Terrence Linden has posted on the SL Blog a carefully worked out solution to the issues raised by the Teen Grid and its closing. Responding to the needs of the middle school and high school educators’ community, a solution has been developed which resolves the issues from both LL’s side and the education community’s side. The blog with the solution is posted here:
This new policy will allow educators to construct schools and appropriate environments for 13 to 15 year old students and to use SL’s existing mechanisms to restrict these students to the estate on which the school is placed and create school-based accounts for their use. Restrict to Estate is a well developed tool for providing access restrictions in SL for corporate and organizational accounts, and its expansion to the teen-area of the grid makes perfect sense. This solution preserves the intention of teen education in SL while eliminating the need for LL to maintain an entirely separate grid and yet continues to allow access to this important community of educators and students.
It means as well that educators can now take advantage of the entire content creation community to build their schools, and that they can freely invite guest speakers and presenters to their sites and conduct their own process of approval for such speakers. Students from all over the world will be able to share experiences as they do now, on other social media channels, while exploring how their educations are enriched by SL teaching and the 3D VR environment.
Given that the US department of Education has published a meta-analysis of VR education and has come to the conclusion that virtual education settings work and work better than many more conventional settings, this decision by LL is a very important one. (The US Department of Education study can be found here:
http://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
What do you think? Let’s talk about how all of us can contribute to the enrichment of the educational experience using SL at its best.