After much discussion over the past four months we have made the decision to merge our Pacific Rim Exchange project with the Australian based Skoolaborate project. Our islands have been relocated to their new locations, our founders avatars have been moved over, and we are now at the stage of getting permission slips for our new students that will be participating in the project. We are very excited about this new partnership and the opportunities it will bring for both our students and teachers.

Kyoto Gakuen has been working with Skoolaborate in parallel with PacRimX for their junior high school students over the past year. These relationships lead to discussions of a possible merger between the projects. We gave a presentation on ISTE Island last March about the PacRimX project. A group of attendees stuck around after that talk discussing how we might pressure Linden Lab into starting an Education Grid. That is obviously not happening anytime soon, so we are taking the matter into our own hands. We believe that the Skoolaborate project is now the largest private global project on the Teen Grid of Second Life

Since our merger with Skoolaborate, another partner has joined up and they are awaiting their background checks. This other partner is the Global Challenge. They have approximately 2,000 students participating in their program. Their project seeks to engage international teams of students in solving global issues. They have a very interesting program and will bring a whole new dimension to the Skoolaborate project.

We are really excited about this new partnership. There are partner schools in many different time zones. This will give us so many more opportunities to have our students communicating and collaborating with their peers from around the world. Having a private project on the Teen Grid of Second Life is like being a ship in a bottle adrift in a large ocean. We needed to find a way to expose our students to more cultures and to more diversity of opinion, and this partnership will do exactly that.

Westley Field, Director of Online Learning at MLC School Sydney, founded the Skoolaborate Project last year. He drafted this press release that we were going to use next week at the Virtual Worlds Expo. They had so many press release submissions that they could not print them all in the daily news publication. Since this will not be published there, we are finally making the official announcement of our partnership with the Skoolaborate project. We will continue to keep this PacRimX specific blog, in addition to the Skoolaborate blog.

Press release                

In 2007, MLC School launched a virtual world initiative called Skoolaborate. Recently both the Pacific Rim Exchange project and Global Challenge have partnered with Skoolaborate joining with 17 schools from across the Globe to make it the world’s largest ’school based’ virtual worlds project. Westley Field, Director of Skoolaborate, believes that it is the collaborative and philanthropic nature of the project that has struck a chord with schools.

Claudia Linden, Head of Education for Linden Labs described Skoolaborate as the “best model I have seen for international collaboration”.

Schools collaborate using a variety of online tools and environments to share experiences, thoughts and ideas from around global understanding, social and environmental education. Westley says “that with Skoolaborate we aim to create awareness and understanding that will lead to the improvement of education for all”.

Skoolaborate acts as a vehicle that promotes global awareness and understanding, through creating a visual world – in this case a school – that young people can enter as characters or avatars and then actually join online classes (wikis and LMS) and discussions (blogs). Most importantly it uses tools and environments that motivate and engage students in their learning. Immediately after the Skoolaborate launch, interest was sparked from other New Zealand, Singaporean, Taiwanese, United States and Australian schools. Recent interest has come from Chile, Portugal and the UK.

A cyber entrepreneur and teen second life builder, 18 year old Mike Mikula from Milwaukee Wisconsin, found the site and persuaded MLC School to engage his skills to build the virtual school on the site. Using the plans drawn up by award winning Sydney architects Lippmann Associates, for MLC School’s new junior high school being built in reality now, Mike and Ed Lippmann video chatted their way through the construction. Mike was recently featured in the Wall Street Journal in their “My Virtual Summer Job” article. Mike has since visited Australia, worked with Ed and has begun negotiating future plans.

Stan Trevena, co-founder of the Pacific Rim Exchange project says “This is the next logical step for PacRimX. Our student’s want to reach out to other students from around the globe and the Skoolaborate project is the single largest ’school based’ cultural exchange project in Second Life. We are proud to be part of the Skoolaborate global community and look forward to a long and rewarding partnership for our students and teachers.”

Schools interested in joining the Skoolaborate project can get more information here.

The Eye4You Alliance is having their second annual college fair on the Teen Grid of Second Life on October 12^th from 9:00am – 3:00pm SLT. Their first college fair was a huge success, and this one can only get better and reach more students. Follow the link to all of the details for this valuable event:

The Second Annual Second Life Teen Grid College Fair

All of our islands have been moved to their new locations. The junior high and high school students from Kyoto Gakuen are finally able to meet face-to-face. We are now part of a 13 island project that currently includes 17 schools from around the globe (and expanding). With schools in more time zones we will have many more opportunities for our students to interact with global citizens, even some during our school day hours. And a new partner to the project will be bringing a whole new avenue of exploration and global collaboration for our students.

Our official announcement will be made in the next week. Suffice it to say that everyone involved is very excited about the potential for the coming year. We’ve finally broken out of our little “ship in a bottle” (what we called our four island PacRimX project), and have arrived in a new world teeming with residents from around the globe. This is going to be big!

There’s a new post up at The Daedalus Project on kids and their use of MMO’s, and what their parents think are the risks and benefits:

Kids and MMO’s

The survey had 314 participants, parents who were gamers who had at least one child under the age of 18 playing online games.

The perceived risks were as you would expect; exposure to inappropriate language and themes (42%), online predators (32%) and spending too much time playing (25%) were the top three. The article lists out a large number of these risks from the survey. These numbers still support the use of private virtual worlds in formal school settings, as the top perceived risk factors can be mitigated and managed in a private setting (virtually eliminating predators and griefing).

The benefits listed were also interesting; working in a diverse group (53%), problem solving (25%), reading/writing/typing (23%), and social/communication skills (20%) were the top listed. These benefits are exactly what the current cultural virtual world projects seek to provide their students. PacRimX has always tried to foster communication, collaboration and cultural exchange with our participating students from America and Japan. We will continue to strive for this goal with our soon to be announced partnership.

The article closes out with some advice for parents that are letting their students play MMO’s. The best is to not only know what your kids are doing, but to get involved in what they are doing. Don’t just dip in and take a look at what they are doing, but have an ongoing involvement in what they are doing, and research all of the fan sites and outside resources they may be tapping into while playing the game.

The article goes into great depth on the results of the survey. Jump to the full article for a series of graphs summarizing the survey results, and interpretations of the survey results. This should be required reading for any parent thinking about letting their pre-teen or teen play MMO’s of any type, especially those that are free and open to the public (with no verification system).

Well, sometime in the last day the movers arrived. All that remains of our old PacRimX 2 x 2 land mass is the Kyoto Island. The other three have been moved to their new location. The student accounts (only the founders) have been moved and they are exploring our new home and meeting new friends.

For some reason my estate owner account has not moved yet. So we must be midway through the move. One of my kids is on the computer next to me and it appears that the islands that moved (including the forensics lab) are intact on the other side. As soon as we get settled in we will be announcing our new partnership. There will not be much in the way of blog posts in the interim. Keep an eye on this page for more news soon.

The PacRimX Project is in transition. We are in the middle of a major move and there has been very little time lately to post updates to the blog. I appologize for the absence, but in the end it will all be worth it. We’ve been cleaning up our islands and prepping them for the big move, one of the four islands has already shifted to its new home.

We are moving on to the next phase in the growth of the project. The timing worked out well, falling right after the conclusion of our first full year with students on the island and visiting America. As soon as we are settled in we will post a series of articles on when, why and where we moved, and how it will change PacRimX.

Well, I’ve got to get back to packing. See you in a few weeks.

Christopher Baker, Science Teacher at Hatboro-Horsham High School, has received a grant to fund a science island on the Teen Grid. Here’s the post that he made to the SLED Listserv today:

“A while back I wrote for and received a grant to fund a science island on the Teen Grid for our school district.  Well, the island has been delivered, my alt av loaded-up (thank you to all the generous and helpful folks on SLED and SLEDT) and was just transformed to the TG.  I am blogging about it every step of the way.  I just posted several picts and videos of the new, pristine island at http://hattersisland.blogspot.com/.”

I am very pleased to see that he will be blogging his experiences and contributing to the community of educators using Second Life. I’ve added his blog to the Blog Roll to the right.

Congrats Christopher, and welcome to the Teen Grid!

With the release of v1.20 of the client, Torley Linden has posted a great collection of tips for maximizing and speeding up the new client:

*20 Video QUICK TIPS* to ultracharge your Second Life

Here’s what he has to say about this collection of tips:

“YAYZERAMA! Back by popular demand, it could only be a matter of time before another round of QUICKTIPS arrived. This series is warmly treasured by Second Life Residents for delivering the goods — not counting intro/outro, each tip is 2 minutes or less, so even if you don’t have a lot of time, you can choose what you’re interested in and learn! From basic need-to-knows to strangely handy advanced features”

Check them out. Torley always puts out great video tutorials (ok, the best). You always learn something new when watching his stuff.

Linden Lab has been having some major milestone events of late, not the least being teleportation between virtual worlds. They have started a very useful page on their Wiki:

Linden Lab PR update

Let’s hope they keep some resources dedicated to keeping this current. It’s very helpful to find these listings to narrow the search when looking for these types of needles in the haystack that is the Internet. I’m adding this to our Blog Roll to the right for future reference.

We got a few more albums put together today. Here are some quick links to these new albums.