"THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE" - WHICH MESSAGE(S) CAN WE FIND FOR LIFELONG LEARNING IN MULTI-USER VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS?

Massive Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) have gained a lot of attention in the last years - mostly by means of online games like "World of Warcraft", but also because of some more serious worlds like Linden Lab's "Second Life". The latter is used - amongst others MUVEs - by many organisations or institutions for educational/learning purposes, with the problem that there is a general lack of structured support for practitioners in Lifelong Learning, especially concerning models for learning scenarios.

LLL3D is a 2 year project funded under the EU's Lifelong Learning Programme, and aims to improve the opportunities for Lifelong Learning and the quality of the experience, by identifying, developing and sharing practice clusters in the use of MUVEs in education and by providing support and educational tools for interested, but inexperienced users attempting to create learning scenarios for different target groups with different characteristics.

On the basis of expert interviews, guidelines to identify good practice cases were developed and applied to a series of pre-cases. The result of this analysis were 10 clusters or "learning scenarios" that show some common characteristics - they constitute prototypes for learning situations in MUVEs derived from the practice.

The actual tasks of the project are:
- to present these clusters to experts and less-experienced users;
- to complement the clusters with typical educational tools and supporting information;
- to "pilot" or validate the clusters in order to or re-organise them or to identify further clusters.