Strategies and Challenges to Facilitate Situated Learning in Virtual Worlds Post-Second Life MARCCONRAD, ADIL HASSAN, LYZGEO KOSHY, ASLAN KANAMGOTOV, and ATHANASIOS CHRISTOPOULOS, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom Virtual worlds can establish a stimulating environment to support a situated learning approach in which students simulate a task within a safe environment. While in previous years Second Life played a major role in providing such a virtual environment, there are now more and more alternative—often OpenSim- based—solutions deployed within the educational community. By drawing parallels to social networks, we discuss two aspects: how to link individually hosted virtual worlds together in order to implement context for immersion and how to identify and avoid “fake” avatars so people behind these avatars can be held accountable for their actions. CCS Concepts:  Human-centered computing → Virtual reality;  Computer systems organization → Peer-to-peer architectures Additional Key Words and Phrases: Virtual worlds, social networks, situated learning, identity ACM Reference Format: Marc Conrad, Adil Hassan, Lyzgeo Koshy, Aslan Kanamgotov, and Athanasios Christopoulos. 2017. Strate- gies and challenges to facilitate situated learning in virtual worlds post-second life. Comput. Entertain. 15, 1, Article 3 (February 2017), 9 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3010078 1. INTRODUCTION The “situated learning” approach by Herrington and Oliver [2000] encompasses pa- rameters such as authentic context and multiple roles as well as provides perspective and collaborative construction of knowledge. With the increase (and even more so with the recent “hype”) on virtual worlds, these can be identified as a means to provide an “authentic context” in which a situated learning approach can take place. An—at least often perceived—advantage of virtual worlds is that they provide an experience of “reality” in an otherwise safe and controllable environment. However, there is an inherent tradeoff in this: The more realistic the simulated environment, the more there is a danger that this environment is then, in addition to the positive benefits, as well affected negatively by the behavior of its population. An issue here is played by the traceability of the avatar to a real person that can be held accountable for his or her actions. A further aspect requiring attention is a potential dependency on a central provider such as Second Life. As a partial response to this situation, many virtual world projects nowadays use local, OpenSim-based solutions as an alternative. However, to provide Authors’ addresses: M. Conrad, A. Hassan, L. Koshy, A. Kanamgotov, and A. Christopoulos, Univer- sity of Bedfordshire, Park Square, Luton, LU1 3JU; emails: {Marc.Conrad, ADIL.HASSAN, lyzgeo.koshy, Aslan.Kanamgotov}@beds.ac.uk. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701, New York, NY 10121-0701 USA, fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. c  2017 ACM 1544-3574/2017/02-ART3 $15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3010078 Computers in Entertainment, Vol. 15, No. 1, Article 3, Publication date: February 2017.