Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to give a brief introduction to Second Life, and to provide an outline of how one academic librarian has got involved with using it and reviews the issues that have arisen from a library perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The paper offers a reflection on whether library activities in Second Life are…

Reply to comments on an article "Issues With the SIMPLE Model: Comment on Brown, Neath, and Chater" (2007) by Bennet Murdock on the current authors' original article "A temporal ratio model of memory" by Brown, Neath, and Chater. Does a single mechanism underpin serial and free recall? B. Murdock (2008) argued against the claim, embodied in the…

Due to advances in computer and network technology, virtual reality (VR) is no longer just an area of scientific research. It has also become a popular consumer product, as demonstrated by the proliferation of massive multiplayer online role-playing games. Second Life (SL), in particular, has gained popularity among casual users since it became…

A single-subject design was used in 2 experiments about the effects of percentage payback (winnings in proportion to total amount bet) on gambling on a slot-machine simulation in 8 adult humans. In Experiment 1, percentage payback was varied across a wide range of values, and participants were exposed extensively to percentage-payback conditions.…

Asperger's patients have been treated by role-playing with real-life therapists. The virtual-reality town at the medical center is a new twist. The University of Texas at Dallas uses a platform from Second Life, the popular virtual world, in which patients go to an "island" customized for therapeutic purposes. The island was built by…

To create an environment in which all students have opportunities to notice, describe, and wonder about variability, this article takes a context familiar to many teacher--sampling colored chips from a jar--and shows how this context was used to explicitly focus on variation in the classroom. The sampling activity includes physical as well as…

Over the past several years, the authors have been developing an instructional technology, called Teachable Agents (TA), which draws on the social metaphor of teaching to help students learn. Students teach a computer character, their "agent," by creating a concept map of nodes connected by qualitative causal links. The authors hypothesize that…

This paper reports on an exploratory case study that investigates the synchronous interaction of intermediate level EFL learners in the 3D virtual world "Second Life." The subjects took part in three seventy-minute chat sessions that involved the use of affordances provided by a purpose-built world within this environment. Analysis of the data…

Virtual world platforms such as "Second Life" have been successfully used in educational contexts to motivate and engage learners. This article reports on an exploratory workshop involving a group of high school students using "Second Life" for an urban planning project. Young people are traditionally an under-represented demographic when it comes…

This paper describes the development and evaluation of web-based museum trails for university-level design students to access on handheld devices in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The trails offered students a range of ways of exploring the museum environment and collections, some encouraging students to interpret objects and…

The purpose of the present study was to examine and compare the effectiveness of virtual frog dissection using V-Frog[C] and physical frog dissection on learning, retention, and affect. Subjects were secondary students enrolled in year-long life science classes in a suburban high school (N=102). Virtual dissections were done with V-Frog[C], a…

This volume contains the following papers: (1) Beyond Computer Literacy: Supporting Youth's Positive Development through Technology (Marina Umaschi Bers); (2) Educational Technology, Reimagined (Michael Eisenberg); (3) Children as Codesigners of New Technologies: Valuing the Imagination to Transform What Is Possible (Allison Druin); (4) Content…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not the use of solid modeling software increases participants' success in solving a specified technical problem and how visualization affects their ability to solve a technical problem. Specifically, the study sought to determine if (a) students' visualization skills affect their problem…

This article is a guide for researchers interested in assessing the effectiveness of serious computer-based games (or video games, digital games, or electronic games) intended to improve health and health care. It presents a definition of health games, a rationale for their use, an overview of the current state of research, and recommendations for…

The sophistication of the integrated world of work and increased recognition of business processes as critical corporate assets require graduates to develop "process orientation" and an "integrated view" of business. Responding to these dynamic changes in business organizations, business schools are also continuing to modify…