Immersive Education and VLE's: Call for Participation

by Aaron E. Walsh

I am a faculty member in the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College and direct the Media Grid standards group that today released the following Immersive Education call for participation (to educators, students and professionals):

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Media Grid call for participation: Immersive Education and Virtual
Learning Environments
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High quality PDF and Web versions: http://MediaGrid.org/#NEWS
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BOSTON, MA - June 04, 2007 - MediaGrid.org launches Immersive Education initiative with an open call to educators, students, and professionals who have experience using virtual learning environments or video game technologies (such as Second Life, Croquet, Extensible 3D [X3D], Panda3D, Quake, Unreal, Torque Game Engine, and so forth). Individuals and organizations can visit ImmersiveEducation.org to select the next-generation Immersive Education platform, contribute to best practices, and establish standards for virtual learning environments and game-based learning platforms...

Full release at http://mediagrid.org/news/2007-06_immersive_education.html
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I'd like to personally invite faculty and students who have experience teaching and learning in Second Life to participate. Second Life wasn't a viable platform for Immersive Education the last time (2003) we selected a platform, but it's a serious contender today. Details on how to participate are provided in the news release above, or directly at http://immersiveeducation.org/ (see "Participate in the Immersive Education standardization process").

CoSN K12 International Symposium Streaming Video

CoSN has made the entire day of the International Symposium: Using Games and Simulation for Engaged Learning available online in streaming video:

http://www.k12schoolnetworking.org/2007/symposium/agenda.cfm

There's an agenda posted on this page, you can generally judge where in the four chapters of video various sessions occur. There's some good stuff in there.

Mark Prensky kicks it off with a keynote based on his new book, "Don't bother me Mom - I'm learning". Lord (David) Putnam gives a good presentation in the afternoon session. Both of these have individual links to their videos from the agenda.

SLED Listserv, Stan Trevena, 15MAY07