I have been reading through some of your rhizomatic knowledge information and immediately saw connections to an Idea I am just starting to flesh out. I have been thinking about better ways to enable the creation, organization and retrieval of learning materials after being disappointed at the whole “learning object repository” model and previous attempts to reach the same goal. After spending the last 4 months immersed in SL, my thinking started to drift toward 3D enhanced methods for doing this. The biggest problem I experienced as a teacher trying to locate information was finding things that would be a close match to particular curriculum outcomes without having to go through each resource the “search” turned up to assess its relevance. Another annoyance going back to the “Web page containing Weblinks” to “database driven sites” right up to “learning Object Repositories” was the problem of “loopiness” (there’s probably a more sophisticated name for it, but it was the best I could come up with.) In each case no matter how well designed the metadata collection and resource description process was, people found ways to reduce many of the resource entries down to links to “great websites…” which themselves contained mostly links to other “great websites” and so on. Sometimes by chance you ran into something useful, but most of the time was spent chasing threads which quite often ended up leading back to a previously visited site creating a loop. The big issue that had not been tackled very effectively I thought, was the lack of a direct connection from resources to specific curricular outcomes. Trying to link a resource back to all the related outcomes after the fact relying on machine processing is difficult, but using a rhizome approach may make it possible. I am working on a small trial using my free OpenSim region on the Tribalnet p2p grid, but I can imagine something similar on any VW or a google earth/sketchup implementation. I have a fairly large map of north america and am going to start with Alberta and Saskatchewan, subject mathematics. In the appropriate geographical location on the map I am going to construct clusters of prims tagged/imprinted with curricular outcomes direct from official documents. The shape, color, height above surface, proximal arrangement etc. can be used as visual cues. Once several different regions have been completed it would be possible for Avatar/users to fly between different regions and identify very similar outcomes which could be physically joined by a thread. The outcome prims themselves can act as drops for notecards containing text,urls to sites containing “actual related content” or teleportation information to Sims containing related immersive activities. This info is made accessible to all the other outcomes linked to it. I could see a synergy between the VW interface and a drupal based back end managing the actual content offering a secondary flatter interface to the same body of resources. Sorry, got a little carried away with the length. Must start my own blog…