Dr Kenneth Y T Lim Shares the Affordances of Virtual Worlds for Environmental Education

On 24 August 2020, Dr Kenneth Y T Lim, Research Scientist at the Office of Education Research, facilitated a session at the Coastal Ecosystem and Management webinar together with Mr Hajime Nishimura from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Ms Linda Morris Kelley, Instructor of Professional Practice at Rutgers Business School. Their session on environmental education, titled “Using virtual immersive 3D geospaces to gain understanding of and support for responsible management of coastal ecosystems”,  brought the participants on a 40 minute showcase of the Abyss Observatory.

The Abyss Observatory, as shown during Dr Lim’s webinar session

The Abyss Observatory is an online marine ecosystem that Dr Lim, Mr Nishimura, and Ms Kelley have been jointly curating for the past seven years on Second Life—a virtual and customisable world where Second Life users can build virtually anything. The design of the Abyss Observatory is based on Dr Lim’s Six Learnings curriculum framework, a framework he developed to inform the design of technology-supported learning environments. Through the showcase of the Abyss Observatory, and with the help of the Six Learnings curriculum framework—more specifically, the area of “learning by exploring”—Dr Lim, Mr Nishimura, and Ms Kelley hope that having given participants a chance to explore this immersive world, they have learnt more about these vital coastal ecosystems. The firsthand experience, they posit, will facilitate meaningful engagement and remind the participants of the need for responsible management of coastal ecosystems.

Participants of the session were introduced to eight ecosystems. These included two tropical habitats: a mangrove forest and a coral reef, four temperate habitats: a coastal oak and holly forest, a temperate rainforest, ocean banks, and a kelp forest, and two arctic and subarctic habitats: the coastal tundra and a cold-water coral reef, all of which are key ecosystems for global sustainability.

For a more in-depth view of the Abyss Observatory, please watch this video: