Curriculum development in immersive Virtual Worlds, Supporting a Renewal in Farming Thursday, May 27, 2010 See also www.educationWorlds.com/bridge.pdf Overview Core barriers Water based algae production Immersive Virtual World technology Conversion of existing shrimp and aqua cultural farming to decentralized coops Social networks and knowledge management tools Decentralized ecosystems The principle of stratification in nature Composition and stratification Demand pedagogy as a balance to current educational practice Motivation and private, individual, ownership within a virtual real world Return to an agricultural society based on individual ownership and responsiveness Market innovation support using virtual models of natural worlds Overview Immersive 3D Virtual Worlds have rapidly become available for modeling the physics and biochemistry involved in water based algae production. Virtual World technology is freely available. In fact, the technology is available in open source form. This technology is being used to focus social networks within which advanced knowledge may be exchanged. Knowledge management tools such as ontological modeling and building information modeling are being integrated with cell phone and computing based connectivity. Why focus on algae? Algae solids contain high volume of lipids, which may be converted in a refining process into hydrocarbons. Algae production will clean the water after a cycle of food production. Fish and shrimp production creates a large decentralized ecosystem with healthy and sustainable production of hydrocarbons from husbandry of algae. With the addition of new solar panels and pressure turbines, using air and water pressure, the new decentralized farming operations promise contributions to sound management of natural resources. We also envision a social revolution in which many thousands of individuals and families take ownership positions in a new economic system based on the decentralized farm embedded in a coop. These systems have advanced designs and thus require certified or degreed operators. Individuals enrolled in training may develop walk-through buildings or design machines and processes. A curriculum supports the exposition of principles central to the management of decentralized farming systems. The curriculum supporting these certifications and college degrees include applied mathematics, physics, hydrologics, principles of electric, bio-chemistry of hydrocarbons, finance and accounting, government, public speaking, and core liberal arts Core barriers Core barriers are addressed through curriculum development within a mix of virtual world environments, classroom activities and on site service learning. Our group’s first site is a four hundred acre abandoned shrimp farm on the Gulf Coast. We propose to develop this site, as well as other sites in Texas, as a means to train Texas youth for ownership or employment within this new economic system. The possibility of ownership is seen as a motivating factor. The barriers include poor preparation of our current population of high school students in mathematics, engineering and science. This barrier provides an opportunity. A significant innovation is available. A modification of the well-known Texas method for teaching of graduate mathematics has been developed as part of a comprehensive revision in learning theory. The modification is called “demand theory”, and depends on the student selecting what is to be learned next from a minimally described set of focus topics . The set of enumerated focus topics give a target for the learner, but the learner is given the freedom to select those topics of immediate interest. Guided self-directed discovery using focus topics creates the better of two worlds. Demand pedagogy with focus topics balances the supply of curriculum with a shift of responsibility for learning from the teacher to the students. Success leads to increasing positive self-efficiency. The use of web based modules allows each student to become highly self directed both in what is selected for study as well as how evidence is provided to professors that material has been mastered. Progress towards certifications and college degrees may move at the speed determined by the student. Contracts based on group cohorts are used to provide structure to the administration of degree and certification plans. Water based algae production The virtual model is to demonstrate the viability of a framing coop based social and economic system. A social and educational process connects together many hundreds, and then thousands, of separate and dedicated virtual models of algae and aquaculture systems. The prototype will create a model involving work force development and a platform for farming and other innovations. Some details may be supplied on the expected production of various commodities, such a biomass, from one small farm. The details will delineate the viability of a distribution system supplying all essential commodities to a system of farm coops, the installation of specific production plants such as ponds, shading materials, enclosure materials, pressure to current turbines. The distribution system would link farms within a larger marketplace having a refinery. A coop owned refinery would produce hydrocarbon-based products from the harvested biomass cultivated by the farms. The community is to be supported with educational and community services. E-governance methods will be developed. The educational services we propose to use would not be fixed top down impositions of educational curriculum, supplied by the system. Rather the educational services are seen as a form of e-governance service. The curriculum is defined in part by the ability of the individual to select what he or she wishes to learn about. This form of educational service is discussed at length in The Education Bridge. The development of algae based farming ecosystems meets the national need for alternative sources of liquid fuel. However, the evolution of social network based decentralized ownership over land and farm installations may provide a model for increasing self-governance. Self-governance is linked with education as a means to serve as a citizen. E-education provides a means through which the individual might select a career path. Immersive Virtual World technology For education to work differently than the current system there must be support for young individuals and families. The iVWs provide just the right type of resource for individuals to be more active in demonstrating individual potential. We propose the federal development of a virtual infrastructure where science education is coupled with the simulation of decentralized ownership over family farming. These farms are envisioned as each having algae ponds, and physical means supporting wind or heat pressure conversion to electric current. An understanding of how these farms might be managed is missing in our politics, in our scholarship, and in our curriculums. Curriculums are to be developed and learning methodology demonstrated. The use of the curriculum and pedagogy follows a paradigm in which learning objectives are stated in the form of a computer-based list of focus topics. The individual is allowed to develop evidence that the curriculum has been mastered, and in this way entitle the individual to certain rewards and benefits. Education is all to often today for jobs that may or may not be available, and may or may not be personally fulfilling. The Education Bridge identifies new areas of technological and science advancement. The Texas based project will use a new pedagogy and a curriculum supporting the decentralization of ownership over productive farm systems. Education could become what we all thought it would be, the process through which “I” as an individual comes to know the world “I” live in. The knowledge the individual needs is often about nature and society, so there is a liberal arts core to what is to be learned. The knowledge is sometimes about a machine; how it is designed, how it works, and what to do when it is broken. The iVWs may become a curriculum repository for school, college and universities to use. Conversion of existing shrimp and aqua cultural farming to decentralized coops A think tank in Austin Texas proposes to provide a bridge between situations involving urban juvenile delinquents and four identified rural locations where existing or partially existing aqua+algae culture farming systems exists. In Texas existing youth programs may start immediately using virtual world technology in certain independent implementations in iVWs. The costs are exceedingly low and the iVWs may be owned by the state and be monitored as if a boarding school. An underlying teaching system will be expanded exponentially as this system comes to represent the cultural life emerging in small farm communities and provide an expansive capacity available to anyone having the desire to dedicate professional life to decentralized farming. The same system will provide advanced training in any of the academic fields. As a result, the Bridge is both a path to employment as well as a means to provide life long learning to Texas citizens. Monitored public spaces in iVWs are developed as a means to support e-governance services connecting the individual to the coop. The farm ecosystem becomes a place to support individual human innovations and small group or individual ownership within farming coops. A system of farms is defined when there are many individually owed farms and a distribution-supply system including one refinery. Our estimate is that if there was a supply chain then the cost of a refinery would come down to around $200,000 per plant. 25 to 50 small farms would supply a single plant, with average incomes for each farm at around $125,000 per farm. 100 farms and two refinery plants would cost a total of around $50,000 per farm to transform so that the total development costs would be around $50,000,000. However these 100 farms would produce $125,000,000 worth of wholesale oil per year. Social networks and knowledge management tools Social networks have not been equipped with knowledge management tools. These tools exist and are available to large corporations but are not often mentioned in college and university undergraduate programs. Even in schools of business the absence of curriculum about such things as collaborative tools, or human knowledge representation is touched only briefly. The topics related to the use of social networks by children and college students are left outside of the school and college curriculums. The concept of collective intelligence is absent in the processes we use to educate our children. This concept, and related concepts, is absolutely necessary if the individual is to understand the negative power of television and Internet programming. With the existing tools we may represent the topical structure of social expression, and make these representations available as part of e-governance and e-education. For example, tweets from a community defined by the students taking a mathematics class might be collected into an immersive Virtual World tweet repository and this repository made available for algorithms that extract nouns and verbs so as to produce a model about the social discourse. An analysis of this model might show that students have certain feelings about their study. The nature of the social discourse might be aired in the classroom. Students may be asked to write about their feelings regarding past experiences. The linkage between life goals and learning has been broken in many cases, for most students. The key to increasing the relevance of education is to allow participatory activities, and ultimately to lead to certain positive changes in the identity of self. The development of a virtual model of farms and farm systems would allow students to experience the type of tasks that would be required if he or she were to be an owner of one of the new small decentralized farms. Decentralized ecosystems The dedicated iVW infrastructure will serve as a low cost economic stimulus, while enhancing the local authorities’ intent to preserve cultural rules and traditions. Bricks and mortar community centers will link farming communities economically. The land and building for these community centers will provide an economic base for the coop, as well as grounding for virtual communication in local physical world activities. This is a large project, with considerable logistical, ethical and financial dimensions. Our pilot program would use open source publicly owned software infrastructure to support a statewide project designed to increase the number of self-sustaining small farms. Our position is that the project will happen, and that e-governance and e-education based principles will enable additional projects. Using the current capacity of social network software an entire ecosystem with supply chains and new markets maybe planned and then stimulated. Any qualifying participant may make innovations available to others, even innovations for which there are strong intellectual property protections. However, the communications common will not be ownable. It has always been viewed by the founding fathers and by those who have followed, that an agrarian base is essential to a healthy democracy. These farms be established anywhere, in any state, where small farms once existed or may be created. We may establish farming coops in places where farms could not previously be developed. Decentralization technology produces power and energy from natural environments and thus new types of small farm communities will develop in what are now areas with very sparse populations. The development of education for this near future is essential. The development of life long learning, decentralized and under control of the individual may represent the next step, and allow the next generation to participate in an American dream. The principle of stratification in nature The principle of stratification has been slow to be developed and recognized. Part of the reason why is because phenomenon on one organizational scale, such as a cell in a body, has dependencies on other scales of organization. These dependencies are not often well understood. In fact the nature of cross scale dependency may be less precise that what our traditional view of science would like. However, living systems have these dependencies. The organizational stratification of nature creates gaps between time scale and size scale. Stratification imposes a structure on how emergence; e.g., the normal functioning of cross-organizational scale phenomenon, develops in specific situations or circumstances. Emergence involves non-locality, as we seen clearly in empirical work in particle physics or in gene expression. But again, the understanding of non-locality and emergence has been slow to develop. The discussion in The Education Bridge illustrates some of the mechanisms involved with the emergence of a new phenomenon into an organization scale. The difficulty in getting a predictive science around the issues of emergence might be by-passed if we develop descriptive models of the observed phenomenon. The means to do this is developing in the form of what is sometimes called “semantic technology”. Such technology includes many of the standards for representing relationships between things. We recognize a need for education that is purposeful, as well as which informs the individual about the natural world. We must understand the so-called hard problems, at least we must see over a lifetime that some progress is made on issues such as self-governance or even property law. The development of a perception into the essential properties of living systems is considered essential to the intelligent participation in e-governance and in the type of communication commons that would model the farms within a coop. Composition and stratification The Education Bridge is designed to help change how our young people are treated by education. The current picture is not healthy. The principle of organizational stratification leads us to understand something about individual learning. Specifically we are able to advance two theories. The first is about the nature and causes of an acquired learning disability syndrome. The second is about a methodology for freeing any individual from this syndrome, as well as opening access to the higher knowledge of science and mathematics needed from a citizen population. The first of the two theories suggest that biological systems respond to repeated under-stimulation because the stimulation itself is evoking the emergence of some new mechanism; e.g., “how to respond to this situation now”. Because there is nothing to respond to, a non-response is habituated. Non response characterizes the nature of the observed non-capacity to learn basic arithmetic Picture a compound, at one level of organization, having a specific form. Analysis leads to some specific prediction about properties of the compound. For example, an algae pond may be in a certain state and then be perturbed by the accidental introduction of chemicals. The question is then about what to do. Now consider the abstract case, where any compound in an ecosystem is a composition of some small set of atomic elements. There is an extensive literature on this type of systems theory which has not been integrated into either K-12 or college/university undergraduate studies. The curriculum and the pedagogy proposed in The Education Bridge have a common architectural feature. A small set of focus topics is presented as curriculum. Students compose original expositions of some self-selected subset of these focus topics. A similar capacity is needed to own a small farm. Demand pedagogy as a balance to current educational practice Most entering college freshman have lost the ability to learn. The remediation is to find a new stimulation, something that is surprising. Why? The answer comes form science. Novelty response does not use the neurological system controlling selective orientation toward something already habituated. Theory suggests that learning of a minimal number of focus topics, studied in isolation from each other, creates a desire to compose a presentation of these topics into an assessment of skill and ability. Synthesis is induced. The student is more deeply motivated. He or she is able to express as an individual would. The focus topic framework has been developed by two of the most important associations of teachers, The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Council of Teachers of English. However, they did not develop the concept of student self-selection of topics and the use of blank paper as an assessment tool. The concept that students could or should develop an understanding of what he or she might like to do professionally and privately must be balanced with the delivery of the cultural heritage from the past. There is the need for guidance. However, the current system is not providing the guidance that prepares the individual for citizenship in a world where our technology empowers us in the ways that we now see. We are not providing the individual with the means to be an individual. We are in a position to provide curriculums over which the student may make informed selections. These may be linked with future work force requirements. As we do this, we may also enhance the capacity for our graduates to decentralize ownership over production systems. These are the two primary objectives of The Education Bridge. Motivation and private, individual, ownership within a virtual real world Imagine a home that is the source of all or most of your income. The home is also a place where a family may be raised, and where friends may gather. The development of homes of this type is being supported by the immersive Virtual Worlds (iVW). However, the inclusion of a “virtual real world” is not yet fully anticipated. A virtual Real World (vRW) is a view of a real world using an iVW. The current generation of iVWs does not yet have the capacity to produce a vRW, because the ability to encode information about component supply chains and about bio-logical processes has not yet been adopted as a standard. This will be corrected in the coming year. Meanwhile, we make the case that home ownership may be earned within farming coops that reduce dependencies on foreign oil. The inclusion of new standards opens the possibility that individuals might identify real property, model this real property in a iVW, and then show how the real property might be transformed into a vRW, as part of an existing or emerging farming coop. The models would then be useable as part of a loan contract through which the graduate of our program might make with a bank, or even with the federal government. This land bank and loaning authority may be how federal and state governance orchestrates the creativity and resourcefulness of all of us in addressing the many challenges we now face. To open new possibilities to urban young adults is to tap into a national resource. The Texas proto-type may be refined as a model for use by other state governments. Return to an agricultural society based on individual ownership and responsiveness Our young people are far more under employed than at any time in our measured national memory. The Education Bridge will change the outcomes by introducing demand pedagogy within a virtual world, where personal identity is protected. The Bridge is designed to create a virtual Real World (vRW). The development of the vRW requires the skills needed by an emerging decentralized economy. The costs associated with learning these skills may be a small fraction of the current costs of technical or vocational education. So we are not talking about spending more money, to solve what appear to be intractable problems, but less money. Decentralization of ownership and the provision of individualized training arise due to social networking. Any individual may build a virtual world where his or her own skills might be refined and shared. The sanctity of individual information within the Bridge infrastructure is a critical issue, and deserves to be discussed at some length. This discussion occurs in supporting documents. The model creates a separate path to achievement that becomes attractive to young individuals who are not getting what they feel they need from regular school. The Education Bridge is a work force development program. One way to develop labor force skills is to allow individuals to log on and develop a “private” virtual place, within a monitored dedicated virtual world. The use of constructivist and participatory pedagogy, both within the virtual worlds and in the classroom, creates a creativity demand. Tracking labor market opportunities creates one path to high quality professional futures. The developing curriculum available within the framework of demand theory may be focused on where these market opportunities are forming. However, our perceptions may be oriented towards a new cultural reality in which individuals are building ownership, not mere a barely subsistent living. Market innovation support using virtual models of natural worlds Digital Right Management (DRM) is a huge area of discussion and scholarship. DRM has significant economic implications. However, there are few tools to protect digital rights. The technology underlying next generation technology is called a computing backplate. The backplate provides a means to track all occurrences of a digital property, as part of the underlying architecture. The same mechanisms provide a very high degree of information assurance, in particular to provide information security over the evaluation of students. Educational curriculum within The Education Bridge will focus on those activities jointly perceived by academics, work force development programs and the individual student. Vocational work will be emphasized. The purpose of our prototype is to bring a 7-24 educational platform into existing immersive Virtual World, one that is dedicated and monitored as if a boarding school. The model may be used to develop either private or public programs, and to unify the federal and state response to under employment trends. In our proposal, we develop new college curriculum, resulting in new certifications and degrees programs. The applied nature of the certification and degree programs may be focused on new farming coop governance using immersive Virtual Worlds (iVWs) to model each farm and the supply chains associated with all farms. A healthy economy is thus supported by communication between increasing self-sufficient decentralized farms. Capital formation may be stimulated with a state or federal land banking system. The development of plans to transform a property is to be done in the iVW infrastructure using building components and technology components developed by coop members. Thus component design and innovations expressed using components supports an active market for innovation. | |