What’s the value of virtual worlds in education? Alfred Essa, deputy CIO of Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, writes that one answer can be found on YouTube.

He points to a video posted by an anonymous MIT researcher. In it, the researcher demonstrates the ASSISST program, which allows users to design moving, mechanical systems by simply drawing on a screen.

Mr. Essa writes:

“All human creativity, including science, art, and literature, are imaginative activities. The ability to imagine different possibilities and interact with them is one of the virtues of virtual worlds.” —Hurley Goodall

The founders of Wikipedia and Connexions, an open-access source for educational material, revealed their Cape Town Open Education Declaration in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday.

The declaration grew out of a September 2007 meeting to spur the open-education movement. The goal is to create more educational resources that anyone can freely access and contribute to. Members of the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation, which support education, attended the September meeting.

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) and Rich Baraniuk (Connexions) write that open education “promises to turn the textbook-production pipeline into a vast dynamic ecosystem that is in a constant state of creation, use, reuse, and improvement.” —Hurley Goodall

The University of Manchester announced yesterday a reintroduction of the academic search engine Intute, slated for the end of the month.

The newest development for the relaunch is the Intute Institutional Repository Search. It will be a search engine for university digital repositories, allowing researchers to easily find academic material in one place.

Caroline Williams, Intute’s executive director, says the search engine has gathered data from 86 institutions, and that number is growing.

The university launched Intute in the summer of 2006. At the time, it was touted in Britain as a “rival to Google.”

Hefty claim, but perhaps not without merit. The search engine was created specifically for British students (though it’s openly accessible to students everywhere) and is closely monitored by a consortium of seven British universities, including Oxford. “Subject experts” — from...

A group of science bloggers has created a site that allows researchers to share blog posts about peer-reviewed research in one place.

ResearchBlogging.org, launched yesterday, is essentially a blog aggregator. Blogging academics (or, apparently, laymen interested in peer-reviewed research) register their blogs with the site. Bloggers can flag certain posts they write about peer-reviewed research by inserting a snippet of code. These posts then appear on the main page of the site, replete with proper academic citation.

The idea, writes co-creator Dave Munger, is to allow researchers to learn about new peer-reviewed research without relying on press releases or news reports.

Each post itself is peer-reviewed — registered bloggers on ResearchBlogging.org can report post that don’t fall in line with the site’s guidelines.

This, evidently, is part of the growing effort to ease communication ...

People tend to be loyal to one social-networking site, though that relationship is often fleeting, says Martin Weller, educational-technology Professor at the Britain-based Open University.

He points to no particular reason for this — just that one site will get old and people will move on to another. He asserts that this is happening to Facebook, but gives an analysis of the lessons academics can take away from the phenomenon. In particular, he writes:

“...in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these...

America’s high-school students are confident they can solve the world’s most complex problems, such as climate change and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. However, more than half of them believe high schools aren’t giving them the science and technology background to take those problems on, according to survey results from the Lemelson-MIT program.

This year’s Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, a survey that indicates Americans’ attitudes toward invention and innovation, shows most high-school studnets (64 percent) believe they are capable of inventing scientific and technological solutions to global issues.

At the same time, 59 percent of the teenage respondents (13 to 18 years old) don’t think they are being adequately prepared in high school for science and technology careers.

That seems to mesh with yesterday’s Joint Information Systems Committee report that students can...

The next generation of college students, more wired than any other, might not be as good at Internet research as you may think.

A new report from the Joint Information Systems Committee, a British higher-education research institute, says the “Google Generation” (those born after 1993, who can’t remember a time when the Internet wasn’t widely available) may be computer literate. But that doesn’t make them information literate. Some of the key problems the study found include: Young people don’t develop good search strategies to find quality information. They might find information on the Internet quickly, but they don’t know how to evaluate the quality of what they find. They don’t understand what the Internet really is: a vast network with many different content providers. The report details the implications of these problems for library professionals. It says library resources...

The University of California’s eScholarship Repository has recently exceeded five million full-text downloads, according to the university.

The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily access it free of charge. The idea is to ease communication between researchers.

Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have embraced the service, allaying concerns among researchers that others wouldn’t contribute to the repository. —Hurley Goodall

A group of Stanford computer scientists has designed a program that could help users create a more realistic virtual environment in which to interact.

The Stanford Virtual Worlds group announced this week that they have created Dryad, a program in which users can easily “construct” trees in a virtual space.

Using the wealth of information about trees already collect by botanists, Dryad populates the virtual space with trees created from 100 different variables. Users navigate the space and pick their desired tree from thousands of possibilities. A social-networking component refines the software by “nudging” users to trees with popular characteristics.

This, in effect, allows users to pick an item they want without having to go through a complicated creation process, or being able to shape a realistic-looking object manually.

The purpose, apparently, is to eventually allow people to in...

The University of Guelph, in Ontario, just opened a new research lab Monday that uses virtual reality to study gambling addiction.

The lab is equipped with a Panoscope 360, a virtual-reality viewer that immerses a user in a 3-D image. The machine also has surround-sound capabilities. Essentially, it would give the effect of standing in a casino, allowing researchers to study people’s behavior and reactions. Gambling behavior appears to be influenced by aspects of the casino environment, and the researchers want to identify them.

“The big advantage is that we can control what’s going on in the environment,” Jane Londerville, a researcher at the facility, says. “We can put them in a virtual-reality casino with lots of flashing lights, or no flashing lights, and see how they feel in those environments. We couldn’t do that in a real casino.”

Ms. Londerville says research done at the...