On Friday June 20th at 4pm EST the Immersive Education Initiative will launch the Education Grid with an array of Sun Wonderland virtual world servers ("nodes") hosted by Essex University (United Kingdom), University of Oregon, St. Paul College, New Media Consortium (NMC), and Sun Microsystems. Faculty and staff from each host organization will join faculty from the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College to guide visitors through the Wonderland virtual worlds that debut on the Education Grid this Friday.

The Education Grid is provided free of charge to the general public and Immersive Education Initiative members. Starting this Friday, Immersive Education Initiative members can conduct classes and meetings within Wonderland virtual worlds on the Education Grid. Initiative members can also use the Education Grid to build custom Wonderland virtual learning worlds, simulations, and learning games.

Immersive Education's virtual world Platform Ecosystem and corresponding Education Grid provide educators with an open and comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure for a new generation of learning worlds, interactive learning games, and simulations. Sun Microsystems Laboratory's Project Wonderland is an official Immersive Education virtual world platform. Wonderland is now being enhanced to utilize the Education Grid, which is being designed to deliver a rich library of learning objects, digital media assets, learning games and collaboration services from which a wide variety of Immersive Education experiences can be assembled. Friday's event will give educators an early preview of the emerging Wonderland client-side platform and corresponding server-side Education Grid.

This event starts at 4pm EST (1pm pacific / Second Life time) in Second Life and then moves into the Education Grid's Wonderland virtual worlds

WHAT: Education Grid launches with Project Wonderland
WHEN: Friday June 20th, 2008 at 4pm EST
WHERE: Sun island http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sun%20Microsystems%201/127/165/71