The Minerva Project – The First Online Ivy League

The Minerva Project: The World’s First Online Ivy-League University

Will It Really be a “Virtual Harvard”?

By Jamie Littlefield, About.com Guide

The Minerva Project is a soon-to-be online college that offers an ivy-league style education at a distance. It’s the first project of its kind and has generated a lot of excitement as well as hesitancy in the distance education community. The for-profit university plans to offer a top-notch education to students from around the world at half the price of a traditional ivy-league school. Students will be accepted based on academic merit alone, and will learn in small classes that synchronously watch pre-recorded video lectures from top-professors and discuss them in small groups (around 25) with PhD-holding instructors. Students will be encouraged to live with other enrollees and travel the world as they complete their undergraduate educations.

via The Minerva Project – The First Online Ivy League.

 

It’s Not a Game … « Mariis’ explorations of 3D remediation

Even though my PhD-research has focused exclusively on Second Life, I will in one of my theoretical chapters examine the concept and evolution of Virtual Worlds in general. As a prelude to a discussion of several Virtual World definitions and typologies, I have chosen to look closer at what two prominent figures within the field have to say about Virtual Worlds. Richard A. Bartle (co-creator of MUD1, which by many is considered the first computer-based (albeit text only) Virtual World) and Cory Ondrejka (co-creator of Second Life) both agree that Virtual Worlds are not games. However, what’s interesting is that Bartle and Ondrejka seem to reach this conclusion based on very different arguments.

via It’s Not a Game … « Mariis’ explorations of 3D remediation.