Collaborative Prototyping of Learning Innovations across Loosely Coupled Educational Communities

Immersive virtual reality (IVR) offers a way to create situated places wherein resources and communications services can be provided for a range of distributed and emergent collaborations between government agencies, universities, industry, and federal laboratories in support of innovation. This paper describes a collaborative design-build (CDB) ecosystem employed by a consortium (comprising the United States Air Force, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and several universities) to explore, examine, and implement learning innovations enabled by new media technology. The consortium, named the Global Learning Forum (GLF), is a social network collaborative operating within the IVR of Second Life. Learning innovation prototypes derived from the use of a CDB ecosystem by the GLF are offered as exploratory examples.