Abstract:

There is an urgent need to transform our educational ecosystems and address the rapid transformations occurring in our world, especially the crisis confronting our survival. Are these needs linked and can we address them together? Educators around the globe are discovering and embracing virtual worlds, such as Second Life, for immersing their students and reinvigorating their pedagogy with 21st Century Literacy’s and Learning Skills--But how do we make our classrooms immersive? What will it look like to shift our pedagogy from one based on teaching and specialties to one based on student centered learning-- pluralistic, hyper-individual, eclectic, diverse, and emergent? ICT4 Emergence and the International Telecenter movement offers an opportunity to leverage this transformation.
I’d like to suggest a scenario for transforming our classrooms and learning institutions. We can achieve this by creating a learning community that blends the engaging and transformative power of virtual worlds, with immersion in practical hands-on experiential learning for sustainability and prosperity. Participating in a massively multiple on-line virtual world such as Second Life, or creating your own community specific virtual world through the open source community of Open Sim--educators are provided with an evolutionary step unparalleled in media ecology. Using social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and nings--free, open source platforms--global interaction and collaboration tools are available to every classroom, spurring innovation and emergence.
What I am suggesting is moving into a blended learning methodology that leverages the emergent technological platforms of the immersive internet--virtual worlds, web 2.0 and serious gaming--while addressing the urgent needs facing us as humans and as educators. Estimates are that world wide we will need to build a major university every day for the next 3 decades to accommodate the growing population and learning needs of our young. In that time span much, if not all, of the polar ice will have melted. Virtual worlds offer a 24/7/365 synchronous and asynchronous model of learning without the need for bricks and mortar. As for the bricks and mortar, these energy consumptive, water wasting, and unsustainable facilities offer the ideal laboratory to transform our learning applications into concrete, practical and life giving learning communities.
How then, do we transform our schools? Consider that the community is the curriculum: the whole systems which sustain the local biome-- food, water, waste, energy, culture, government, the environment, the economy--are the topics we address, investigate and may redesign for a sustainable future. Apply systems thinking and ecological, synergistic practices to our curriculum. This is the vision of a design science formulated by Buckminster Fuller that sees nurturing our innate creative and design prowess as the answer to solving our dilemmas. By applying these techniques to the systems which sustain life, students are empowered with the tools and opportunities to transform their communities. In the process they develop the 21st Century Literacy’s so essential to their success and offer solutions to our most pressing global challenges.