re going, drop me a line, maybe we can meet!