Comparing Social Virtual Worlds for Educational Purposes

Over the last decade the interest in social virtual worlds as tools to improve the teaching/learning process and to stimulate knowledge, including the development of learning to learn autonomy, has greatly increased as a result of their promising potential. In the current work we introduce a concise definition of a social virtual world and make a comparative analysis between different virtual worlds based on Mannien´s matrix. For this study, Second Life, Active Worlds and There were selected as they are the virtual environments most commonly addressed by the academic community. Finally, we discuss the potential of social virtual worlds for educational purposes.