Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

NMC continues to pioneer educational uses of Second Life. Read the announcement for full info! Here's the hilights:

• The NMC Virtual Learning Prize. The NMC Virtual Worlds team will be soliciting ideas for the development of immersive content from educators around the globe. Twenty ideas will be selected in 2008 for development. Each Virtual Learning prize recipient will receive $5,000 US in cash incentives and virtual services that can be devoted to realizing the idea in Second Life. Recipients will have their idea funded with $4,500 US in premium development services from NMC and receive an honorarium of $500 US in cash. The copyright for prize winning ideas will of course remain with the inventor, but the products created as part of this program will go into open source and be distributed royalty free to the educational community. This program will be launched in March, 2008.
• The Educational Resource Repository. The NMC is devoting an entire sim for an educational resources repository that will be located on Learning, an island within the NMC Campus. To seed the content of this repository, and to encourage other developers to support education in Second Life, the NMC will release virtually all the content it produced in 2007 into open source — buildings, meeting facilities, educational tools, avatars, clothing, equipment, scripts, and much more. The amount of material that the NMC has licensed to release in this way numbers in the thousands of objects, and the NMC is committed to adding to it throughout the year. The repository, in which everything from shoes to amphitheaters will be available for a single Linden dollar (simply to enable tracking via counts), will also include resources donated by other developers. The first of these is Stephane Zugzwang’s renowned Virtual Reality Room, which is already available. The NMC’s Educational Resources Repository will open February 1, 2008
• Development of New Forms of Architecture. Among the interests of the NMC Virtual Worlds team for 2008 is to explore new concepts of architecture that may be especially suited for virtual spaces. The first of these, created by real-life architect and NMC Virtual Worlds developer CJ Holden, is an extremely flexible modular structure that works with the SL building grid to allow the construction of simple or complex structures organically in literally minutes.
• Live mentoring for new entrants into Second Life. High on the list of planned enhancements for the NMC’s Orientation Island experience is the implementation of a mentoring program. There is strong support for this in the Second Life educational community, and a presence-aware mentor notification system has already been piloted. The mentor community is expected to launch sometime in the next 30 days.

 The open source project is VERY exciting. Building interactive things in SL is a huge barrier to innovative uses of the space. Having all of NMC's expertise at our fingertips will be a big blessing! Way to go, NMC!