Colloquium MUVE eventedness: An experience like any other Dave Cormier Address for correspondence: University of Prince Edward Island, 550 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PE, Canada C1A 4P3. Email: coarsesalt@gmail.com Introduction The OpenHabitat project is a Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Users and Innovation Programme funded project exploring the practical application of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) to the higher education classroom. This paper discusses ongoing research, drawing tentative conclusions from reporting streams coming out of the project. The researchers have identified that once lecturers have acquired literacy in the MUVEs, there is a threshold after which they become able to see MUVEs in education as offering an experience that allows for the exploration of existing content in a new context and which acts as a focal point for reflection. The ‘otherness’ of the environ- ment provides a ‘mirror’ for practice (for both student and teacher). The otherness, however, does not necessarily call for new pedagogies but rather relies on a long tradi- tion of experiential learning. The use of MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) in education is no longer the realm of the avant-garde or the charmingly quaint, and is encroaching on the edges of the mainstream. A recent scoping study conducted for JISC tells us that the (educa- tional) ‘use of virtual worlds has accelerated exponentially over the last two or three years’ (de Freitas, 2008). With the increasing prominence of these new tools, we need to start asking what the technology offers for the average classroom, and moving beyond the ‘if’ of virtual worlds to the ‘when’ and ‘for what reason’. The OpenHabitat project is primarily an attempt to see past the complications of the technology to explore what happens when a virtual world comes to a regular classroom, or in the case of OpenHabitat, two classrooms: Ian Truelove’s art and design class at Leeds Metropolitan and Marianne Talbot’s class at Oxford University overseen by the project’s Principal Investigator David White. The OpenHabitat project The project was conceived as a series of two iterative pilots where best practices and lessons learned could be gleaned from the results of the first pilot and used to inform the development of the second pilot. Each of the groups has kept an open, running discus- sion freely available online and aggregated to www.openhabitat.org using video, photo British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 40 No 3 2009 543–546 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2009.00956.x © 2009 The Author. Journal compilation © 2009 Becta. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.