The Open Habitat Project is an effort, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), to explore how multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) can be used effectively in a classroom setting and examine best practices for implementing MUVEs in the classroom.
To link participating researchers from partner institutions in Britain and Canada, Open Habitat uses a combination of blogs and image feeds to synthesize work done in a local, deliberate manner with work being done on blogs elsewhere on the Internet and around the globe. The result is a rhizomatic structure built through a collection of tags and node connections (Cormier 2008). For example, individual researchers might publish their thoughts on their blogs, which are aggregated to Open Habitat's Web site and, through tags and manual connections created by researchers, lead to more refined thinking. As these developments and ideas are posted in the datastore on the Web site, they, in turn, become part of the larger rhizomatic knowledge base of the site.
Cormier, D. 2008. Creating a rhizomatic knowledge node on a website. [Weblog entry, February 2.] Dave's Educational Blog. http://davecormier.com/edblog
/2008/02/02/creating-a-rhizomatic-knowledge-node-on-a-website/ (accessed May 27, 2008). Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5XspuUYmH.