Sun Microsystem’s Project Wonderland and The Immersive Education Grid

The Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative led by Aaron Walsh from the Boston University has been on the cutting edge of virtual environments experiments for a learning purpose. They hold constant meetings in Second Life, have been experimenting with different virtual worlds and not was Wonderland’ turn for a more “official” educational event run by the Immersive Education participants. 

I’m pasting some of the thoughts fellow bloggers have had on their posts about the event:

 

 

First Educational Gathering in Wonderland

By timwang

(…) over 60 avatars gathered on the Sun’s island in Secondlife, cuing up to get a “ticket” for the first experimentation of the Wonderland Project by Sun’s Microsystems. The event was organized by the MediaGrid which is a computational grid platform that promotes 3D virtual learning environment. (…)”

On Tim Wang’s eLearning Blog 

 

Wonderland Works!

By Katherine W. Prawl:

“Friday was a red-letter day. I attended an event in Second Life for an education group, hosted by Sun Microsystems, which was intended to introduce the group members toProject Wonderland. Especially exciting was the fact that Sun and its partners (which include NMC) are exploring the possibility of allowing avatars to navigate from theEducation Grid running on Wonderland servers.”

On the NewMedia On the Go blog

 

Sun’s Wonderland & Education Grid Demo

by Chris Collins

“Today the Media Grid Immersive Education Initiative launched the Education Grid onSun’s Wonderland platform.

Aaron Walsh from Media Grid launched the initiative from within Second Life and the island quickly filled up with many more avatars waiting to get in to join the demonstration.”

Fleep’s Deep Thoughts blog

 

Sun Microsystem’s Project Wonderland’s Security Levels

In this blog post Nicole invites Timothy Wright, a Ph.D. candidate from University of Notre Dame, to write a post about his research interest in Project Wonderland and Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) from a security and data storage perspective.

His research project has driven him to come up with different “privileges” and status for users which dictates what files, objects and places they can see and/or modify.

This brings much more relief for companies and academic institutions that plan on adopting Virtual Worlds for learning and collaboration but are worried about data security.

Like Wright says, the advantage of Wonderland over other Virtual Worlds is the fact that it is in its early stages and already considering these issues, which means that these types of functionality will be built in the program and not “around it” once it is already built, which is the case with most Virtual Worlds out there (if they even consider such issues at all.

Nice read.

VirtuED - Using Wonderland to Promote Learning

This is a great project and here is a post on their efforts to establish Wonderland as a learning tool.

Keep up the good work guys!

Immersive Education - Education Grid Initiative

An interview with Aaron Walsh, professor of virtual environments and games for learning at Boston University: