Learn 4 Life Holodeck

Learn4Life Island has been in Second Life now for roughly two years and in that time I have put a lot of time and money into the building of the space to see what the possibilities are for education in the future. This year I am intent on building an imaginative community to work there on several ad hoc projects; they may come to nothing or they may evolve into bigger projects that can be co-opted into mainstream education.

In the first of these I am looking for any UK teachers who are very experienced with the Second Life platform. Ideally they will be working in the arts, media and science fields.  If you have basic scripting/coding skills as well that would be a big bonus. The idea is to have a play with and adapt, design, build Holodecks to make ARGlike environments that can be used for imaginative teaching in any areas of the curriculum – in and outside SL – so allied resources for building, cartoon making, filming, machinima and other stuff will be available as well – a lot of these will be web based, free, collaborative and Open Source applications that can be used to construct stuff both socially and virtually :). The process of building in the interactive/ collaborative activities away from the computer will be just as important as any ‘virtual’ build. You may never use Second Life in your teaching but the ideas and activities you evolve here will help with any future collaborative virtual environment you may use.

I personally will not have much time to run the project but I can offer secure resources such as land and holodecks/ media facilities in Second Life for you to have a play with and try to evolve some form of pedagogy around the concept. This will kick off (if it gets enough attention) end of Feb beginning of March 2009. Any LA or other commercial /non-profit or other interested organisations who want to become involved and offer funding/ sponsorship/ expertise would be most welcome too. Scripters and interested academics are invited too to lend any expertise they feel might be valuable. All results and resources will be entirely open and the whole process is as much one of professional development for yourself as well as the intended students further down the line. If you want to take the experience and formalise, research, exploit it, fine, but this project is not about that, it is about having fun and gaining insights to what does or doesn’t work – I’m deeply attached to idea of learning through play and this project is definitely about play and personal as well as professional development

I am beginning training teachers who are totally new to SL at that time as part of UK BSF (Building Schools for the Future Project) so there will be a totally newbie teaching community around to bounce ideas off as well. Look at the film and get in touch. This project will not involve students at this stage – only teachers…The scope is limited to the UK because of timezone differences but if that doesn’t worry you then please email, Twitter or DM me in-world. I’ll take it from there and orgainise some in-world and Flashmeeting dates.

We will probably looking to take some of these ideas into the EduSim platform as well for use by primary teachers and students later. So please do get in touch.

My contact details are available on the film below.

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