Next Practice in Resourcing Personalisation - Schome-NAGTY

Teen Second Life Pilot

NAGTY are collaborating with The Open University, The Universities of Warwick and Liverpool and the National Physical Laboratory, in exploring whether Teen Second Life will afford the development of networked learning communities. Teen Second Life is a virtual reality world that provides almost totally open-ended opportunities for avatars (virtual representations of real world participants) to interact with each other and with the virtual world. The Schome community, based at the Open University, has invested in an island, Schome Park in the Teen Grid (which is for students aged 13 to 17). 200 members of the NAGTY community on Schome Park are involved in the pilot project. 75 of these children come from disadvantaged and under-represented Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. They will be supported by experts from The Universities of Warwick and Liverpool and the National Physical Laboratory, working in three groups. These are Ethics and Philosophy, Archaeology and Physics.

The aims of the pilot are to
• explore the potential and limitations of second life both from technical and educational perspectives
• investigate young people's engagement within Second Life in relation to their engagement with the existing NAGTY online community tools
• investigate the learning that takes place within Second Life.

Overall, the pilot will enable students to co-develop and co-design Schome, a new form of education system which will meet needs of society and individuals in the 21st century.

See a map showing the locations of all the Next Practice in Resourcing Personalisation field trial sites. 

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