Second Life + Moodle = Sloodle
October 21, 2006 — Daniel LivingstoneWhat happens when you put the online virtual world of Second Life together with traditional Learning Management Systems such as Moodle?
Interested? Read below for more…
Finding out is one of my ongoing activities, started when I thought I’d try to explain Second Life to work colleagues in terms of comparison against LMS [1]. My partner in this work, Jeremy Kemp, really pushed this forward by thinking that instead of just finding a way to access Moodle content within SL, we should be trying to produce something more dynamic, something altogether richer [2]. Something that would really bring the 2D flat world of Moodle and fully exploit the potential of bringing it into a 3D immersive world.
Jeremy has also succeeded in bringing together a fantastic team of educators and technologists from across the world - and we’ll be having our first in-world meeting at around noon SL time (8pm GMT) on Monday. Even before our first meeting, the recent activity has been amazing, thanks largely to the Moodle devs who have joined us in SL - Paul Andrews in particular.
Paul is also organising a Second Life orientation session immediately before the main event - details and sign up on sloodle.com. If you plan on coming along, and don’t yet have a Second Life account, I’d recommend registering, downloading the client a.s.a.p., getting set-up and logging in to complete the standard orientation. Also if you can spend an hour or two on Help Island that’d be great - there should be mentors and other users about who can help answer questions.
[1] Massively multi-learner: recent advances in 3D social environments, Livingstone, D. and Kemp, J., Computing and Information Systems Journal, School of Computing, University of Paisley, Volume 10, No 2, May 2006
[2] Putting a Second Life “Metaverse” Skin on Learning Management Systems, Kemp, J. and Livingstone, D., in proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop at SLCC, San Francisco, August 2006, p.13-18.
