TLE's Innovative New Network Will Expand Its Free Education to the Entire Web

By: Alas Zerbino - TLE Official Blogger

What exactly will the new TLE Educational Network look like? In my last post, I talked about some of the features of the "old" TLE in Second Life that I missed the most during its three-month hiatus. In this post, I'll share some of the reasons why I'm so excited about the "new" TLE!

As I said in the previous post, TLE, as a virtual education and publishing center in SL, grew somewhat spontaneously and serendipitously as it experimented with ways to offer people knowledge and education at no cost to them. Once finished with that experimental stage, TLE assessed the pros and cons, successes and failures, and this week will begin to unveil its innovative new program - one that will extend far beyond Second Life or other virtual worlds.

Starting with a sim that will open within the next week, the TLE Educational Network expand its efforts in four separate, but related, areas, all of which were prototyped in TLE's first stage:

• TLE University, offering free university classes to anyone in the world with access to the Internet.
  Think of those who live far away from any real-world university and/or have no money to afford tuition and/or have disabilities that make it impossible for them to leave their home very often. They will be able to get education -- and even college degrees, once TLE's plans are fully implemented.


• TLE Creative Arts program, using the Internet to bring together professional authors, artists, and others in the creative field, with a global audience.
  Imagine attending a professional stage performance from your own home, or meeting "face-to-face" with a best-selling author or world-renowned artist. These are the kinds of events TLE is planning, thus opening this world to millions who can't attend such events in real life.


• TLE Publishing, creating free and low-cost "mini books" on a vast array of topics.
  So many of us want to learn about things we're unfamiliar with, yet don't have the time or money to read widely in order to do so. These TLE books (of which more than 160 have been created already) will give us the overviews and insights we want.


• TLE World History Museum and Zoo, which will provide interactive displays about our planet's history and replicas of the world's animal inhabitants.
  Imagine being far removed from a world-class zoo and being able to not just view wildlife in its natural inhabitants, but to walk among them and watch how they actually live. Or better yet, doing that with your children or disabled family members, as well.

But here's one of the most exciting things about this new venture! TLE has, of course, already offered versions of each of these programs in Second Life. But now, TLE will expand its programs far beyond what it's done in the past, and not just in Second Life, but across the entire Internet.

The technological wizard behind the TLE Educational Network is its owner, visionary Kitviel Silberberg, who has overseen a number of successful IT ventures in the past. He has developed technology and processes that will allow TLE's programs to be integrated with its Web site and such social media networks as Facebook and Twitter. So, TLE will not be limited in its reach to only residents of the virtual world of Second Life, though it will continue to use SL to provide the amazing realism that only a virtual world can offer. It will be accessible to many millions more!

As much as I'm excited about this innovative technological spread of TLE to the entire Web, the feature of this virtual education network that, for me, is its greatest gift to the world is its overall goal. And that is, quite simply, to create a better world for all of humanity.

How can it do this? Because its single focus is to freely educate people throughout the world, and, as Kitviel puts it:

"Knowledge and understanding fostered in an environment of willing people will produce a better world for all of us to live in. It will allow all of us to leave a much better world to our children than the one we inherited from our parents."

TLE's plans call for a huge leap forward in using 21st century technology and the World Wide Web to encourage a more compassionate, understanding world population. Not a small task, by any means, but many kudos to all of those behind TLE who are taking it on!

Stay tuned to this blog for more details of these plans!