Back from the Eduserv Symposium on “Virtual Worlds, Real Learning” in London yesterday. Great presentations on what can be achieved and some of the possibilities of Virtual Environments.

Gilly Salmon’s SEAL project presentation also sounded interesting and looks like something it would be worth getting involved with in some way. I was also interested to hear about the forthcoming Infection Control simulation that Sara De Freitas mentioned.

Although the focus was mostly on Second Life there are lots of other environments out there to investigate – a few examples being gogofrog, cyworld and there.com as demonstrated in Roo Reynolds talk (as well as IBM’s own in-house virtual environment currently being developed).

Finally, a stunning session from Stephen Downes putting Virtual Worlds in context that tempered some of the excitement. As everyone starts to pile in to Virtual Worlds without always having a clear educational reason for doing so this made a lot of sense and asked some interesting proprietary questions. But there are still tremendous opportunities ahead.

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