Teaching and learning affectively within a virtual campus

Working in a virtual world creates new opportunities available for both students and teachers and introduces new challenges to their skills and resources. In particular, virtual worlds such as Second Life (SL) offer revolutionary and innovative modes for learning. These learning spaces are referred to as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) (Gredler, 2001; Jenkins, 2005). The guiding principle for the adoption of new VLEs by educators is that the particular features of each new Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-based tool should be used to provide specific benefits to the students' learning environments. While virtual worlds like SL are visually very rich environments where many types of stimuli and materials can be made available to students, the question is: what 'mainstream' university campus activities may be carried out completely within VLEs such as SL? We propose to explore this question and identify the potential to support teacher and learner interactions and activities within a virtual campus space of SL.