Academic Goals and Resources needed to achieve them:
My personal goal is to become a researcher specialist in virtual environments for teaching and learning. I want to design educational products that motivate students to learn and help teachers benefit from all the possibilities this new medium of immersive education offers to discovery learning theories.
Since October 2008, I became a member of the virtual world Second Life and have deepened my skills within this environment. I was part of the development team of TejanoTech, a virtual island in Second Life where I did an exhibit about my retrospective photographic work. I continue working on a daily basis within virtual worlds with different companies and universities.
Teaching/Training and Curriculum.
Design Goals and Resources needed to achieve them:
At the present, I have researched and participated in several workshops on immersive education and virtual environments. I am following research being conducted by Duke University on the creation of an academic virtual platform called Cobalt. Also, I will be training new teachers on the use of Whyville, a virtual world for children, for teaching Math and Sciences..
In the Fall semester of 2008, while still a Second Life "newbie", I did the first Power Point presentation in a virtual world for the class of IST 5323 Concepts of Teaching and Learning. It was the most exciting experience as a learner to discover a new medium where an avatar or virtual representation of me could take charge and expose the learning theories I has learned from the real world.
By Spring of 2009, I purchased some virtual land and built the first virtual school where our class met. During the following months, our group experienced working in teams and project based learning between a virtual environment. Our students/avatars became pioneers of this new constructivist learning. Finally, our class received a grant from the College of Education and Human Development and The Academy for Teacher Excellence and acquired our first virtual island named: "TejanoTech" as it was named. We may not have been aware at the time of the valuable experience we attained from those humble beginnings.
Now, after multiple classes, workshops, readings, building and researching, we can now call ourselves virtual world specialists with skills to produce cutting edge educational products. As for me, I am grateful to have been given this unique opportunity and feel privileged to be part of a university-based developing team.
by Eduardo Valenzuela. Use of any material is allowed with attribution. 
