Learning in Virtual Worlds: A Situated Perspective - Teaching through Multi-User Virtual Environments - page 131

roles. For example, the teacher that is pro-
moting the creation of a certain community
can hold a general meeting at an audito-
rium in a virtual world like Second Life
where she proposes some relevant ques-
tions regarding the communities domain
of interest and explains where pertinent in-
formation can be found. Her assistants can
be available for guidance and consultations
and also act as administrators.

timers so as to learn with and from them.
These roles can change over time.

• The MUVE should encourage members

to set their own goals and identify a pos-
sible course of action to achieve them.
The formation of smaller groups should be
allowed, hence, it should provide the ap-
propriated virtual environments, tools and
technologies for these subgroups so that
these smaller groups can meet and engage
in their own activities. • The MUVE should include the necessary

resources so that members can build and
maintain their new community of prac-
tice. Particularly, the virtual environment
should provide different communication
technologies so that members can engage
in collaborative practices, share infor-
mation and ideas, and know and trust all
members' identities. In a virtual world like
Second Life the in-world avatars can com-
municate synchronously via chat or voice,
but also asynchronously vie e-mail, dis-
cussion forums, etc. The MUVE must of-
fer carefully designed virtual areas where
members can interact.

• The MUVE should encourage members to

remain as active participants of the com-
munity of practice for as long as they feel
necessary to achieve their personal learn-
ing goals. Thus, administrators of the
MUVE should plan in advance how they
would support the community, technically
and economically, over time.

Type 2. Taking into consideration the ideas
related to the cognitive approach of the situated
learning paradigm, like the cognitive apprentice-
ship model, a MUVE can be built with the main
objective of promoting the development of higher
order cognitive skills in students by collabora-
tively interacting within a simulated environment
where students acquire information, values and
behaviors of the culture of a certain professional
community. Examples of this type of MUVE
that could be developed in a school would be:
a MUVE that simulates a publishing company,
where students enter to develop critical thinking
abilities through reading and writing; a virtual
environment simulating a chemical plant where
engineering students solve problems through
designing virtual industrial robots; or a MUVE
where students form part of a team of geographers
and have to solve ecological problems through
doing urban analyses. A type 2 MUVE can be
built considering the following strategies:

• The MUVE should include technological

resources so that members can document
their practices and, in this way, be able to
build a common information base that can
be consulted by other members and other
communities. In Second Life there are sev-
eral ways that this can be accomplished, for
example members can store a set of note
cards in their inventory library, they can
also store those note cards in objects spe-
cially developed for that purpose, or they
can create Blogs and Wikis where they can
store and share their produced information.

• The MUVE should respect and value the

different types of social roles that members
naturally assume within a community of
practice. Newcomers should be allowed to
participate in the process of legitimate pe-
ripheral participation interacting with old-

• The MUVE should be developed to simu-

late the culture and context where a certain