Squirrelverse Graduation Village Opens!

Today (Saturday 20 January) Second Life’s latest education facility, Graduation Village, had the pleasure of officially opening for full service to the SL community!

Operated by Squirrelverse (http://www.squirrelverse.com), Graduation Village is a privately owned education services facility on the Main Grid that has a dual purpose - to give Teenagers aged 18 and over a place to hang and to meet informally with adult educators and librarians, and to be a focal point for the provision of commercial education and business services.

SLURL:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kaunis/20/221/293/

The Village was opened with a speech by Squirrelverse owner Fleet Goldenberg, an SL education worker, training instructor and project leader whose class ‘Establishing an Educational Presence in Second Life and Teen Second Life’ was a Pick of the Week event by the blog New World Notes this past week.
(http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/01/riks_picks_for__2.html)

The speech was followed by an extensive and richly detailed Fleet-led tour of the Village and its features for the attending audience members, during which a few took the opportunity to enjoy the fairground bumper cars in the first floor Teen Center!

The Center, as well as providing social play fun for teens newly arrived on the Main Grid from Teen Second Life, also provides a dance club area with animated dance poseballs and flashing ceiling spotlights and, perhaps most importantly, a Help Desk with spaces for volunteer Counselors/Chaplains and Educators to outreach to teen users of the area and offer emotional support and information on educational programs, something that up til now has not been visibly available specifically to young adults in Second Life. At present a counsellor and two specialist Christian chaplains have been recruited and are due to begin advice services at the Village in the 3rd week of February. Fleet would be keen to hear from others who would like to volunteer to fill chaplaincy positions to represent other faiths as well!

It is Squirrelverse’s vision that young people who may have begun learning in Teen Second Life do not become lost to education when they ‘rezuate’ to the Adult Grid. It aims to deliver education to all age ranges across an entire lifetime, enabling citizens of the world to enjoy uninterrupted personal growth from early years to seniority.

Once the tour group were coaxed away from the giant turtle that acts as a relaxation room and private space to IM counselors from, they were led through the rest of the facility, which is devoted to serving the educator population of SL. The next stop was the Auditorium, where state of the art speaking and presentation facilities are available for free use to educators.

Rising up a floor took us to the Squirrelverse main office, where numerous exhibitions on the services that Squirrelverse operates were available for browsing, which includes education and business consultancy, book/research paper publishing and speaker/instructor hire for events.

Finally, the trail ended at the Sunsets restaurant, a high class meeting space and socializing area that has magnificent views of SL’s sunsets from seated positions at tables.

The opening was concluded with fond temporary farewells and thank-yous, and great hope that an excellent future lay ahead for Graduation Village and its visitors and regulars!