A taxonomy of virtual worlds usage in education

Virtual Worlds are an important tool in modern education practices as well as providing socialisation, entertainment and a laboratory for collaborative work. This paper focuses on the uses of virtual worlds for education and synthesises over 90 published academic papers, reports and educational websites from around the world. A taxonomy is then derived from these articles, delineating current theoretical and practical work on Virtual World usage, specifically in the field of education. The taxonomy identifies rich veins of current research and practice in associated educational theory and in simulated worlds or environments, yet it also demonstrates the paucity of work in important areas such as evaluation, grading and accessibility. Introduction Internet technologies have been deployed in business, education and academic life. Visual environments have developed from the original online games of over 40 years ago. Multi User Dungeon (MUD) games were developed in the 1970s (Bartle, 1990). By the 1990s fully graphical multimedia MUD Object Oriented systems had been developed along with Multi Player Online Games (MMOGs). One of the most widely known MMOG is World of Warcraft, (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com) with over 11 million active subscriptions. Visual environments have been developed further from 3D Web-based technologies to form Multi-user Virtual Environments (MUVEs) such as Second Life and Active World (www.SecondLife.com; www.activeworlds.com). A MUVE enables multiple simultaneous participants to access virtual contexts, interact with digital artefacts, and represent themselves through avatars (online persona), communicate with other participants, and take part in experiences incorporating modelling and mentoring about problems similar to those in a real world context (Dieterle & Clarke, 2005). A virtual world, by comparison, is also a computerbased simulated environment but which may not have multiple users playing simultaneously online. According to Mennecke (2008), virtual worlds are part of the domain of multiplayer online games but without the organised game play. A virtual world could be entered on an off-line personal computer, such as with the game Sims (http://thesims.ea.com), but a MUVE implies online interaction with other users. MUVEs allow multi users to access 3D virtual environments at the same time. The use of MUVEs has not only attracted gamers who enjoy exploring on-line virtual worlds, but also businesses and academic researchers. The educational use of MUVEs has become a key area of research (Bellotti, Berta, De Gloria, & Primavera, 2010; Edirisingha, Nie, Pluciennik, & Young, 2009; Falloon, 2010; Hew & Cheung, 2010; Jestice & Kahai, 2010; Oliver & Carr, 2009; Petrakou, 2010; Salmon, 2009).