Media Zoo, the immersive teaching and research environment being developed by The University of Leicester has been shortlisted for the THES 2007 Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year Award.

Twofour has been working closely with The Beyond Distance Research Aliance at the University of Leicester to create the Second Life element of Media Zoo which is due to be launched later this month.

Gilly Salmon, Professor of E-learning & E-learning Technologies at Leicester commented: 'The collaboration between E-learning researchers and Twofour Learning has enabled us to create an environment to explore the myriad of questions that SL raises for learning and teaching in the future. And has provided an examples of a productive collaboration and partnership of two different kinds of organisations working together to create new kinds of student experiences'.

The Media Zoo already exists as an on-campus laboratory and an interactive website, has displays that take the mystery out of innovations such as mobile learning, e-learning design, e-moderating skills, digital repositories and blogs.

A film about Media Zoo in Second Life is now available on youtube.

Guardian article by Stephen Hoare - Campus of the Future - 04.12.07.