MULTIVERSE, META VERSE OR 3D INTERNET FREEDOM

By Aaron Dishno Ed.D. FOUNDER AND CEO OF HTTP3D INC. –WALKTHEWEB

To the education world, I ask you, would the Internet have been a success if it had one owner or company that fully controlled the content, advertising, censorship, and the way we display information? I say no. The success and acceptance of the Internet come from the limitless boundaries with the lack of controls and censorship, namely, freedom. Then why would we hand something as important as creating the Multiverse or Metaverse to a single company?

If you watch the latest Marvel movies, the Multiverse is shown as another dimension or instance of what we know to be our existence, yet our alternate decisions ultimately lead to alternate realities. It is like taking our storyline and testing the possibilities where we make critical decisions.

Google defines the Metaverse as, ”a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.”

Any web page can produce a 3D gaming experience, but in my opinion, it takes much more to be 3D Internet. I visualized 3D game scenes or Internet cities where 3D buildings, 3D games, and 3D shopping stores are loaded. They are unloaded, as you, the digital shoppers represented by avatars, walk near and then unloaded as you walk away.

Walking near would be like clicking an invisible proximity link. The 3D building information is fetched from the internet, then added to the 3D scene. You literally and virtually Walk the Web from one 3D website to another, while spanning the globe from one server to another. This concept allows us to create endless internet cities because we unload content from your view as we load the new content as you walk along and approach a new location.

It provides a bubble of the finest details closest to you. Mind-blowing yet confusing? Read on...

I would say there are many gaming and social media companies trying to be the dominant Metaverse and possibly demonstrating the use of Multiverse. But the one major ingredient missing is Freedom which only 3D Internet can provide.

The Internet as we know it, provides freedom because it is authored by anyone and for everyone. There are numerous companies that make it easy to get started from hosting a website to providing tools that simplify website design. Let’s face it - with a little effort, you can even learn the basics and create your own traditional website from scratch.

We need this same root level of freedom in the 3D Internet to allow anyone to create and display anything we want, how we want, and where we want. Instead of web pages and websites, we are creating 3D buildings or 3D stores and connecting them to 3D internet cities.

Today, only gaming and social media companies are working to develop such 3D internet cities because the learning curve is much higher, and takes a combination of many programmers and many hours to create a good flowing 3D Game. This hurdle blocks most most people from the all-inclusive freedom needed for 3D Internet to fully thrive. We need a simple way for anyone to get started for free.

The path to Freedom is paved with Open-Source Code and 3D CMS.

In 1998, Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens started the Open Source Initiative. When a programmer or company releases code as Open-Source, it means that the code is publicly available. It can then be changed or redistributed by anyone, and it usually includes licensing terms to protect the original author. The importance of OpenSource when developing the 3D Internet is that everyone has the freedom to see how it works and expand its capabilities and usage.

The ideal Open-Source solution for 3D Internet would then incorporate the basic components. For example, using a 3D game engine to produce a 3D game-based website with features like animated doors and interactive 3D Avatars. 3D Internet should work in all major browsers without special browser add-ins, settings, or modifications.

You should also be able to choose how you view it: with a Virtual Reality headset, computer screens, or mobile devices.

If the Multiverse or Metaverse you choose is not Open-Source, know that you are just playing their game, under their terms, and you will have to pay their price. Open-Source software sounds great if you are a programmer, but this still does not solve 3D Internet Hosting for the masses; hence we need a 3D CMS.

CMS or Content Management System is a software used to make it simple for anyone with or without programming experience to create a traditional website, start a blog, share information, or open an online store in minutes. CMS is responsible for the majority of new websites in the past decade and provides freedom and availability for everyone to easily add feature-rich websites to the Internet.

We need a 3D CMS that takes these same principles and applies them to create 3D game scenes. It can be as simple as selecting a 3D scene, a 3D building, then pick your 3D avatar and you are up and running with a 3D website. From there you can edit the 3D scene and add more 3D buildings and streets to grow your a 3D internet city.

With an Open-Source 3D CMS everyone can have the freedom to create, host, and own a piece of the 3D internet. So I created that content management system! Let’s all make it better!

Go find out more at https://github. com/HTTP3D/WalkTheWeb.

Availability of Public Funding for Private Schools

A European research study on OECD countries shows how it can be done.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is an alliance formed by governments of countries from Europe, Africa, Asia, South America, and Oceania which came together in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and trade. Today the organization boasts 38 member countries. OECD member countries have generally encouraged public subsidization of private sector schools due to the benefits introduced to the schooling market. As private schools enter the fray with fee structures manageable by families from a range of social economic tiers, there is naturally more competition. This places direct and positive pressure on the public sector schools to raise their standards and performance up to par with the private sector.

Researchers from the University of Glasgow and the University of Barcelona conducted a thorough review of literature on the subject and identified:

Four models of private subsidized education

Freedom of Instruction: Per this model, public subsidies ensure the financial viability of an already existing private education institution provided the private school conforms to basic quality education. This typically happened in the case of some religion-based schools that had been suffering from a lack of resources. Once the schools have demonstrated both a period of self-sufficiency and adherence to basic, state-mandated standards of curriculums, they become eligible to apply for public subsidies. The funds only partially cover the operational expenses of the school, and the institute is expected to charge some fees guaranteeing a minimum level of parental commitment to the school. Beyond that, the schools are free to further adapt or add to the basic curricular requirements, in addition to other managerial and pedagogical freedoms. Among the schools surveyed in this research, these schools typically developed internal evaluation systems of school performance instead of applying state level measures and testing.

Equivalence: In a model of equivalence, once a private school receives public funding, it also gives up autonomy in areas such as enrollment, curriculum, pedagogy, testing, and accountability. Typically the level of public funding for private and public schools is essentially the same in such cases, though it may be tailored to the socioeconomic composition of the families covered in a given school. That said, there are enough variations in this model despite the goal of equivalence. Full funding may be given only to private schools not charging fees. Conversely, some schools are forced to charge fees when full funding is not approved for them. Autonomy levels granted may also vary.

When new, subsidized schools are approved in this model, a factor is whether the new school will provide enough pedagogical diversity in the area, and how much social demand exists for that type of school. The lack of a particular type faith-supported school in an area can also be a factor in approval.

Market Competition: The major goal in this model of state subsidization of private schools is to stimulate healthy market competition and thereby encourage public schools to compete for students in the area by holding their academics and management to higher standards. The funding strategy is accordingly per capita for both public and private sectors per this model for true competition to materialize between schools in the area regardless of their private and public status. These schools work hard to keep up or excel in standards in a bid to win more students, and with them more funding. This funding model is commonly known as a voucher scheme and is very common in Sweden and Chile. Some regions allowed charging additional fees to private school families in this model, subsequently followed by reduced fund amounts. However, it led to a far greater segmentation across social class than would be healthy, prompting bans of public-subsidized private schools to charge additional fees. New schools are often approved only when there is low supply and enough demand in a given market. For-profit, fee-charging new schools are also prohibited from state funding. Freed oms in admissions and other school operations such as pedagogy, translation of the curriculum, and evaluation, etc have varied over time and region under this model, with governments often responding to complaints of exclusivity in private school admissions.

Educational Diversification: This model is similar to the market competition model in both autonomy and the purpose of subsidies. The only difference is that this model was employed in some countries with the view of large-scale reform of the school market through radical diversification of school choice offerings. The reform attempts were meant to bring great upgrades in the quality of education on offer in both public schools (via market competition forces) and private schools (via funding support). The reform did stimulate a positive change but not quite to the extent the programs were “planned” for. Of particular note was the bid to bring diversified, high-quality school offerings to disadvantaged families, which has happened with more or less success. Typical examples of this model would be Academies in England and Charter schools in the USA.

Challenges and Policy Responses

Segregation: When schools diversify and reach disadvantaged communities with help from public funding, an unintended outcome is the concentration of ethnic or immigrant minority students in certain schools. This segregation has also sparked a lot of protests and controversy on the issue of public funding of private schools. It was this outcry that has sometimes led to the equivalence models requiring sameness of procedures across public and private public-funded schools in some regions in order to avoid segregation in any form.

Selection, Discrimination: Another problem often protested in public-private partnerships is allowing schools to select their students. Such criteria are often discriminatory since higher performing students also tend to come from more advantaged backgrounds while disadvantaged populations struggle to keep up similar performances at the same scale.

For-profit: Public funding makes it easier for private schools allowed to charge fees to turn a profit, which then encourages selectiveness in admissions. The policy response has been to generally prohibit public subsidies in fee-charging schools.