Multi-User Virtual Environments for the Classroom: Practical Approaches to Teaching in Virtual Worlds

The future success of education depends on technological and pedagogical innovation. Unbridled by the physical constraints of both time and space, virtual spaces transcend many limitations of the typical classroom, where learning depends on presence and physicality. Multi-User Virtual Environments for the Classroom: Practical Approaches to Teaching in Virtual Worlds highlights the work of educators daring enough to teach in these digital frontiers. Instructors will find cutting-edge teaching ideas in the theoretical discussions, case studies, and experiments presented in this book. These insights are applied to variety of subject areas and pedagogical contexts, including learning foreign languages in virtual environments, examples which encourage educators to design and develop new worlds of learning inside the university and beyond.

Giovanni Vincenti received his Doctorate of Science in Applied Information Technology from Towson University in 2007 after an academic career that focused on Bioinformatics through a B.A. in Biology and an M.S. in Computer Science. He is in charge of Research and Development at Gruppo Vincenti, a small but dynamic company with interests across several fields. His main areas of research include Fuzzy Mediation, Technology-Based Education and Emotionally-Aware Agency. He is also a Lecturer with the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University. He published his findings at several regional, national and international conferences. His interest in education and technology-based instruction comes from years of direct interaction with students in the classroom and empirical experiences that formed him as a teacher.

James Braman is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at Towson University. He holds a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is currently pursuing a Doctoral Degree in Information Technology. James also serves as a joint editor-in-chief of the (ICST) Transactions on E-Education and E-Learning. He is also part of the Towson University Second Life Initiative, the Towson Innovation Lab, promoting virtual environments for higher education learning. In collaboration with Giovanni Vincenti, has co-authored several publications, recently including the Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics. His current research focus includes art and technology, intelligent agents, affective computing and education in virtual and immersive environments.