Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education (VWBPE) will be holding their 7th annual conference in Second Life and OSGrid between April 9th – 12th this year and the keynote and featured speakers have been pencilled in. Some of them should be extremely familiar, especially High Fidelity CEO Philip Rosedale.
Another familiar name for some of you, especially those in OpenSim circles, is Maria Korolov of Hybergrid Business.
Then of course there’s new Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, who is a late addition to the schedule, so late that he wasn’t in the email I received about the conference!
The full schedule for the conference will be released soon, but here are the known keynote and featured speakers :
Opening Keynote: Closing the Gap: Virtual Reality & Education
Presenter: Philip Rosedale, CEO High Fidelity
Date/Time: Wednesday April 9th, at 1:00pm PDT
Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium
Featured Keynote: Connections in an Open Place
Presenter: Justin Clark-Casey, President OpenSimulator umbrella Overte Foundation
Date/Time: Thursday April 10th, at 7:00am PDT
Location: OSGrid – VWBPE Gateway
Featured Keynote: The Coming 3D Future Shock
Presenter: Maria Korolov, Editor in Chief – Hypergrid Business
Date/Time: Thursday April 10th, at 10:05am PDT
Location: OSGrid – VWBPE Gateway
Featured Keynote: Using Virtual Worlds and Gamification to Enhance Learning
Presenter: Andrew Hughes, CEO Designing Digitally
Date/Time: Friday April 11th, at 7:00am PDT
Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium
Featured Keynote: TBA
Presenter: Ebbe Altberg, CEO Linden Lab
Date/Time: Friday April 11th, at 1:00pm PDT
Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium
Featured Keynote: Design Implications of Game-Based Analyses
Presenter: David Gibson, Associate Professor at Curtin University in Perth, Australia
Date/Time: Saturday April 12th, at 7:00am PDT
Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium
Featured Keynote: “There’s always room for a virtual zipline”, and other lessons from SciEthics Interactive
Presenter: Dr. Larysa Nadolny, Assistant Professor, Iowa State University
Date/Time: Saturday April 12th, at 1:00pm PDT
Location: Second Life – VWBPE Central Auditorium
The event is free to attend, but of course if you’re attending the event in Second Life or OSGrid you will need an account for those virtual worlds.
An overview of the conference is available here : http://vwbpe.org/conference/conference-overview
Now here’s a little bit of blurb from the organisers of the event :
Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education is a global grass-roots community event which focuses on education in immersive virtual environments. This open conference is organized by educators, for educators, to provide an opportunity to showcase the learning that takes place in this community of practice.
This year, the conference is being held April 9-12th, using two immersive environments: Second Life and OSGrid. As always, the conference is FREE for everyone to participate.
The main conference will be followed up by a 3-week Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) which will highlight examples of educational design from a myriad of other immersive environments. Past presentations have included environments such as Club Penguin, Eve Online, World of Warcraft, Spot on 3D, inWorldz, Sococo, and a host of other virtual platforms.
Over 2000 innovative educators from around the world will be sharing their achievements and challenges that they face in enhanced learning technology as well as their vision of future collaborative learning in virtual worlds and games.
This year’s theme is Connections.
Interesting looking stuff and it’s good to see that educators still see the value of using virtual worlds. I’ll bring you more news as I get updated, and of course, if I remember to blog about it!