Visualizing The Knowledge Domain Of Virtual Worlds In Teaching And Learning

Along with the rapid development of Internet and virtual reality technology, virtual world is increasingly applied to teach and learn, and it has become a new focus in education technology research. With the advent of the era of big data, the number of literature publication speeds up rapidly. Meanwhile, with the progress of information technology, the application of visualization becomes more and more popular. In order to grasp present research situation and reveal emerging trends of virtual worlds in learning and teaching, published papers will be analyzed in the way of mapping knowledge domain, using Citespace, a tool of text mining and visualization in scientific literature.This thesis adopts the method of visualization of mapping knowledge domains, citation analysis and co-word analysis, which can be realized by Citespace. Three aspects of the virtual world used in teaching and learning are reviewed, which is based on the relevant research data from core collection of the Web of Science database from January 2000 to December 2015. This study aims at answering the following questions:Firstly, what are the publication bibliometrics about virtual worlds in learning and teaching different from 2000 to 2015?Secondly, what are the research subjects(including countries/(regions, research institutions, and prolific authors and highly cited authors)?Thirdly, what are the hot spots(including hot research fields and hot key words)?By literature analysis of virtual worlds in learning and teaching, the following results are obtained:(1) from 2000 to 2015, the amount of published papers of virtual worlds in learning and teaching increased steadily, fluctuating slightly, and the peak is 93 in 2013. It shows that virtual world in learning and teaching is gradually attracting more and more researchers‘ attention.(2) three aspects consists of the knowledge objects of virtual worlds in learning and teaching, they are :(a) studies in this field are allocated into 51 countries or regions, in which America ranks first, followed by Britain, Spain, Australia, and Greece. It demonstrates that researches on virtual worlds in learning and teaching mainly concentrate on developed countries in Europe and the United States.(b) A total of 44 scientific research institutions have conducted researches in this field, and all of the top 10 institutions are universities. The cooperation between them is mainly domestic, and large-scale cooperation is not formed.(c) more than one thousand scholars or experts have carried on researches on it and they cooperate commonly, and the top five prolific academic experts with high-quality papers and high cited rate are Dede C, Dickey MD, Wsrburton S, Jarmon L, and Wenger E.(3) the hot areas of this study are education, computer, and engineering, which are characterized with interdisciplinary. What‘s more, virtual world and second life are the hottest research directions.This study analyzed the published papers of virtual worlds in learning and teaching with visualization of mapping knowledge domains by Citespace. This kind of approach provides a micro viewpoint on prestigious publications of virtual worlds in learning and teaching and find out a more frequently researched topics and themes. This kind of literature reviews is not designed to replace conventional reviews; however, it is intended to provide an additional and beneficial reference.