Virtual Worlds - Best Practices in Education talk
http://conf.vwbpe.org/index.php/VWBPE/11/paper/view/140

José Dominguez

In the winter of 2011 I decided to organise a course through the Peer to Peer University(P2PU). The topic chosen was the development and extensibility of the virtual worlds toolkit Open Wonderland. Following the ideas of peer to peer learning, the course is targeted to... [read more]

Virtual Worlds - Best Practices in Education talk
http://conf.vwbpe.org/index.php/VWBPE/11/paper/view/140

José Dominguez

In the winter of 2011 I decided to organise a course through the Peer to Peer University(P2PU). The topic chosen was the development and extensibility of the virtual worlds toolkit Open Wonderland. Following the ideas of peer to peer learning, the course is targeted to software developers with a minimum of 2 years experience in the Java language.

The experience is a mix of distance learning, peer to peer collaboration and evaluation, synchronous communication through virtual world meetings, and asynchronous communication through the P2PU online learning management system.

The openness of both the P2PU model and the open source roots of Open Wonderland make the course possible. The syllabus is open to participants and it is based entirely on openly available resources. Drawing from out-of-school learning and an anthropological view of theories of situativity (communities of practice), the course is intended to facilitate the transition from peripheral participants in the community to more actively engaged members, by forming study groups that mix newcomers and longer time members.

The proposed VWBPE session would provide an overview on how the peer to peer principles and open source software were used to foster participation in the community of Open Wonderland developers.

The openness of all resources used would make possible to reproduce this environment in any institutional setting, although the peer to peer evaluation assessment technique used in the course might not be considered a viable option in some institutions.

P2PU Open Wonderland course: http://p2pu.org/general/open-wonderland-development-java

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