In May 2014 David L. Parrott completed his research project 'THE IMPLICATIONS OF VIRTUAL WORLD TECHNOLOGY FOR K-12 STUDENTS IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE COURSE OF STUDY'. It was then submitted as doctoral dissertation to the School of Graduate Studies and Research at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 

Data was collected from German courses run by Mrs Simpson at Clearfield high school in the USA. During the 2013-2014 school year, she integrated the use of the on-line German Virtual World city called "Plauderstein" (plaudern means "to chat" in all her classes.

The Open Sim environment used is modelled on the Dutch initiative 'Chatterdale', a 3D realisation of the language village concept, inspired by related projects such as ViTAAL (Koenraad, 2008) 

 

One of the findings that resulted from the student interviews was that [...]  a virtual world learning activity should be an “adjunct” or extension of the current classroom course of language study, not an online replacement of traditional classroom work. The students at several points mention that it would be good to use the Plauderstein sim at key points throughout the year to reinforce what they have been learning in specific chapters or modules of instruction. (Parrot, 2014: 148)

We invited both teacher and researcher to join the Euroversity community as network partner and share their experiences.