news: Immersive Education Initiative Celebrates 1st Birthday in the Virtual World, Expands in the Real World

Hello everyone, below is a text version of today's announcement; please do join
us this evening to celebrate. If you'd like to see this announcement in Web page
form (with images and detail links for each bullet, which aren't in the text
version below) you can visit the Immersive Education news area where you'll find
other news items as well:

  http://ImmersiveEducation.org/#NEWS

And you can also visit http://ImmersiveEducation.org/events/ for details on
tonight's party. Best regards, Aaron

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Immersive Education Initiative Celebrates 1st Birthday
in the Virtual World, Expands in the Real World
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BOSTON, MA - June 04, 2008 -  The Immersive Education Initiative, in celebration
of its first anniversary and a number of recent accomplishments, will throw a
virtual 1st birthday party tonight for its members and the public
(http://ImmersiveEducation.org/events/).

The Immersive Education Initiative is a non-profit international collaboration
of universities, colleges, research institutes, consortia and companies that are
working together to define and develop open standards, best practices,
platforms, and communities of support for virtual worlds and game-based learning
and training systems. Immersive Education was conceived in 2005 as an
application of the Media Grid. The corresponding initiative was officially
launched one year ago today, with an open call to educators, students, and
professionals who had experience using virtual learning environments or video
game technologies. In the year since the initiative was started it has grown to
more than 200 members from around the world.

The initiative is focused on promoting and advancing Immersive Education, which
combines interactive 3D graphics, commercial game and simulation technology,
virtual reality, voice chat, Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with
collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education
gives participants a sense of "being there" even when attending a class or
training session in person is not possible, practical, or desirable, which in
turn provides educators and students with the ability to connect and communicate
in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience.

Milestones in the past year include:

* Immersive Education Initiative received $1.2 Million STEM donation from the
John C. Ford Program. The donation consists of 67 STEM (science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) programs and associated learning materials and
technologies that will be integrated into the next generation of Immersive
Education learning environments.

* Immersive Education Initiative announced the Education Grid and Platform
Ecosystem during the 2008 Boston Digital Media Summit. Based upon open source
technologies and open standards, the Education Grid and Platform Ecosystem will
provide educators with a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new
generation of virtual world learning environments, interactive learning games,
and simulations.

* Immersive Education was the focus of the 2008 Boston Digital Media Summit
during which educators, researchers, administrators and students from Boston
College, Boston Public Schools, Amherst College, Federation of American
Scientists, MIT Media Lab, Harvard University, Duke University, United States
Department of Education, New Media Consortium (NMC), Johnson & Wales University,
NASA, Sun Microsystems, Synthespian Studios, and Computerworld gave a series of
presentations, panel discussions and workshops related to Immersive Education.

* "Immersive Education Day at [YOUR SCHOOL HERE]" program was launched, starting
with Immersive Education Day at Harvard University. In the year ahead the
program will expand internationally, beginning with Immersive Education Day at
Fundación Universitaria Sanitas (Bogota, Columbia), with more events planned for
Latin America, Europe, Asia and other locations around the world.

* Immersive Education co-Chair Dr. John Carfora received the Distinguished
Service Award from the National Council of University Research Administrators
(NCURA) for his "sustained and distinctive contributions to the organization."

* Immersive Education and Media Grid receive national recognition as
"...innovative, promising technologies which hold the potential to significantly
affect society in the near future" when Computerworld named Media Grid and
Immersive Education director Aaron E. Walsh to its list of "40 Innovative IT
People to Watch, Under the Age of 40."

* Media Grid launched the Immersive Education Initiative with an open call to
educators, students, and professionals who have experience using virtual
learning environments or video game technologies.


The Year Ahead: Milestones on the Roadmap

Following on the success of the previous year, the initiative’s roadmap for the
year ahead is focused on: 1) developing next-generation Immersive Education
platforms, 2) developing next-generation Immersive Education learning content
and environments, 3) launching the Education Grid worldwide, and 4) supporting
its growing community of end users, content builders, software developers and
systems administrators.

Significant milestones for the year ahead include:

* Education Grid access. Starting this month members of the Immersive Education
Initiative will have early access to the Education Grid. Initiative members can
conduct classes and meetings on privately hosted Education Grid servers for
Second Life and Wonderland. Initiative members will be able to build their own
Second Life and Wonderland virtual learning environments that may be hosted by
the initiative, by the member’s own school, or at multiple locations for
fail-safe redundancy. Members will also receive early access to content delivery
services and Cobalt/Croquet world storage (persistence) services.

* K-12 program launch. This fall Immersive Education will become available for
K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) with the launch of the initiative's K-12
program. This summer the initiative is conducting K-12 program pilot trials with
K-12 schools in the United States, the results of which will inform the official
K-12 program launch in the fall.

* "Teach the Teacher" Training Courses. This summer the initiative will launch
its "Teach the Teacher" training courses that prepare educators to teach,
assess, and grade students using virtual world, simulator and game-based
learning technology.

* New Technology Working Groups (TWGs). Technology Working Groups develop,
deliver and maintain technological materials such as technical reports, design
documents, specifications, software implementations, conformance test suites,
best practices, and formal reviews of deliverables produced by other groups. In
the year ahead the initiative will launch the following Technology Working Groups:

  - Open File Formats TWG
  - Open Protocols TWG
  - Open Worlds TWG
  - Content Tagging, Rating and Review TWG
  - Assessment, Evaluation and Grading TWG
  - Metrics TWG
  - Metadata and Taxonomy TWG
  - Foreign Language TWG
  - Artificial Intelligence TWG
  - Education Grid TWG

* New Community Groups (CGs). Community Groups enable informal discussions and
collaborations among members who have similar interests. In the coming year the
initiative will launch the following Community Groups:

  - Immersive Education Day at [YOUR SCHOOL HERE] CG
  - K-12 and Higher Education CGs
  - Second Life user, builder, developer and administrator CGs
  - Wonderland user, builder developer, and administrator CGs
  - Cobalt/Croquet user, builder, developer and administrator CGs
  - World of Warcraft (WOW) research and educators CGs



About Immersive Education
Immersive Education (http://ImmersiveEducation.org) combines interactive 3D
graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality, voice chat
(Voice over IP/VoIP), Web cameras (webcams) and rich digital media with
collaborative online course environments and classrooms. Immersive Education
gives participants a sense of "being there" even when attending a class or
training session in person isn't possible, practical, or desirable, which in
turn provides educators and students with the ability to connect and communicate
in a way that greatly enhances the learning experience. Unlike traditional
computer-based learning systems, Immersive Education is designed to immerse and
engage students in the same way that today's best video games grab and keep the
attention of players. Immersive Education supports self-directed learning as
well as collaborative group-based learning environments that can be delivered
over the Internet or using fixed-media such as CD-ROM and DVD. Shorter
mini-games and interactive lessons can be injected into larger bodies of course
material to further heighten and enrich the Immersive Education experience.

About the Media Grid
The Media Grid is a public utility for digital media. Based on new and emerging
distributed computational grid technologies, the Media Grid builds upon existing
Internet and Web standards to create a unique network optimized for digital
media delivery, storage, and processing. As an on-demand public computing
utility, a range of software programs and Web sites can use the Media Grid for
delivery and storage of rich media content, media processing, and computing
power. The Media Grid is an open and extensible platform that enables a wide
range of applications not possible with the traditional Internet alone,
including: Massive Media on Demand (MMoD); Interactive digital cinema on demand;
Immersive Education and distance learning; Truly immersive multiplayer games and
Virtual Reality (VR); Hollywood movie and film rendering, special effects, and
composition; Real-time rendering of high resolution graphics; Real-time
visualization of complex weather patterns; Real-time protein modeling and drug
design; Telepresence, telemedicine, and telesurgery; Vehicle and aircraft design
and simulation; Visualization of scientific and medical data.

The Grid Institute leads the design and development of the global Media Grid
through the http://MediaGrid.org open standards organization in collaboration
with industry, academia, and governments from around the world.
--
Media Grid: http://MediaGrid.org
Immersive Education: http://ImmersiveEducation.org
Personal page: http://gridinstitute.com/people/aew/