Here is the slide presentation from a keynote presentation about "Using Virtual Worlds to Aggregate Learning Environments" that I delivered along with Barry Joseph of Global Kids, Audrey Aronowsky of the Field Museum of Chicago and Amana Kazkasi, a Global Kids teen leader. The occasion was a really neat conference called "Digital Is..." sponsored by the National Writing Project, a nation-wide network of thousands of K-12 teachers concerned with literacy and writing.
Basically, Barry, Audrey, Amana and I spent about 40 minutes describing the "I Dig Science" program, an initiative to expose young people to science and culture in new ways through the virtual world of Teen Second Life. In it's first two years, groups of young people in New York City and Chicago have had the opportunity to go on short "virtual fossil digs" to Tanzania and Zambia from within Second Life. Role playing as fossil hunters, they connected on a daily basis with a real life team of paleontologists in the field, who send back videos and photos and called them every day from satellites phones into Second Life.
For our keynote, we focused on how "I Dig Science" aggregates a number of different learning environments -- from virtual worlds, online social media, and real world experiences -- in order to engage our young people with the subject matter in new and compelling ways.
The slides are admittedly a bit hard to follow without hearing us speak as the slides flow by. We'll prepare a complete video combining the slides, video from our presentations, and synced audio as soon as we can. But hopefully this will give you some gist of what we talked about.
We had a lot of fun creating this presentation using the online tool Prezi, which allows anyone to combine text, photos and videos onto a nearly limitless two-dimensional canvas -- and then present it to other people as a fun, spinny slideshow. Enjoy!
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