1. Virtual Worlds The classroom of the future? Ulla Gudnason, Royal Daish Defence College, Institute for Foreign Languages

2. What am I talking about • What is a virtual world? • MUVES 3D Multiuser Virtual Environments. • Three types (there might be more) • Games (World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, Tribal Wars) (each with several million users) • Simulations (most likely custom made) • Platforms with user created content (Second Life and others (Open Sim, Blue Mars)

3. Getting there Avatars Building tools Meeting people At home in SL Getting into Second Life

4. immersion less fear of ridicule and mistakes roles are not scripted can be used as leisure activity few class hours - a lot of games classes mostly used for feedback and assessment Language learning in SL

5. Here we go! • http://secondlife.com • http://www.languagelab.com/en-gb/ • http://slurl.com/secondlife/Languagelab/104/173/36 • Operation Director of Language Lab , Shiv Rajendra (avatarname : Kingsbury Yeats)

6. What can you do? • Make own environment • Meet freely • Talk in voice all in one location together, in pairs or in groups • Send notes and instant messages • Participate in ordinary SL activities as concerts, disco, theater, exhibitions etc etc • Have classic classrooms • Have a more classic e-learning platform for distributed learning Moodle/SLoodle (http://moodle.org/ ) • Use video, power point, roleplays in real settings • There are no limits

7. Problems • Security issues • Legal matters • Learning to navigate the world takes training • The provider might suddenly close down.

8. Visions for Virtual English training in Denmark Use for individuals when and where needed • Use existing language schools in virtual worlds • But still have more traditional language courses to offer

9. Vision for mission area languages • Build scenarios so that you can train in realistic setting and with real situations • Share teachers between nations • Play and have fun while learning

10. CIMIC platform • Developed by Interactive Lab Productions • Editing possibilities • All instructors can make and save their own situations, roleplays, scenarios, tasks etc - so that it becomes available in the platform library for all users • Possibility of scripted roleplays • Possibility of student’s control of avatars

11. Here we go again • http://www.interactivelabproduction.com/en_index.html

12. Questions? • Enjoy • Have fun • Use them – they are here to stay • But do not become addicted - it happens to the best of us – and we don’t want everyone emigrating to the virtual world. Someone must stay behind and take care of business as usual!!