Edutainment in Virtual Environments: An Academy Supporting Collaborative Learning in Second Life

Second Life (SL) is a digital game and a Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment. The "unofficial" Academy of Athens is a space in this environment. This space, or "land"according to SL terminology, was created by the group "The Power in unity", in order to create a Greek learning SL community to offer distance courses and events for Greek SL users and teachers. Accordingly, the Academy wiki was created in order to provide relevant information to the users. An experimental implementation of the educational use of SL is presented within the context of this paper, along with considerations, results, conclusions and future work. Initially, the group of the Academy was created simultaneously with the configuration of the roles which every member had in this group. Then, the SL land in which the Academy would be hosted was looked for. The building was designed to resemble the real life Academy of Athens. The foundation of this Academy targeted the Greek SL users. Already existing ones were approached by organizing Virtual Educational Events in order to get them accustomed with the environment of this virtual world and to familiarize them with the courses which were created for both new and more experienced users. Greek Teachers showed interest in attending virtual courses on educational issues. Discussions on topical issues of real life and their relationship to avatar lives won the interest of all the Greek SL users. A museum and galleries were created within the building of the Academy and the lands around the building were upgraded for the cultural interest of its visitors. Throughout the whole implementation but also during its current use, the virtual environment of SL gave users such a pleasure it raised concerns about its addictive nature. The danger of the possibility real life being absorbed or replaced by virtual life is also discussed within the context of the paper presented, forming concrete conclusions as to how a virtual environment facilitate Education and Learning and how can one control its use.