Jacquie Bennett was an associate lecturer on several courses, including T175, and was a teaching fellow with COLMSCT at the OU. Her project was to get an island in Second Life - called Cetlment - and see how people might use it. She was a lifelong gamer and had been in SL as Jacquie Sholokhov since SL started. She always believed virtual worlds were going to be big for education and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with her.
It was Jacquie that got me into SL by nagging me to give it a try, and when I did I was blown away by the potential of it, and I immediately started working with her. She was one of my closest friends and we often said that we talked to each other more than our families, as we would be on Skype or in SL all day, often joined by lizit.
We were both tutoring T175 at the time and we started bringing our tutor groups into SL and working with them together, and it was all very new and exciting and our students were really enthusiastic, so we had great results. About 11 months after we started working together in SL that cohort of T175 came to an end and we wrote a paper about our experiences, to present at the international conference on computers in learning in Austria, in September 2007. I wasn't able to go, so she went by herself to present it and the night she arrived she said she was going to bed early with a migraine. In fact she had a brain haemorrhage and died that night - the hotel staff found her in the morning. Her death was totally unexpected.
COLMSCT bought a new island, which was Open Life (Linden wouldn't let us transfer Cetlment so it had to be abandoned), and we put it next to Schomebase. Jacquie and I were both very active members of Schome and were working on the Schome project in the teen grid at the time (the kids had an inworld ceremony as an act of remembrance, which was very moving). I did the development of Open Life and Schomebase and when the halls on Open Life needed a name it was a good way to keep a reference to her memory on the island. Nobody ever asked about the name, which was as I’d hoped, so it was just part of the way things were.
Jacquie and Elsa enjoying a tipple, early Cetlment days
Cut to the village, and when we moved here and didn't have the halls as such any more we had the requirement for a spiritual/peaceful area, and it seemed a natural thing to transfer the name. It means something to those of us who knew her, and it has a whole other meaning to people who were around for the original halls, which is nice.
She wasn't a sentimental person, she was very kind and a brilliant tutor but could also be bitingly funny, and she wouldn't have appreciated anything soppy, nor would it have been appropriate, particularly as the project expanded and more and more people came on board who had never known her in the first place, so I like the way it worked out.
She had a husband and 2 young children, and about a year before she died they moved to a remote farm in Wales and bought some sheep and goats. They loved their new lifestyle and Jacquie was learning to sheer and spin in order to start a business selling their own wool. I do believe that however successful it became she would always have continued to spend significant time each day in Second Life.
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