Sloodle lives!

Well, time to come out a bit more about Sloodle I think…

Inspired in part because I find myself encountering it by chance quite often. For example, when Alan Levine discovered that he had a featured slide show on SlideShare, his screen shot revealed that another featured presentation of the day was this one by Alja Sulčič - Moodle in a Virtual 3D World.

This was from the first Slovenian MoodleMoot, where Alja presented on the Sloodle project. While in San Jose, preparing for my own presentation to the SJSU School of Library and Information Science I’d chanced upon a YouTube video posted by Alja just days earlier - and ended up using it my presentation. Which I’ll post to SlideShare real soon I promise…

Then, tonight (or this afternoon if you live on the other side of the Atlantic) I logged into Second Life to listen into James Paul Gee talking to teens on Teen Second Life. Normally adults can’t chat with anyone on the teen grid (for obvious reasons) - but by using the Sloodle Chatcast - which passes chat messages between a Moodle chat-room and Second Life, we were able to ask our questions and chat to the teens too. (Chat from Moodle is quite clearly different from normal avatar chat… and teens were aware that adults were present - including some of the Global Kids leaders). Thanks to Claudia at Linden Lab for helping set this up - and for enabling us ‘aliens’ stuck in the main grid to see what was happening on the teen grid via snap-shots.

You can see some pictures from the teen grid here, plus some from the main grid [1], [2]. Plus Global Kids blog entry here. It all seemed to work pretty well, with just under 20 adults using the Moodle chat-room; around a dozen (with some coming and going) adults listening in at Teaching on the main grid, plus a room full on the teen grid.

So the chat-cast… (aka chat-logger or chat-bridge)… why?

Obvious reason #1: Allows people who can’t attend chats in SL to participate anyway! This can be due to firewall, lack of broadband, accessibility or other reasons. This was one of the first uses made of Sloodle… back when we first demo’d the idea of Sloodle in public, one SL resident was unable to log in. So he listened in via Moodle.

Reason #2: Allows chats to be archived in a web-accessible database. Yes, chat logs from SL can be saved automatically - or by cut-and-paste. But you can use the setting available in Moodle to archive chats in a database which is then nicely sorted by course, activity or module - accessible to everyone enrolled for that activity and no one else. Archive and (controlled) distribution.

Key features include:

• Opt-in logging (from SL). Keeps to Linden Lab terms of service
• Chat from SL includes hyperlink to location of chat-cast box in SL
• Colour coding. We are going to revamp this a little I think, but there is some basic colour coding - used to highlight SL avatar names. This will be getting extended to use unique colours for different avatars.

That is just the chat-cast… there are other parts too - and I hope to find time to write more about them later.