NMC CONFERENCE CENTER -  Media Grid will be holding the “Boston Digital Media Summit: Enabling the Age of Immersive Education” January 12-13 at the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, Boston, MA. Attendance is expected to range between 150-200 people. A pre-summit event was held today at the NMC Campus in Second Life with 54 residents in attendance.

A three to five year plan was proposed for the creation of an education grid: a dedicated, not-for-profit grid of computers for educational content, worlds, and learning games that can be used in a classroom. All information would be marked with metadata so educators could build their own virtual experiences from a large distributed database of content. Pre-constructed virtual learning environments will also be available for quick classroom implementation.

“The basic notion of the education grid is sort of open courseware for virtual worlds,” Aaron Walsh said, speaker at the pre-summit presentation today. Walsh is director of the Media Grid and the Immersive Education Initiative.

Immersive education encourages use of virtual worlds, video games and interactive digital media as a key component of learning environments.

The Media Summit will have a major announcement concerning SL. “Officially, Second Life, Wonderland (from Sun Microsystems) and Croquet (from Duke) are immersive education platforms. We can plug them into the Education Grid.”

Walsh said that all three education platforms meet requirements of open source code with the ability to modify the environment with no license fees. Each of the platforms could be enhanced rather than built from scratch.

The goal of the Education Grid is to offer a uniform and consistent immersive education experience from platform to platform. A standard set of interfaces and a standard set of modalities would be developed that would bridge the gap between platforms and allow learning environments to be familiar from space to space. It is planned to be platform and vendor neutral with open standards, open access, and free for education and non-profit use.

“The future is not a single platform,” Walsh said. “Multiple platforms can provide similar experiences, consistent from platform to platform.” Walsh illustrated by stating that if a student was in SL, there is no reason for them to come out of SL to go into another environment to experience immersive education, but should be able to do it within the platform of choice.

For the future, immersive education will include the ability for students to work collaboratively using different software applications without leaving their virtual world or even their desktop. In addition, high resolution graphics will need to be incorporated into these environments to enhance the learning desirability.

Work will begin at the Media Summit to create requirements for the Education Grid.

The Media Grid is an open standards group focused on promoting standards for digital media usage on the Internet.

Visit http://immersiveeducation.org/ for information about the Immersive Education Initiative. This site has links to participate in the definition of standards for the Education Grid.

Information and a schedule for the Media Summit can be found at http://mediagrid.org/summit/