Cross-posted to blog of proximal development.

I am delighted to report that the Virtual Classroom Project that I started last year on the island of jokaydia in Second Life is back in full swing. An Australian educator, Annabel Astbury, has been selected to be Educator-in-Residence on jokaydia until the end of February. Her residency was launched on February 1st at the jokaydia mini Unconference (you can download the audio recording of the sessions here).

Annabel (SL: Annabel Recreant) has been busy creating a very unique project. As a teacher of history, she is interested in creating a virtual learning space where visitors can learn about “settlement / colonisation in the south east of Australia.” Specifically, she is interested in creating a space where students can explore and experience “the impact that colonisation had upon indigenous communities in Australia.”

Annabel wants to create a space where the students can interact with the virtual land, where they experience the life of early settlers:

My idea is that when someone first visited the site they would be faced with a simulation of the Australian bush as it appeared pre settlement. Uncleared. Perhaps with evidence of Indigenous inhabitants. Features of the natural landscape.

Visitors may have read documents in class (hence the working with not around) or read some of the documents provided in another part of the space regarding elements of Frontier life such as the process of settling on a new land, difficulties faced, the ways these were solved (if at all) etc.

Once armed with some of this foreknowledge, visitors would be invited to clear the land themselves taking into account the topography, geography and physical elements of the landscape. Provided with a ‘box’ visitors would be invited to build their own hut, or settlement.

What I like about her project is that Annabel wants her virtual learning space to be a place where the visitors can build and create, not just view, watch, or listen to whatever has been prepared for them. She wants the visitors to not just read about early settlers in Australia but also to interact with the virtual landscape, to make it their own and, in the process, learn about issues faced by settlers. This idea emerged from some very critical questions about the educational potential of Second Life:

[...] I think I became a little disengaged at the end of last year with Second Life … because I had reached a ‘now what?’ stage. Having been part of the community of learners on the Islands of Jokaydia was great, but personally I felt I had plateaued in what I could offer or do. More than that I think I started to find it difficult to see the other uses of Second Life other than that main one of being connected to a network of great teachers.

[...] what I began to obsess over was this: if anyone came to my plot .. why would they? Why would they come into Second Life merely to click on a few urls that would take them to the internet? To me, that wasn;t a good use of the platform.

To me, the problem Annabel describes here has always been a major weakness of how Second Life is used in education. It is often a place where artifacts are built for visitors and where mere reproductions of real-life lecture halls are quite common. Annabel wants to use Second Life as a place where students can build their own understanding while (virtually) building a homestead and clearing the land. She wants to engage visitors by providing them with primary and secondary sources that will then enable them to make well-informed decisions as virtual settlers. Her virtual classroom will never really be finished - it will be more of an empty canvas where visitors can construct their vision of early settler life.

Annabel envisions this project as an opportunity to show other educators how students can be encouraged to use virtual environments such as Second Life to build their own understanding of history so that it becomes visible to anyone who visits the virtual space. This is not going to be just about building a virtual space where students can click on some URLs and read secondary sources. Annabel wants to develop a virtual resource to engage students in Historical Thinking by providing them with resources they can consult and artifacts they can use to build their own understanding of history. It’s almost like creating a virtual world wiki where instead of being confronted with a carefully designed space, a student is given access to a variety of resources and tools to build that space and, in the process, demonstrate his or her understanding of the material. The wonderful part about this is that this process will make learning visible in 3D. A student who builds with the resources provided in this virtual space and by using her own understanding of the time period will create an artifact that other learners can explore, interact with, and also rebuild or redesign.

I hope that you will follow Annabel’s work by reading her blog, checking out the Virtual Classroom Project Flickr group, and exploring her work inworld.

On Friday I had an opportunity to participate in a number of virtual sessions of the Australasian Virtual Worlds Workshop held in Second Life. The sessions took place on the Islands of jokaydia and the beautiful Second Life campus of Swinburne University on Koala Island.

I managed to take lots of pictures and even some video. Unfortunately, I was not able to capture the audio. Below you will find two machinima pieces from the event and also a flickr stream of all the pictures from the jokaydian Fotopool.

Keynote address by Chris Collins, Director of Enterprise Business Systems of Linden Lab
(no audio):

(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

Some shots of the panel sessions after Chris’ keynote:

(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

… and here are all the tagged pictures from the event:

I finally found some time to write a blog post on my virtual Kenyan classroom. I also finished the video, which you can watch below.

Once again, big thanks to Jo for supporting the project and finding a spot for me to present at the jokaydia Unconference back in September.

You can find the post on my blog of proximal development. The SLurl is here.

Virtual Kenya Project Machinima
(Link to the original file on blip.tv)

If you like what you see and would like to bring your students or colleagues into this space, or learn more about education in Kenya or the work of Teachers Without Borders - Canada, please feel free to contact me. I’ve given a number of tours already and would be happy to chat about the space or help you build a lesson around this virtual exhibit.

As some of you may know, I have been away since July 1 traveling with Teachers Without Borders - Canada. One of the last videos that I filmed before my trip was of the new sim of what was then known as jokaydia III. Back then, this new area of the jokaydian Estate was fairly empty and I made the video to document the addition of the new sim. I had no idea that in only three months the landscape would change so much as to be almost unrecognizable!

When I logged on a couple of days ago - for the first time since July 1st - and saw how much the area had changed, I knew that I just had to document this fantastic growth of our community.

I finished editing the new video just a few minutes ago and I hope that you will take some time to watch both the first video (jokaydia THEN) and the new one (jokaydia NOW) to see how much jokaydia has grown in just over three months. Enjoy!

jokaydia THEN (June 4th, 2008):

jokaydia NOW (September 10th, 2008):

The inaugural phase of the Virtual Classroom Project is coming to a close. The official in-world meet-up to officially conclude Leigh Blackall’s (SL: Leroy Goalpost) residency on jokaydia as our first Educator-in-Residence will take place in the next two weeks. Details will be posted as soon as the date is finalized.

Before we conclude, however, Leigh and I will use voicethread to engage in conversations about his work and his experiences as our Educator-in-Residence.

So, if you’ve been following the project or attended our inworld meet-up during jokaydia’s April Festival, please add your thoughts. Leroy and I are looking forward to an engaging discussion.

Click here to listen to our voicethread discussion or use the embedded player below.