Currently we myself and James are writing a chapter in the “Handbook of Research on Computational Arts and Creative Informatics” that will tentatively be published in 2009 by IGI Global. This chapter will focus on the impact of virtual environments in the classroom where we will discuss research in Second Life and how it can applied to other areas of research (i.e. Human-computer interaction, Art, Psychology and other areas) http://www.igi-pub.com/reference/

Myself and James Braman at Towson University have as part of our research efforts in Second Life establishing the validity of using such virtual environments in higher education, have so far been able to publish our second article.

Our second article titled “Towards a Virtual Classroom: Investigating Education in Synthetic Worlds” was presented and published in the proceedings of the AAAI Fall Symposium: Emergent Agents and Social and Organizational Aspects of Intelligence in Arlington, VA, USA in November 2007.

(www.aaai.org) The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence holds several conferences and symposiums every year on many topics relating to Artificial Intelligence and its impact on society.

Post contributed by James Branman

Our first co-written article was published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Information Society in Merrillville, Indiana. USA in October 2007. The proceedings can be accessed at http://www.i-society.org/2007/

Just a quick update, our first collaborative journal written by myself and James Braman is near completion. Due to my results yesterday (2:1) I am now preparing to pitch our next stage of our synthetic world and e-learning research to Plymouth University as part of my MRes project, simultaneously pitching the project to e-learning companies across the country.