In June 2006 The Open University (OU) purchased its first land in Second Life. Over a two and a half year period, the OU presence evolved and grew to a point where an average of between 150 and 250 unique users in any 7-day period are active in an OU area. This chapter charts the history of the development of the OU Second Life social community and considers the nature of that activity at a point of critical change, in January 2009, shortly before a new island is developed to provide a permanent home for the community. In order for the community to continue evolving it is necessary to understand the nature of the core activities of these users, and to consider this in a context of sustainable development. Through reference to aspects of socialisation and physical community, the author proposes that a virtual world environment can be described using the physical world concept of a Third Place in the information age, and considers the value of virtual space to a learning community. From a perspective of ethnography, this chapter captures a community development within SL and proposes that physical world concepts of community and Third Place are exhibited in a virtual world, and that there are equivalent benefits in the sense of support and belonging to a virtual world community.

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Three dimensional virtual world environments are becoming an increasingly regular feature of the education landscape, providing the opportunity for richly graphical augmented and immersive learning activities. Those who participate in these experiences must mediate through an avatar, negotiating and managing the complexities of this new variation of digital identity alongside their more familiar identity as learner and/or teacher/facilitator. This chapter describes some key moments in the construction of digital identities as a lecturer and a student in the Open University’s community in Second LifeTM. The authors explore experiences in relation to the impact of trust and consistency from a sociocultural perspective, privileging the role of social interaction and context where meaning is socially produced and situationally interpreted, concluding that social interaction is pivotal to any meaningful identity development that takes place. The chapter ends with thoughts for future issues surrounding digital identity in relation to lifelong learning.

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This paper introduces the term Open Virtual Worlds and argues that they are 'unclaimed educational spaces', which provide a valuable tool for researching pedagogy. Having explored these claims the way in which Teen Second Life® virtual world was used for pedagogical experimentation in the initial phases of the Schome Park Programme is described. Four sets of pedagogical dimensions that emerged are presented and illustrated with examples from the Schome Park Programme.

In 2005 the Centre for Professional Learning and Development at the Open University (OU) established a pioneering collaboration with Reuters (which in 2008 became Thomson Reuters), working together on The Management Challenge Online (TMCO), a 10-week cohort-based course for First Line Managers. The course is currently delivered in the open source Moodle environment using Flash learning modules, to a model that encourages and supports collaborative participation and deep learning for delegates. This chapter will begin with an introduction to TMCO, providing some context and background to its development, structure and delegate groups. This has been described in detail elsewhere, see Peachey & Walshe (2008), where it was identified that “a Second Life activity programme element for TMCO would offer additional engagement potential for a significant number of participants.” The chapter will describe the virtual world Second Life and the course management integration system Sloodle before exploring the motivation and structure for integrating these new tools into the next evolution of TMCO. The chapter will propose an adaptation of an evaluation framework originally proposed by de Freitas & Oliver (2006), creating a tool for evaluating the introduction of virtual world technology into a work based training curriculum, and will outline the proposed Second Life/Moodle/Sloodle activity for TMCO in some detail.