The distinctive campus of LITE in Lafayette, Louisiana, where IMAGINATION began. (Image credit: LEDA-Lafayette)

Between signs for Cajun food and the university’s “Ragin’ Cajun” mascot sits a 50-foot-tall, luminescent, rainbow-colored egg attached to a modern building.

The $27 million, 70,000 square foot facility called LITE (Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise) signals the birth of something altogether new in the Lafayette landscape. This is one of the world’s most sophisticated public virtual exploration facilities, and though it seems like an anomaly, it’s perfectly fitting for it to be in this region, nestled within a culture that has gainfully employed creativity and technology in the past to revamp their local economy and culture.

To entice tourists with automobiles to the region, Cajuns once focused on art, poetry, music, cuisine and a rich culture of storytelling to transform the local economy.

Technology, however, has changed since then.

Joshua Fouts arrives at the entrance to 3D Squared offices in Metaplace

Our journey to LITE began in an Internet browser-based virtual environment called Metaplace. Simple to access, filled with small, innocuous avatars in an environment more evocative of Donkey Kong than Grand Theft Auto, Metaplace seemed ideal at first glance for educational purposes.

It was Metaplace that we first met Joe Castille, the executive producer of a technology education group called 3D Squared, amid a square of landscaped green space. 3D Squared is a non-profit dedicated to “workforce development for the game and digital media industry” lead by Spencer Zuzolo an academic and game developer from Austin, Texas, who teaches game design.

Video: Spencer Zuzolo describes his theory of learning through making games.

We met in Metaplace with Castille and Zuzolo in an environment created collaboratively with students that included a geodesic dome, office furniture and a park. The place was abuzz with tiny, busy avatars, many of whom were interns and students participating in 3D Squared and involved with its parallel venture, GameCamp.

“I’m immensely concerned about the transformation in the economy and how to prepare tomorrow’s workforce to adapt to it,” Zuzolo told us when we first met in Metaplace. “How do you engage the students and connect them to parents, teachers and students? Part of it is language.”

That language, he believes, lies partly in the culture of games.

The idea of games in education is often narrowly interpreted through the prism of a specific game such as World of Warcraft, which, because it builds strong guilds and demonstrates the power of play in groups, is an easy target for such assertions. Massively multiplayer online games are one type of game, and the skills built within them can have great impact, but this project interprets “games” far more broadly to encompass systems deliberately engineered for maximum participation.

Video: Spencer Zuzolo describes mis-perceptions about learning models for kids.

In Louisiana, 3D Squared’s young participants aimed to create games that could translate into real social and economic value.

“We have the largest outmigration of any state in the nation,” Castille explained of Louisiana. “100,000 skilled labor jobs are unfilled. We’re using Metaplace as the first rung of the skill ladder for teaching virtual world development.”

Castille and Zuzolo believe that the reform of education and the future of work are intertwined, and being perceived as such will allow for the creation of an interactive collaborative atmosphere with immediate feedback and development. In this environment, the role of the individual is important, with each person contributing valuably to the process. The group’s mission remains the sole focus. The purpose is served, and everybody wins.

3D Squared’s project was funded by a $750,000 grant from the Louisiana Department of Development.

What did the grant cover?

• Thought-leadership: The Digital Technologies and Creative Processes Initiative included a statewide assessment of Louisiana’s needs and resources, development of curriculum criteria and standards, pilot programs, stakeholder education, and creation of a digital media laboratory.
• Action: The project would culminate in a Digital Workforce Initiative during which students from different schools would work in teams to develop virtual world prototypes of games and simulations addressing core social problems during a week-long event at LITE.
• Intangible benefits: Students gaining rapid mastery over complex subject matter after conducting their own research and collaborating on critical thought, design and project development. Students gaining public speaking ability and confidence in a professional, competitive and team-oriented environment in which the individual is a valued contributor.

Zuzolo and Castille extended an invitation for us to visit Lafayette, Louisiana, and participate in the Digital Workforce Initiative. The event would also serve as an opportunity for 3D Squared to explain their work to community and political leaders. When we first arrived, event participants were divided into groups to choose from among a roster of themes ranging from police brutality and obesity to environmental crises and unemployment.

Each team would collaborate on the design of a virtual game with real world benefit, bolstered by research into the topic and sharing knowledge and ideas. When the students needed a break, they could share their terror about public speaking with their group leaders or play Rock Band in a recreation room at the end of the hall.

The public speaking would be necessary at the end of the week when game designers would be flown in to critique their work in front of a live audience of parents, educators, facilitators, journalists, policymakers and peers. The live event at the end of the week still seemed a long way off. The participants had barely chosen their topics and hadn’t yet decided who among them would fill the roles of producer, director, designer, researcher and writer.

By the end of the first day, their games started to shape up. Each team was focused on a different social issue including obesity, unemployment, environmental issues in the Gulf Coast and police brutality. Several times we heard people say that if not for Mississippi, Louisiana would rate dead last in almost any category related to health, education and the local economy.

In the hallways of LITE, team members practiced public speaking as they worked on their Metaplace environments. They ate together, laughed at their mistakes, congratulated each other for amazing feats of creativity and worked their problems out in tandem. The participants, accustomed to studying alone, taking tests alone and failing or passing in isolation, had never experienced anything like it. Excitement and nerves crackled in the air at LITE as future workers began to shift from a paradigm of solitary competition to one of collaborative creativity.

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All week, while 3D Squared’s Digital Workforce Intensive was underway, LITE buzzed with activity.

While the students collaborated, we took a tour of LITE.

“The only place I’ve seen like this is inside a top secret underground military bunker,” said a self-described military contractor who joined us. “There are only about four others in the country. And they’re only accessible to the military.”

The tour wound through rooms of different sizes, each used for different types of full immersion training. In contrast to viewing a virtual world from a computer screen, in these rooms you become the avatar, physically surrounded by images on all sides.

The first room was completely dark. We were given goggles and gloves and asked to put on hospital slippers. The tour guide pulled a curtain behind us as the interior becomes illuminated with a digitized hospital room and a life-sized avatar of a projected patient. The gloves worn by people in the space allow healthcare trainees to interact with objects in the hospital room, including the patient. The room across the hall projects massive images of an oil rig. Gloves are used to zoom into the platform of the rig and the ship to train and to identify ways of improving oil drilling.

The pièce de résistance is a 25 foot-high set of three screens attached to a giant multi-directional treadmill. Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the treadmill floor is a parachute body harness and helmet. A participant straps into the harness and helmet as the machine is warmed up. Images of the interior of the Sistine Chapel are projected onto the three walls.

“Start walking,” the tour guide said.

The floor tilted as the participant’s feet tentatively stepped one after the other, like a person learning to walk again. The virtual Sistine Chapel changed and zoomed, allowing participants to walk “into” and explore the structure which appears to be moving much the way the arc of the rising and setting sun is really just the rotation of the earth. The guide switched the images to reveal the deck of an oil rig out at sea.

“Walk down the steps but be careful not to fall into the ocean,” the tour guide advised.

The floor tilted down. The participant lost his balance and found himself at the bottom of the ocean. After the small crowd finished laughing, the tour guide explained that these immersive rooms are being used to protect two of the greatest local sources of income: fishing and working on the oil rigs, but that the simulations aren’t being utilized fully by either industry, mainly because it’s hard to understand the value of immersive virtual environments until the crises they are created in part to avert are mitigated by the additional deep training.

Format

All week, while 3D Squared’s Digital Workforce Intensive was underway, LITE buzzed with activity.
While the students collaborated, we took a tour of LITE.
“The only place I’ve seen like this is inside a top secret underground military bunker,” said a self-described military contractor who joined us. “There are only about four others in the country. And they’re only accessible to the military.”
The tour wound through rooms of different sizes, each used for different types of full immersion training. In contrast to viewing a virtual world from a computer screen, in these rooms you become the avatar, physically surrounded by images on all sides.
The first room was completely dark. We were given goggles and gloves and asked to put on hospital slippers. The tour guide pulled a curtain behind us as the interior becomes illuminated with a digitized hospital room and a life-sized avatar of a projected patient. The gloves worn by people in the space allow healthcare trainees to interact with objects in the hospital room, including the patient. The room across the hall projects massive images of an oil rig. Gloves are used to zoom into the platform of the rig and the ship to train and to identify ways of improving oil drilling.
The pièce de résistance is a 25 foot-high set of three screens attached to a giant multi-directional treadmill. Suspended from the ceiling in the center of the treadmill floor is a parachute body harness and helmet. A participant straps into the harness and helmet as the machine is warmed up. Images of the interior of the Sistine Chapel are projected onto the three walls.
“Start walking,” the tour guide said.
The floor tilted as the participant’s feet tentatively stepped one after the other, like a person learning to walk again. The virtual Sistine Chapel changed and zoomed, allowing participants to walk “into” and explore the structure which appears to be moving much the way the arc of the rising and setting sun is really just the rotation of the earth. The guide switched the images to reveal the deck of an oil rig out at sea.
“Walk down the steps but be careful not to fall into the ocean,” the tour guide advised.
The floor tilted down. The participant lost his balance and found himself at the bottom of the ocean. After the small crowd finished laughing, the tour guide explained that these immersive rooms are being used to protect two of the greatest local sources of income: fishing and working on the oil rigs, but that the simulations aren’t being utilized fully by either industry, mainly because it’s hard to understand the value of immersive virtual environments until the crises they are created in part to avert are mitigated by the additional deep training.
Path:

Video: NOAA demonstrates its virtual world training environment.

Imagine the job interview to be the person who travels on an aircraft through hurricane conditions to gather weather information–or being on a trawler on treacherous seas gathering data vital to understanding and protecting, the oceans?

It’s the job of The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to find these people and train them. The cost and duration of training in the physical world is a serious challenge, so NOAA has been exploring ways to train more people at lower cost. Virtual training is smart for organizations and businesses that work with complex tasks or machines, because it allows individuals to practice dangerous skills in environments in which physical harm is impossible. NOAA invested in a robust virtual development program including the creation of one of the most sophisticated projects in the virtual world Second Life.

The first time we visited, Eric Hackathorn, NOAA program manager, was in Virtual Alaska and physical Alaska at the same time, teaching students how to build out the virtual oceanic environment. The resulting digital ocean, complete with marine life, would span from the equator to the poles with special emphasis on some areas, including Alaska. In a virtual ocean, time can be bent so participants can see, for example, the long-term death of the coral reef in a condensed format. Watching the vital bright red color fade to ghostly white in seconds instead of centuries is a powerful way to illustrate a point in a way that comes to life and sticks.

Hackathorn took us on a tour of the space, including a digital replica of NOAA’s spectacular Science on a Sphere. Dozens of locations around the physical world will host the Science on a Sphere globe, onto which various stunning and informative data visualizations are projected. In Second Life, participants can choose from a panel of data visualizations to see them projected onto the virtual sphere’s surface.

Virtual environments offer many such opportunities to solve problems. Virtual environments are an asset for practicing as complex as a hospital evacuation or preparing for other local disasters that require safety plans to be tested ahead of time.

The participants at 3D Squared’s Digital Workforce Initiative weren’t just playing games. They were training for the type of skilled positions already available for workers prepared to take them. Americans are currently faced with a shortage of jobs, but by 2018 the nation may be faced with a shortage of educated workers. Int Louisiana, 100,000 skilled labor jobs are currently unfilled. The issues facing Louisiana are particularly dire. Environmental disasters, both natural and man-made, aren’t the state’s only major issue. The state is at the bottom of the list when it comes to health and education as well.

“Some youth with few job prospects and little hope for future advancement may see little alternative to criminal activities or joining armed conflicts,” the Population Reference Bureau has noted. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports Bureau of Justice Statistics indicate that Louisiana’s per capita homicide rate has ranked first among the states for 20 straight years.

The best opportunity to analyze the relationships between complex factors related to cities might also come from simulated environments. Eric Beidel’s article “Video Game Tackles Serious Urban Problems”  in the September 2010 issue of National Defense Magazine details IBM’s CityOne game.

“The work force of tomorrow can learn a lot by playing video games today,” IBM told Beidel.

IBM’s recent CityOne is a free online game that takes the concepts behind the popular SimCity series and tries to up the real-world ante. IBM’s version of the city simulator features problems and solutions that leaders in urban environments actually might encounter when they go to work. A game scenario involves a water crisis, with usage outpacing demand to strain supplies, coupled with pollution and leaky pipes while energy costs continue to rise. Players must come up with a way to deliver high quality water at low cost.

Much like 3D Squared’s attempt to introduce a broad range of social issues into the game development experience, CityOne presents an array of challenges related to financial, environmental and sociological interests. The next step could be to tailor the platform to specific real world cities and challenges. Real cities are also starting to use technology to crowd-source ideas from citizens.

Video: Game designer Jane McGonigal speaks at TED 2010. Reality is broken, she says. Can games fix it? If so, is gamification really the path to get there?

After working all week at LITE , the big day finally arrived for the young collaborative game design teams. At the beginning of the week, many of the participants expressed terror at the thought of speaking publicly to professionals flown in to critique their work. Each team would take the stage one at a time to present the games they’d designed around various social issues including unemployment, police brutality, obesity, environmental concerns and other local issues of importance.

The auditorium was packed with parents, students, educators, administrators and even legislators looking to understand what the participants had accomplished during their week together. A panel of game designers sat together in a row, themselves a simulation of the future, when the fledgling game designers would face real job interviews.

The Louisiana students responded like champions to their grueling critique. Questions ran the gamut from highly technical to extremely detail-oriented. The students professionally and eloquently explained their research, showing slides of their art and design on the big screen behind the podium and sharing what they’d learned about the serious issues facing Louisiana.

A student named Charlie Flanders, 14, spoke about his team’s game, “War of the Wetlands,” which centered on preventing coastal erosion through educating people in an immersive environment. One aspect of the game, Whack-a-Nutria, caused one of the critics to ask how the team might respond to copyright trouble related to Whack-a-Mole. Flanders calmly laid out a stellar six-point argument about how the game doesn’t violate copyright law. Another student later shared similar views when asked about the Beethoven soundtrack for her team’s game.

Spencer Zuzolo, president of 3D Squared, said during the event that the program shows the natural affinity young people have for 21st century workforce skills.

“They need academic programs that help them more formally transform their creativity and interest in games and immersive virtual environments into realistic career and education paths,” Zuzolo said.

Garrett Guillotte was a content intern for 3D Squared during the event at LITE. He said that the skills he gained during the Digital Workforce Initiative translated immediately to the job market.

“My experience provided invaluable, credible experience in communications and technology that helped lead me to a job with a high-profile tech firm,” Guillotte, who now lives and works in Boston, said. ”Working with Joe Castille and Spencer Zuzolo gave me valuable insight into the workings of a tech-sector start-up, an educational non-profit and a game development company all at once. 3D Squared also helped give kids opportunities in programming and game development that I had desperately sought and never found as a child. Being a part of a group that helped fulfill these dreams was a personally fulfilling experience.”

Guillotte said he was surprised at how quickly the kids were willing to adapt socially to the environment. They formed working relationships, and often friendships, with each other under high-stress deadline pressure.

During the live event at LITE, virtual participants in Metaplace were shown on the stage screen. The platform’s creator, Raph Koster, typed his live comments from Metaplace in the form of a tiny avatar. The comments appeared on the screen as the audience watched.

“I think the thing that most strikes me about an event like this,” Koster typed as Castille, leading the event from the real-world podium, read aloud, “is the fact that citizenship is the same whether it exists in the real world or a digital framework.”

Citizenship in Metaplace, however, would soon be a figment of the digital past. Within months, Koster would announce the shuttering of his world. Many saw this as a sign that virtual platforms were just a passing fancy, not popular enough to warrant continuation, despite a reported billion global participants, mostly under the age of 16.

When Metaplace closed, Koster blogged:

“The reason? Well, [Metaplace] just hasn’t gotten traction. I have many thoughts on why, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t go into all of them right now. It is a sad day for us here, and I know many users are going to be very disappointed by this turn of events.”

Many people don’t realize just how lucrative virtual worlds, particularly those catering to kids, have become. An ever-expanding billion dollar virtual goods market demonstrates a robust nascent sea change in the global marketplace.

It isn’t as if Metaplace failed completely, even if Koster’s journey ended with a measure of disappointment. In June of 2010, Metaplace sold to Playdom. The next month, Playdom was acquired by Disney for 763 million dollars.

Many of the educational projects using Metaplace at the time, however, were left in limbo and received no further funding.

Isaac Asimov: “Science and Creativity in Education”

When teacher F. Margret Atkinson first heard about the Digital Workforce Initiative at LITE, she immediately felt she was getting involved with a powerful new approach to taking creativity and technology to a new level with her students.

While her students worked together in groups at LITE, she discussed their various needs, the span in their ages, ability levels, expectations, socioeconomic and cultural categories. Atkinson’s travel schedule between schools that share her time in the region is dizzying.

To Atkinson, each student learns differently and yet must be prepared for the future, ready for work and meaningful participation in society. She sees technology as an extension of creativity and capacity for critical thought. A modern classroom isn’t just four walls, she said, but rather a home base from which the world beyond can be explored.

“A teacher’s role is to expand and change with the changing times, delivering what each kid needs in the way he or she needs it,” says Atkinson with a smile. Her jovial demeanor is unflappable in person, in texts, in emails or via video chat, even when she’s jet-lagged or logging more miles than Santa Claus zig-zagging around the state.

Atkinson doesn’t limit her view of technology to particular platforms, but remains open to new ideas about which platforms might be appropriate at different times for different reasons. She acknowledges that this isn’t easy, but she views it as a necessity. When she recently joined a delegation of teachers on a trip to Germany, Israel and Poland to learn about ways to teach the Holocaust, for example, she blogged about her experience and used Skype and Twitter to communicate.

“As we get further away from a historical event,” Atkinson explained from Israel via Skype, “greater perspective is gained” she recounted from an earlier lecture by the educational director.

As part of the learning project, the group conducted multimedia interviews with Holocaust survivors, many of which would be uploaded to sites like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter to share with a wider community of educators. Atkinson’s Cajun students are also descended from victims of genocide, so she looks for ways to contextualize the specific circumstances of each period of history but also to broaden the scope to take a wider look at humanity.

“Technology,” she said, “is an immensely helpful asset in this quest.”

How do you use technology in the classroom?

Video: Charles Leadbetter speaks at TED about education transformation.

The divide created by unequal access to technology is crippling. Some schools and districts are struggling to acquire and use technology while others, such as schools participating in Iowa’s emerging 1:1 program are working together to form a collective mission and figure out the value in the visionary fledgling program.

Other schools are using specific types of equipment such as iPads to meet this need, and some educators are learning from robots how to proceed. Some classes are actually being taught by robots.

Co-working spaces designed to accommodate new education and work habits are becoming more prevalent as the role of unstructured play is coming into sharp focus as a mechanism for learning.

“Imagine a global school that can be accessed with a click, in which anyone with internet access, anywhere, can offer a class on any subject imaginable and any students can take the class. One such platform is called Supercool School.” Also see “The illusion of disrupting vs. repairing the existing education market” by Bjoern Lasse Herrmann.

If you’re an educator, what’s your approach to technology in the classroom?

What is a modern classroom and what is the teacher’s role within it?

If you’re a student, we would love to hear from you.

Video: Heather Knight speaks at TEDxWomen about the future of robots.

Robots are becoming more ubiquitous in society. They fight wars, beat humans on game shows and even entertain us, as roboticist Heather Knight shows.

Can some subjects be better and more effectively taught by robots instead of human teachers?

“The most advanced models,” The New York Times reported in, “Students, Meet Your New Teacher, Mr. Robot,” by Benedict Carey and John Markoff, “are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them engaging enough to rival humans at some tasks.”

Researchers say that the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming “infinitely patient, highly informed instructors.” Such bots aren’t just squirreled away in research labs, however. They’ve already been deployed in actual classrooms in multiple countries, including South Korea, where hundreds of robotic teachers aides have been “hired.” Some robot teachers even have a human face.

In the same issue of The New York Times, there’s yet another article, “Exacting Teaching Machine Sticks to the Script in South Korea,” in which Choe Sang-Hun reports that in South Korea’s “obsessive drive” to teach English to its residents, the nation’s budget has been stretched by the import of so many English speaking educators. Robots, however, are less expensive.

Enter “Engkey,” a penguin-shaped robot who “stands for progress, achievement and national pride” but not “bad pronunciation.” In three to five years, according to Choi Mun-taek of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Center for Intelligent Robotics, Engkey will be mature enough to replace native speakers.

“People are starting to form relationships with robots,” Ayesha Khanna of the Hybrid Reality Institute told us, citing a Japanese hologram rock star as an example.

Video: Pesident and Chief Executive Officer of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNACOL) Susan Patrick describes why online distance learning is important.

“This is a new global era of needing to provide a world-class education for all students,” said Patrick, adding that forty percent of American high schools, particularly those afflicted by poverty, offer no advanced placement classes.

Virtual education, practiced now in 32 states, is the only way many students will have access to classes that can prepare them for college. Two million American students are currently enrolled in some form of virtual education program, and hundreds of thousands of them are receiving their entire education virtually, according to Patrick.

Dr. Joseph Morton, Alabama State Superintendent of Education, has overseen the advent of virtual education in the state. CNN featured that program as well, showing teacher Dene Carter broadcasting lessons into multiple classrooms at the same time (LINK). Morton says that rising test scores demonstrate the program’s power.

“Teacher training is a huge issue,” Patrick said. “Teachers with years of experience have to be retrained.” Mostly, she said, teachers have to learn how to use technology, approach collaboration as a mindset, and become familiar with “more authentic forms” of performance assessment.

Digital learning environments can be extremely simple or very complex. The real extent of virtual education, however, has only just begun to be explored and is only limited by imagination.

Interactive media means that students can explore and create environments that transcend physical limitations, including how any object or process works. Instead of reading about abstract visual concepts, even mathematical ones, students can experience them firsthand in a previously impossible way.

It is even possible to bring the living ghost of an entire lost civilization back to life in three dimensions. The Federation of American Scientists constructed a virtual version of ancient Mesopotamia, now present-day Iraq, where writing was invented.

Image source: A quest to virtual ancient Mesopotamia is included in this 2009 graphic novel by Rita J. King.

Virtual ancient Mesopotamia was recreated from authentic archeological data and objects collected from the region over time. The environment includes a candlelit archive room, the stone walls of which glow as they protect baskets of cuneiform tablets first created in the mid-4th millennium BC. In the physical world, surviving tablets cannot be handled. In a virtual environment, however, explorers can enlarge the tablets to see the actual texture of a stylus pressed into clay to capture the first written language. The oldest texts come from the temple dedicated to the goddess Inanna at Uruk, which has also been recreated in Virtual Ancient Mesopotamia to demonstrate the history of the cradle of civilization.

Entire Mesopotamian marketplaces have been reconstructed for learner interaction. Visitors can ask questions of ever-present digital docents scripted with extensive knowledge of the environment and its context. This content has been expertly created by builders working closely with subject matter experts including archaeologists and historians.

When such technology is used to foster education, the creativity that emerges can be staggering, turning students from passive consumers of technology to creators, thus preparing them to participate in the 21st century economy while educating them, even in areas of core competency.

The National Science Foundation recently supported a $3m project for disabled students to focus on the development of STEM skills.

An avatar can be as simple as the profile picture you post on Twitter to show the world your face, or it can be created in three dimensions in a virtual environment, fully customized from the skin and size to hair, eyes and clothes. In some virtual environments, participants have full control over the appearance of their avatars, right down to body shape, color and size, the shape and placement of facial features, hair style, clothing, posture, gestures and even whether or not they want to appear in the guise of a person, animal or inanimate object.

Like a chalkboard, an avatar is a blank slate. Unlike a chalkboard, an avatar can morph into anything and the student can actually embody the object for the ultimate learning experience.

Hundreds of colleges and top universities around the world have experimented with some form of virtual campus, holding lectures, symposia and small group breakout sessions. These digital environments sometimes resemble real life, with chairs, walls and ceilings, but occasionally they look like the ocean floor, including flora and fauna and some can even show the effects of climate change or coral reef death in compressed time.

A learning environment might look like a giant replica of a human heart which medical students can explore at a previously unattainable level of depth and scope, or it can look like a fuel cell, magnified a thousandfold to allow learners to witness scientific processes in action.

Educator Peggy Sheehy is a pioneer when it comes to the power of avatars and virtual environments for education. Not only did she spearhead the development of a major virtual campus project for middle school students, but she kept “a running account of the proposal, acquisition, development, and implementation of the virtual presence of Ramapo Central School District on the Teen Grid of Second Life.”

Like Metaplace, the Second Life Teen Grid was a fruitful environment for education. Also like Metaplace, the platform is now defunct. When it was thriving, Sheehy inspired over 1000 students and their teachers to participate in this bold initiative at Suffern Middle School in the Ramapo district in New York.

After receiving her Master’s Degree in Educational Technology from Stony Brook University, Sheehy became an advocate for the authentic use of technology in education. In 2003 she became Media Specialist at Suffern Middle School, “a fierce advocate for the meaningful infusion of technology in education.” In 2006 she established the first middle school educational presence in Teen Second Life: Ramapo Islands.

“Engagement, edutainment, and the authentic application of 21st Century collaborative tools in education is paramount to preparing our students for success,” Sheehy said.

On October 23, 2010, Jaron Lanier wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, “On the Threshold of the Avatar Era,” in which he describes an experiment with elementary school kids who got the chance to become the things they were studying.

“Some were turned into molecules,” Lanier wrote, “dancing and squirming to dock with other molecules. In this case the molecule serves the role of the piano, and instead of harmony puzzles, you are learning chemistry. Somatic cognition offers an overwhelming emotional appeal for education, because it leverages vanity. You become the thing you are studying. Your sensory motor loop is modified to incorporate the logic of a science, and you develop body intuition about that logic.

No one knows how big a deal avatar-directed cognition will be. Will students routinely dance to learn chemistry in the future? Quite possibly. A student might also become a triangle to learn trigonometry, or a strand of DNA to learn about biology. Will professional nanotechnology engineers become molecular structures in order to refine them? Once again, it seems quite possible.”

Not only is it possible–it’s happening already, and there’s no going back. Some platforms offer the capability to create avatars from scratch, giving students and educators the opportunity to explore identity and community. Other environments offer innocuous small avatars that create a uniform effect, creating focus on the subject at hand. The permutations are endless, limited only by imagination. This recent interview of Microsoft by the BBC shows that the concept of avatars is becoming mainstream.

Image of the virtual Anne Frank house being constructed by New York educator Andrew Wheelock.

In addition to connecting remote students to a single learning experience and creating richly textured environments for exploring complex subject matter, many educators have started looking at virtual environments as a way to shed light on unthinkably dark periods of humanity.

A virtual version of Anne Frank’s experience is being designed by Andrew Wheelock, a technology coordinator in the Jamestown, New York school district, because he believes that students are more likely to engage with the learning experience in this format. In Second Life, Wheelock’s avatar is named Spiff Whitfield. He gives tours of various sims, or parcels of virtual land, to other educators, including “excitedtoteach,” who commented on a blog called Learning in Virtual Worlds about an educational experience with Whitfield:

“Spiff showed us…that SL is better suited for helping educators work together to enrich their lessons and knowledge about their content area. Spiff listed a variety of locations that he has attended with other educators…and talked about the rich conversations he has had with other teachers.”

To see what Whitfield was talking about, the participants spent time in Virtual Harlem.

“It is a neat place. It gives you a visual of what Harlem looked like in the 20′s, with its famous theaters and rich artistic culture. There were images and notecards about famous African-American artists who transformed how artists of their color were received by popular culture.”

As “excitedtoteach” sat there watching the show, an unusual experience unfolded.

“I remembered that I read a book my freshman year of college entitled When Harlem Was in Vogue. I had completely forgotten about this book until I was sitting there in Virtual Harlem, but suddenly I had a memory of all this information…Experiencing something can jog a memory, which can lead to more depth in a conversation. Teachers who know a little about Harlem in the 20′s could meet in Virtual Harlem, exchange information and because they are connecting the information to their “surroundings” then they may just get more from the conversation.”

A virtual Guantanamo Bay was designed by researchers at the University of Southern California, Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil. Participants are submersed in darkness when a hood is thrown over their heads en route to imprisonment in a tiny cage. Once within the prison environment, participants can learn the stories of actual people who have been held at the real Gitmo.

While virtual experiences are simulated, they are interpreted by the brain as three-dimensional, real experiences. Participants react physically and emotionally. This is why virtual environments are being increasingly used for treating post-traumatic stress disorder for combat veterans and make excellent work and social spaces, including for people with various physical disabilities that inhibit ease of movement in the physical world.