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Avatar Action Education Network

Avatar Action Education Network

The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

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.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

People will interact with this project initially by viewing the podcasts we release, but they will also be invited to participate in coversations about the materials on the AAC web site, which is built in a wiki and therefore encourages sharing and collaboration.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

The Avatar Action Center has been an active educational project since late 2006 producing interactive materials in a virtual world to raise awareness about global sustainability issues in the real world and encourage people to take action.

Those who were involved in last year's Netsquared competetion may remember our project entry at that time. Since then we have: held several large events combining live music performances with educational presentations on a broad range of sustainability topics; partnered with real-world organizations, including the Sustainable Living Roadshow, to bring more dynamic content into our space; created an educational delivery system to award a Certificate of Sustainability Awareness to those who complete a program which runs them through a series of different sustainability topics, and; became the first project started in Second Life to gain official nonprofit status in the US as a fiscally sponsored project of the Tides Center.

http://www.avataraction.org/twiki/tiki-blogs_rss.php

Cause Area:
Cause Area Tags:
- sustainability
Previous Prize Tags:
- n2y3mashupchallenge
Project URL:
http://www.avataraction.org
Supporting Organization:
Tides Center
Supporting Organization URL:
http://www.tidescenter.org
Financial support?:
No
City:
San Rafael
State/Region:
CA
Country:
USA

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

We could use help 1) integrating podcast support and video components neatly into our web site with the capability to collect comments from viewers, and 2) creating an XML-based web service from our php/mySQL-based Education Station back end so we can offer it as an interactive education service on others' web sites.

Mashup Data Sources

Our tools are young and not all quite ready for prime time, but we do have a development area set up where we will be moving our work to shortly: http://sloodle.avataraction.org. This page also has a link to our Moodle area, where we have recently started working with SLoodle (http://www.sloodle.org) to further enhance our delivery tools.