Digital student | guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/digitalstudent

for teaching? Blank electronic canva

interesting set of articles - maybe e-learning moving more mainstream?

Explore virtual worlds

This site provides a good roster of existing and still in development virtual worlds. It provides mechanisms for listing them by type, purpose, platform etc.

This is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable guide to virtual worlds.

wiki of virtual worlds - lists and attributes

If you think virtual worlds are a passing fad, look at the figures. Almost all of the 39% growth came from children. Girls used to grow up with their dolls; now they are growing up with their avatars. This goes largely unreported because the users don't read newspapers, but as Kzero reports, poptropica.com – aimed at five- to 10-year-olds – has 76 million registered users. If you move up to 10- to 15-year-olds, users rival the populations of countries – led by Habbo (135 million), Neopets (54 million), Star Dolls (34 million) and Club Penguin (28 million). It starts tailing off among 15- to 25-year-olds – apart from Poptropica (35 million) – but it underlines the likelihood that as youngsters get older they will be looking for more sophisticated outlets and for ways to link existing social networks such as Facebook or MySpace to more immersive virtual worlds.

If you think virtual worlds are a passing fad, look at the figures. Almost all of the 39% growth came from children. Girls used to grow up with their dolls; now they are growing up with their avatars.

growing up with avatars instead of dolls

Three sources of friction: Power, Disillusionment, Lack of Appreciation; Five ways to reduce friction. This reminds me of what our new country director is doing right where the last one was doing wrong.

An article by Roland Legrand on Mediashift relating to social media community managers.

e benefits to working with data in this way don't really need to be touted too much - many businesses already perform data visualization, often using expensive software and powerful computers to do so. What makes what Green Phosphor does so interesting is not that they've come up with a way to visualize data - it's that they've come up with a way to leverage the platforms of virtual worlds to do so.

Second Life and real world data coming together