Greetings all,
Logging in from Metaverse U:
Giorgio was kind enough to fill me in on the afternoon conversations from yesterday and I wanted to chime in on something that I consider to be fundamental to the role that virtual worlds can and will play in the future of the humanities and arts disciplines: namely, that research --i.e. the generation of new, improved, richer, innovative, better informed, more complex forms of knowledge, esp. forms of knowledge poorly captured by text-based or paper-supported forms of scholarship and/or that involve collaborative, team-based, experiential, process-oriented or "hands on" approaches--must drive ALL the other roles that vw's can and do play in these disciplinary domains: roles as teaching tools, supports for traditional classroom-based education, etc.
In other words, vw's aren't simply "another tool" or support (such as language labs for language courses). Rather, in my view, they represent a transformative platform for models of scholarship, research, collaborative authoring, and hands-on training, and a new set of opportunities for communicating these models to audiences (both inside and outside the academy).
Commenting by HaloScan
