The architecture of learning spaces: designing in a virtual world for pre-service teacher education

Teachers have always been required to work within the classroom spaces provided to them. The bricks and mortar of industrial age classroom structures often dictate pedagogical modes that are not always the best for learners or for the concepts being taught. With newly emerging virtual world technologies opportunities are now available for teachers to design and create a much wider range of individually tailored learning spaces – literally anything they can imagine. However, to fully exploit these opportunities and overcome certain challenges they need to understand both how virtual world technologies work and how educationally appropriate environments can be designed and built. This paper presents a case history of the initial design stages of an island in the virtual world of Second Life that is intended to service the needs of pre-service teachers in preparing them for the classrooms of the future.