Mundos Virtuais de Aprendizagem e de Ensino - uma caracterização inicial *

This paper describes an exploratory and qualitative study, which is being carried out within a 3D virtual world - the Second Life® (SL) and represents the first step of a larger research project. The principal aims of that project are to get a deeper understanding of how social interactions occurs within virtual learning environments in order to provide insights to all educators and researchers interested in using those environments as a teaching medium in real life, and to seek for new approaches to real life educative contexts. We've characterized several learning and teaching situations in SL, looking for the teacher and students' roles, the spaces, supplies, notes and complementary media resources. A preliminary analysis of the results reveals that the social interactions between students and teachers are quite different from RL learning and teaching situations, where the informality of the spaces as well as the immersive environment seems to be relevant issues.