Seminars in Second Life: Teacher and Student Views Telmo Zarraonandia*, Rita Francese°, Ignazio Passero°, Ignacio Aedo*, Genny Tortora°, Paloma Diaz* *Computer Science Department, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Leganés (Madrid) °Università degli Studi di Salerno,via Ponte don Melillo 1, Fisciano (SA), Italy tzarraon@inf.uc3m.es, francese@unisa.it, ipassero@unisa.it, aedo@ aedo@ia.uc3m.es, tortora@unisa.it, pdp@inf.uc3m.es Abstract— Virtual Worlds are largely adopted as places where students can perform normal class activities, including lectures. In this paper we describe a didactical experience conducted in Second Life during an Italian-Spanish collaboration which occurred in spring 2010. We proposed to a group of university students that they make use of a virtual world for carrying out the presentations of the projects of one the courses they were enrolled on. The collected results revealed that Virtual Worlds can effectively support distance lectures, both from the perspective of the audience and from the one of the lecturer, although it is advisable to equip the environment with features for carrying out the lectures in a more natural way. I. INTRODUCTION Over the last few years Virtual Worlds have been largely adopted as a platform for education, see for example [1][4][9], and to support collaboration and meeting in general [3] [12]. In [3] Gandhi affirmed that this kind of environment has been very much appreciated by IBM for conducting virtual meetings and discussions. The main reason is that Virtual Worlds are particularly suitable for communicating because they enhance the users’ perception of presence, awareness, communication and their sense of belonging to a community [1]. These peculiarities of Virtual Worlds make them very appealing and, according to [12], in the future we might see a convergence of Web and Virtual World technologies into a 3D Web. In this paper we describe the practical usage of Second Life (SL) to support several seminars having “Learning Technologies” as their subject. This 3D environment constituted an international place [6] [8] where students and staff from Spain and Italy met. During the seminars students performed both the roles of lecturer and audience. The main purpose of the experience was to investigate if virtual worlds could effectively support this type of lecturing exercise. We were also interested in analyzing the experience of the students who played the role of lecturers, and we tried to identify if the use of virtual worlds reported any benefits in terms of relaxation and reduction of fear to speak in public, as a side effect. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses related work, while Section 3 summarizes the main characteristics of Second Life and details the virtual environment used for supporting the experience. In Section 4 we describe the didactical experience, and analyze the results and opinions gathered from its participants. Finally, in Section 5 we present some conclusions and lessons learned II. RELATED WORKS Although it seems likely that virtual worlds will have a large impact on the future Web [12], and, in particular, in teaching and learning, there is still a limited comprehension of the effect of their usage for didactical purposes. Virtual Worlds have been largely adopted as a learning environment in the last decade, see for example [1][2][7][9]. However, there are still some unresolved issues such as difficulties in navigation or in using 3D interfaces [13]. In [1] De Lucia et al. evaluated the effectiveness of performing synchronous distance lectures in Second Life. In addition to the usability of the environment, the evaluation focused on investigating four different factors: the users perception of belonging to a learning community, awareness, presence and communication. The feedback obtained on these terms from the participants experience was mainly positive, even from those of them who did not have specific technological skills. In [7] Monahan et al. examined the design and usability of a virtual world named CLEV-R for supporting various learning tasks. Also in this case, the subjects were in favor of adopting CLEV-R for online education. However, it was also reported that users with no experience in 3D computer games expressed difficulty in navigating in the virtual environment. Jarmon et al. [5] proposed a study aimed at evaluating the instructional effectiveness of Second Life as an experiential learning environment. Several information sources were considered: journal content analysis, surveys, focus group, and virtual world snapshots and video. Results revealed that a project-based approach favors experiential development of interdisciplinary communication awareness and strategies. III. SECOND LIFE The technology we selected to support the proposed learning experience is Second Life (SL) [11], one of the most popular 3D online Virtual Worlds. SL is based on the archipelago metaphor, where space is organized in terms of islands, which are inter-connected via teleportation links, bridges, and roads. The main characteristic of this environment is the persistency. This enables the user to consider the learning environment as a “place” where they can meet, not only for didactical purposes, but also for communicating and socializing [8]. Users access the online system with a client browser and