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In recent years, virtual worlds have been making their mark in patient education (Demiris, 2006 ), in the delivery of health care services (Tourigny, Clendinneng, Chartrand, & Gaboury, 2011 ), and in consultation with experts (Baker, Parks-Savage, & Rehfuss, 2009 ). Virtual worlds have also been adopted by faculty for educating medical and other health care students (Cowdery, Kindred, Michalakis, & Adams, 2009 ). The great advantage of virtual worlds is that they can bring together geographically dispersed participants in a single, unified context for convenient, synchronous collaboration. The format also allows students to be more active participants while learning (Kirriemuir, 2008 ). A virtual world can reshape the learning, communications, and social interactions for distance education students as well (Sibbett, 2007 ). Yet, although the literature has reported the use of virtual world platforms in teaching--learning processes and outcomes (Ahmad, Wana, & Jiang, 2010 ; Broom, Lynch, & Preece, 2009 ; Dev, Youngblood, Heinrichs, & Kusumoto, 2007 ; Schmidt & Stewart, 2009 ; Tao, Lim, & Watkins, 2010 ; Wiecha, Heyden, Sternthal, & Merialdi, 2010 ), little is known about the use of this technology in nursing education. Indeed, the application of virtual worlds to the field of education has been undertheorized, with much of the work being exploratory, descriptive, and technologically focused (Savin-Baden et al., 2010 ).
What Is A Virtual World?
Defined as "a synchronous, persistent network of people, represented by avatars, facilitated by computers" (Bell, 2008 , p. 2), a virtual world is a computer-based multimedia environment in which people interact with other users or objects via their personal graphic representation known as an avatar (Boulos, Hetherington, & Wheeler, 2007 ). The term virtual world sometimes is used interchangeably with virtual reality (Ahmad et al., 2010 ; Baker, Parks-Savage, & Rehfuss, 2009 ), which can be misleading. Typically, virtual reality is experienced by an individual wearing a head-mounted simulation unit or in a high-cost simulation theater or a "cave" in which high-resolution projectors are directed to three, four, five, or six of the walls that form the cave's room-sized cube. In contrast, the virtual world experience, particularly in the age of lightweight and networked laptop computers and gaming systems,...