acceleration in the metaverse
Immersive Education Initiative Announces Education Grid
On January 12th, it was announced at The Boston Media-Grid Summit that the Immersive Education Initiative has selected Croquet as one of three official “next generation” immersive education platforms. The Immersive Education Initiative is an international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia companies, and foundations that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of support for virtual reality and game-based learning and training systems. The Initiative will now direct both funding and programming resources towards the development and deployment of open source Croquet technologies and open source Croquet-based educational applications. Selection criteria for this important honor included the following: 1) support for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems; 2) availability as open source code; 3) vendor-neutral client and server architectures (no vendor lock-in); 4) stable and reliable runtime implementations; 5) integrated text chat and voice chat; 6) high resolution graphics; 7) multi-user support for collaboration; 8) highly customizable avatars that support high resolution graphics and body animation (gestures); and 9) support for user-created content. The other two immersive education platforms selected were Sun’s open source Project Wonderland client and the now open source Second Life client.
Grid Today: During the 2008 Boston Digital Media Summit last week, the Immersive Education Initiative announced the Education Grid and corresponding Platform Ecosystem. Based upon open source technologies and open standards, the Education Grid and Platform Ecosystem will provide educators with a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of virtual world learning environments, interactive learning games and simulations. The first three platforms in the ecosystem were introduced at the summit: Second Life, Sun Microsystems Laboratory’s Project Wonderland, and Croquet. These platforms will be enhanced to utilize the server-side Education Grid that will deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled.
Immersive Education combines interactive 3-D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality, voice chat, Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education gives participants a sense of “being there” even when attending a class or training session in person isn’t possible, practical, or desirable, which in turn provides educators and students with the ability to connect and communicate in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience. Immersive Education is developed by the Immersive Education Initiative, a non-profit international collaboration of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are working together to define and develop open standards, best practices, platforms, and communities of supp ort for virtual worlds and game-based learning and training systems.
Explicit outcomes of the summit include plans to design and develop the Education Grid; integration of Second Life, Wonderland, and Croquet with the Education Grid; research into new forms of pedagogy and assessment for Immersive Education; development of Immersive Education curricula; and a nation-wide pilot program for K-12 schools and higher education.
Posted by G.P. on 01/24/08
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