As a teacher, I often thought that my best lessons were trapped inside insurmountable walls…the highest of those being time. So many students were not ready to learn, at least not at that moment we shared.

When the student is ready, the teacher will appear

Put me on wave watch, I say. Let me lurk until the questions arise.

“What does the chloroplast do?”

Blip! [The Wave-watcher posts a simple response within the context of the learner's question. And, after a quick search, pastes a diagram from Wikipedia, or MIT's Biology content.]

Finally, capture that exchange, and archive it. Later on, if a learner asks about the same topic, a search of the archive could reveal that exchange and deliver the same response. If no match is found, the question-as-blip can be tagged and flagged for review by the wave-watchers. Since Katiya (London) and Chris (Japan) are likely to be watching the wave when I am not, the learner may not even have to wait long for a response. And, I might be watching when Katiya and Chris are not. A wave could widen my net.

I did not begin to think about how an educational wave might work until I started to read about extensions, bots and gadgets. Now, for a wave to be used as an educational tool, I can imagine some of what will be needed behind the screen.

Instruction breaks down into any number of simple exchanges. Traditionally—and at a basic level of examination—those interactions include:

1. Instructor states a learning objective
2. Instructor presents introductory content
3. Instructor leads group in an activity (lecture, discussion, exercise, investigation, guided learning, etc.)
4. Instructor assigns an individual learning activity (to extend the learning)
5. Student delivers finished product to instructor

This is a very simplistic description, of course; plenty takes place between each step above, and each step can have many variations. For example, the activity in #3 above might be “Write a summary”, “Read a chapter”, “Answer these questions”, “Build a model”, or all of the above. And there is little mention of what the learner is doing. Here, I want to focus on direct interaction between student and teacher—those exchanges that an educational wave will need to facilitate—and identify wave mechanisms or gadgets that will accomplish the task.

And it is feasible, given my view of the technologies, to bring wave-enabled instructional tools into a virtual world like Second Life™. A touch-activated kiosk, or an avatar’s HUD might become a wave participant…or client, allowing the conversation of a wave to seep into that virtual space.

What would be the requirements?

From the learner’s perspective, the tool should be:

• Easily attainable (pick one up in world, buy on XstreetSL or other merchant site)
• Easily enabled (worn as attachment or HUD, or rezzed as needed?)
• Easily engaged (i.e., ask question in public chat)

From the perspective of the mentor (instructor, guide?):

• All questions should be accessible (imagining question as blip, here)
• Newly submitted questions should be distinctly tagged or formatted (wave-bot employed here)
• Once a mentor’s response is submitted to a blip, that blip’s status (tag, tags?) should be modified

From here, it gets difficult; I cannot guess what the user interface would be like for the next transaction. The learner could simply receive a text message (IM? OwnerSay or Floating text in a HUD?). Maybe the user would be prompted (llLoadURL) to open a web page with the response…

That is enough to chew on, I reckon. Now, it is back to the Google Wave API and a bit of Python (nudge, nudge).