Preserving Virtual Worlds Educational Events using Social Media Networks and Cloud Storage Services

Abstract

Documenting and preserving educational experiences in virtual worlds can be a challenge, especially for semester-length courses of up to 16 weeks. Vast amounts of data are generated such as objects created in-world, project data contained on social media networks, and real-time educational events. While it is probably not feasible to preserve all the related data for reuse in later courses, it is possible to document essential data for later development of similar courses. Artifacts connect past educational experience with future design of educational material for distance education in Virtual Worlds. These courses were taught on the Second Life School of Information Island and sponsored by the School of Information at San José State University. We describe our approach to archiving this data, which is spread across the Internet using cloud storage services.