The Avatar Action Center, a project of the Tides Center, has been producing interactive educational events and materials in Second Life (SL) for more than a year. We are now expanding our ability to fulfill our mission of raising awareness of sustainability issues and getting people to take action in their real lives outside the virtual world with the launch of the Avatar Action Education Network (AAEN).

While our exhibits, events, and classes have been effective in broadening people's understanding of issues including alternative energy, climate change, peak oil, economic globalization, and others, we want bring more activists and subject-matter-experts into the conversation who are not necessarily part of the SL community.

The AAEN will offer the world a creative and engaging mixture of educational and news content in two ways. The first is a weekly podcast "filmed" on a set inside SL. The content of these podcasts will be composed of reports on both SL-based groups whose work addresses sustainability issues and real world sustainability news. They will appeal to viewers ranging from young adults through middle-agers who will find the content informative and the delivery technique innovative. Broadcasts will be delivered in a news-reporting format with video annotations, and will include interviews with people working in the sustainable living arena to keep it timely and engaging. They will be made available on our web site, iTunes, and YouTube to reach the broadest possible audience and break out of the virtual space.

The second part of AAEN is our Education Station system, a web-based course management system we created to centralize our content on the web and be able to serve it anywhere in SL. Having this content be browser-based will provide visitors to our web site the chance to use our materials without going into SL. We also recently started mashing it up with Moodle, an open-source course management system that a group of people are adapting for use in Second Life as “Sloodle.”

The Education Stations run people through a program of courses that expose them to the broad spectrum of issues that sustainability encompasses. Once a person completes a designated number of courses by passing quizzes based on the presented materials, she will earn a Certificate of Sustainability Awareness.

Both of these components will debut at our second annual Earth Day event on April 19th in Second Life.