This seems great:
Title: World of Teachcraft: The Learning Quest
Date: November 2 – December 16, 2010
Location: Rockcliffe University http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/215/73/23
Campus portion 5 pm SLT Tuesday and Thursday (On Rockcliffe in Second Life)
Reporting over 12 million paying subscribers, World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular massively multi-player online role-playing game on the Internet. Rockcliffe is looking for 6 adventurous educators to participate in World of Teachcraft course!
Your Quest: After participating in a 6 week pilot project, you should have experienced, researched and analyzed how this MMORPG could be used in your classroom, online course, after school program or professional development activity.
Your Battleground: Each week, participants will attend a synchronous meeting in Second Life. World of Warcraft will be used for the laboratory portion and online discussions will take place in at Rockcliffe University’s Moodle course.
I loved playing World of Warcraft but I was so addictive I decided to stop. Recently I could not longer resist and I returned with a new character, Wilbear.
Note however that the course also uses Second Life, which is an open-ended while World of Warcraft – to my knowledge – is focused on a specific game experience. I guess World of Warcraft is more popular among younger people, just because it provides well-defined goals even though it allows for a variety of behaviors (for instance catering for players who primarily want to roleplay). The open-ended nature of Second Life is more flexible but makes people wonder “what the hell am I doing here”, so it seems a nice idea to combine both environments in this learning experience.
More information can be found in this page on the site of Rockcliffe University Consortium.
Because I can’t resist, here is the trailer for World of Warcraft ‘Cataclysm’:
This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Trust Der Spiegel to bell the cat!
I really want some more meat on the bones here too about this education stuff. Gosh, that standard figure of “over 200” sure suddenly became “over 400” overnight, would love to see actual hard lists and reports from the universities, not the lab.
I’d like to see what courses they are teaching besides “exploring virtual worlds”.