by the Grace of God, the Six Learnings framework for curricular design in fictive worlds and virtual environments (to give it its full name :-P ) has come a long way since i first shared it at the fourth Second Life Community Convention back in July 2008.
once its basic robustness was proven, one of my main challenges has been how to help teachers, school leaders, curriculum designers and educators in general, have at least a passing familiarity with it. to this end, i have over the years represented the framework as the standard PowerPoint slides, as a poster, as a physical manipulable artifact, and - most recently - as a brochure.
one dimension i have long neglected, though, has been (ironically) some kind of in-world presence or representation of the framework. for about a year now i have been toying with how best to do this - be it through a traditional (intelligible) office-space, or something more experiential.
in the end, i have gone with the latter, in pursuit of authenticity and in the hope of minimising any mediatory proxies; the new Raymaker Field Studies Centre at Bowness Island (which is still under heavy construction) has given me the perfect venue to establish the in-world home of the Six Learnings framework in as perfectly sympathetic a context as i can.
the Field Studies Centre at Bowness Island offers the visitor a diversity of interactive learning installations, and i've chosen to leverage several of these to help Second Life residents have a first-hand opportunity at experiencing the various affordances for learning that Second Life - as an exemplar for fictive worlds and virtual environments - offers.
the main monorail station at Bowness Island
