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Campus Life: Virtual World Systems for Education

How do you build a ‘system-wide’ virtual world environment for education? How do you gain buy-in from administrators and faculty for immersive education? What types of tools and approaches are being used by educators?

Host Robert Bloomfield interviewed Dr. Leslie Jarmon, Faculty Development Specialist and Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and discussed the creation of a statewide extension of classes and education into Second Life on October 21st at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST).

Dr. Jarmon’s work at the University of Texas is, perhaps, a major milestone for the use of virtual worlds in education. The campus-wide initiative will explore the logistics and impact of using virtual worlds for education. Beyond education, the project promises to shed light on how large-scale enterprise can deploy virtual world technology for collaboration and training.

Dr. Jarmon recently explained:

“We believe that this initiative is going to help so many people. It’s founded on the ethic of sharing. IRB-approved research is being conducted at 3 levels (system, individual campus, individual course), and so there will be many publications generated as we all continue to learn and understand more. After a year, we¹ll be able to share failures, challenges, and successes of what it means when a large statewide public university system extends operations into the virtual world. And the virtual learning community, of course, already extends and will continue to grow far beyond the UT System campuses themselves. Collaborations with other educators, already emerging, will continue to grow and extend more deeply into disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains.”

Please join us in Second Life for this far-ranging discussion, or view live from the Web on this page.

Guest Biographies

Leslie Jarmon

Dr. Leslie Jarmon is a Faculty Development Specialist and Senior Lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin with the Division for Instructional Innovation and Assessment. Dr. Jarmon is Principal Investigator for the UT System’s statewide extension of operations into Second Life, a first-in-the-world initiative that includes 16 academic, medical, and health science university campuses, and thousands of students and faculty. She is perhaps best known for creating the world’s first multimedia digital dissertation to be accepted entirely on CD-ROM in 1996. She has designed and taught graduate level courses at UT-Austin since 1998 with the Office of Graduate Studies. Dr. Jarmon is a leader in the University’s entry into virtual world environments, specifically Second Life, and she is co-founder of the Educators Coop, a virtual residential community of interdisciplinary educators, researchers, and librarians from around the world (educatorscoop.org). Her avatar name is Bluewave Ogee, and she serves as editor for several journals, has published numerous research papers, and has presented at numerous conferences on education and virtual worlds, including the American Educational Research Association, Best Practices in Education in SL, the American Sociological Association, the National Communication Association, and the New Media Consortium Symposium on Creativity. She serves on the UT System Initiative for Serious Gaming.