Things have been very quiet here at SLOODLE.org for a while, but Edmund and Fire have been continuing to work on SLOODLE, contributing to the open-source code base while also developing their own supported solution for end users – Avatar Classroom. There will be a chance to see what they are up to coming soon (SLurl/URL to follow). From Edmund:

Class on Avatar Classroom: Edmund and Fire’s SLOODLE-based classroom, Tuesday March 20th at 8PM

Some people may have heard of the hosted service Edmund Edgar and Fire Centaur have been working on, built on the latest SLOODLE 2.0.

This gives you a pre-fabricated classroom integrated with a fully hosted Moodle website, with all the SLOODLE tools, designed to get you up and running with SLOODLE as quickly and easily as possible.

We have all the usual SLOODLE tools, so you can:

• Upload their Presentations in Moodle, and have them displayed in Second Life with the Sloodle Presenter
• Create quizzes in Moodle, and have students complete them in Secondlife using Sloodle quiz chairs, and the all new Sloodle Scoreboard!
• Create and award points on your scoreboard for quizzes and role-play activities.
• Submit homework assignments in Second Life, and grade them using the Moodle Gradebook
• Distribute Virtual items to the class using a web based interface.
• Record and bridge Student / Teacher chat sessions in Second Life and have these automatically archived in Moodle Chat

We also have a few additional touches, like a shark pool to attack your students if their quiz chairs drop too far.

Fire Centaur will be holding an informational tutorial on Tuesday March 20th at 8PM PST for all those interested.

Hope to see you there!

SLOODLE has a new home in Second Life.

The SLOODLE island is closing, but we have just taken residence in our new home in the Chilbo educational community on the Second Life mainland.

The SLOODLE tool distributors have been moved over already – so head to Chilbo to get the SLOODLE tools from now on. In time we’ll be adding more information content and building a new demo course.

You can visit SLOODLE in Chilbo here:
slurl.com/secondlife/Chilbo/188/24/93

The SLOODLE OpenSim Launcher is a highly experimental investigation into an alternative way of using virtual worlds along with technology such as the SLOODLE Tracker. The idea is to move away from Multi-User Virtual Environments, and allow the educator to setup individual learning exercises which can by dynamically created and deleted on-demand for each student. Mayfly does this by launching a new OpenSim instance when the student starts an exercise in Moodle, and initialising this with a stored virtual world. Multiple students can complete the same exercise at the same time, each in a seperate instance (obviously limited by the power of the server!).

Working alongside a JISC-funded project involving the University of Ulster and the University of the West of Scotland, a very basic exploratory prototype was produced. It is very far from being stable or usable, but some developers may find the concept of interest for future work. If you would like to obtain it, then perform a Subversion Export from the following (public) repository location:

sloodle.googlecode.com/svn/branches/opensim_launcher

Note: the software is very unstable. Please do not attempt to use it unless you are a developer.

What is it?

Is is a modified SLOODLE activity module, to be installed into Moodle. It also contains an OpenSim server installation which will be duplicated and executed at run-time as needed.

Requirements

It is recommended that you only run the software on a Windows server. Some parts may work on other platforms, but it is likely that other parts will not. You will also need to install an “opensim://” protocol handler to launch an OpenSim-compatible viewer from a URL.

Please note that it is not compatible with any other SLOODLE installation.

Support

Sorry, we cannot provide any support for this software. It is being released as-is, under the GNU GPL v3. Please do not attempt to use it on a production server.

At long last, SLOODLE 1.2 is officially released! 

The main point of this release is to include the SLOODLE Tracker functionality, which was originally created at the University of Ulster. It allows you to setup a series of tasks in Second Life, and monitor students’ progress on them through Moodle.

1. Download Instructions

2. Installation Instructions
3. SLOODLE 1.2 Documentation (PDF)

If you have any problems, then please post on our general discussion forum, and we will do our best to help!

From Miriam Laidlaw:

At the end of February we (HRDNZ) will be running a Second Life and SLOODLE (integration between Second Life and Moodle) training in Auckland, New Zealand. The course runs the week of Monday 28th February to Friday 4th March.

Please see HERE for further details of course fees.

Please see THIS BLOG POST for further details on what is involved in each day of the course.

But what I mainly want to ask in this community is… will there be any people online during that week that may wish to pop in (in world) and demonstrate what they can do, or offer some advise, or just hang around and watch as my participants come to grips with Second Life?

It would be awesome if we could get them to interact with other educators who are using SLOODLE, or are familiar with it.

If you’re going to be around during that week, please message me – Merryn Lawksley in Second Life – and let me know. Add me as a friend! Would love to see you there.

Even if you’re not around, but you don’t mind us coming and seeing your SLOODLE area in world, please send me a message and a landmark in SL.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of giving a short online talk as part of the Transforming Assessment series of talks supported by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and led by Geoffrey Crisp at the University of Adelaide.

The recording of “Assessment in Virtual Worlds with SLOODLE” held on
30 November is now online.

Download and view in a number of formats via
www.transformingassessment.com/events_past.php

Pavlos Kallonis emailed me details of these two publications… one from a recent conference, one from a forthcoming conference.

If you’ll be at ICCE in Malaysia at the end of November, the following paper is being presented at the Virtual Worlds Workshop:

• Kallonis, P. and Sampson, D.  (2010). Implementing a 3D Virtual Classroom Simulation for Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development. In Proc. of the Workshop on Virtual Worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning (ViWo 2010) in the 18th International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE 2010). Putrajaya, Malaysia.

3D Virtual Worlds (VWs) are becoming important for education as they provide realistic three-dimensional environments, offer engaging, interactive and immersive experiences, and create new opportunities related to learning and teaching. To this end, it is useful for school teachers to understand these environments and explore their possibilities in enhancing their educational practices. However, in order to achieve this using 3D VWs, teachers should acquire competences that would enable them design and deliver educational activities in the context of 3D VWs, as part of their Continuing Professional Development. To this end, in this paper we present the design and the implementation of a 3D Virtual Classroom Simulation that takes into consideration the instructional strategy of Synectics.

And a related paper was recently presented at CELDA:

• Kallonis, P., & Sampson, D. (2010). Exploiting Virtual Worlds For Teachers’ Professional Development. In Proc. of the IADIS International Conference Cognition and Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2010). Timisoara, Romania.

Today, the emergence of technologies, such as 3D Virtual Worlds, which provide realistic three-dimensional environments and can offer engaging, interactive and immersive experiences, creates new opportunities for teaching and learning. However, we should take into account that possible use of 3D Virtual Worlds is a major challenge for school teachers, since they introduce new concepts that even teachers who are experienced and keen on using digital technologies are not familiar with. Within this context, in this paper we present our case for school teachers’ training activities facilitated by a 3D Virtual Classroom Simulation (designed using SLOODLE), as the means for simulating the familiar “traditional” classroom in the unfamiliar context of 3D Virtual Worlds and thus, by presenting them in a module designed using the Synectics “Making the strange familiar” instructional strategy, we target supporting teachers understand these environments, explore their potential in enhancing their educational practices and acquire competences for teaching in them, within a closed and familiar environment provided by the 3D Virtual Classroom Simulation.

Andrew Wheelock presented his work using SLOODLE at the last SLOODLE Moot. A couple of months back he also posted this video showing his teaching area and how he is using SLOODLE in a social studies course for educators:

Sloodle For Social Studies from andrew wheelock on Vimeo.

Another roundup of SLOODLE cites and mentions.

• De Lucia, A., Francese, R., Passero, I., & Tortora, G. (2009). Development and evaluation of a virtual campus on Second Life: The case of SecondDMI. Computers & Education, 52(1), 220-233. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2008.08.001

A little annoyingly, the SLOODLE citation here is wrong… a reference to the “Putting a Second Life ‘Metaverse’ Skin on Learning Management Systems” paper – but with the wrong year and wrong publication details. The authors do not appear to use SLOODLE, but do create their own Moodle plug-in which is similar to the SLOODLE presenter. An evaluation of their virtual campus is also conducted.

• Hodge, E., Collins, S., & Giordano, T. (2009). The Virtual Worlds Handbook: How to Use Second Life and Other 3D Virtual Environments (1st ed.). Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Inc.

A recent book on using virtual worlds in education. Includes a (short) chapter on SLOODLE.

• Konstantinidis, A., Tsiatsos, T., Demetriadis, S., & Pomportsis, A. (2010). Collaborative Learning in OpenSim by Utilizing SLoodle. Advanced International Conference on Telecommunications, 0, 90-95. doi:doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/AICT.2010.75

“The paper introduces and proposes a hybrid approach to computer supported collaborative learning. The approach suggests a combined use of the open source systems Moodle and OpenSim through the Sloodle module, in order to facilitate the fruitful execution of the collaborative learning techniques Jigsaw and Fishbowl, and examines their online transferability. In the concluding section, it is surmised that the successful combination of specific approaches and systems can surpass particular shortcomings inherent in their isolated use.”

• Yasar, O., & Adiguzel, T. (2010). A working successor of learning management systems: SLOODLE. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(2), 5682-5685. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.928

“Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) have been used in education for a number of years to deliver and manage electronic learning sources. Learning Management systems (LMS), also known as VLE, have lots of functions in the process of learning activities as well as the course administration and tracking, but they still have some limitations which decrease the effectiveness of learning. With their functions of giving the opportunity of involving in the process of constructing meaning from experiences to students, 3D virtual environments have emerged to remediate such LMS problems. SLOODLE is a dynamic learning environment which links 3D virtual environment, Second Life, to an open source LMS, MOODLE(). The aim of this study is to outline weaknesses of traditional LMSs and explore the features of 3D virtual learning environment, SLOODLE, as a potential solution.”

• Guomin, Z., & Jianxin, Z. (2010). An Educational Value Analysis of SLOODLE-Based Distributed Virtual Learning System. Education Technology and Computer Science, International Workshop on, 3, 402-405. doi:doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ETCS.2010.516

I’ve not had time to read this one myself yet… but looks like I’ll have to, judging by the abstract:
“Integrating Multi-User Virtual Environment System with traditional Learning Management System is a developing trend of virtual learning systems, which will be helpful to bring an immersive worlds into educational environment, improve the perceptible and interactive for learners in online education. This paper analyzes the weaknesses of the current 2D web-based learning environment, reviews the system of SLOODLE, illustrates its educational function modules, and explores its potential educational value. The present paper also puts forward possible problems and challenges of SLOODLE in the teaching practice, aiming to give reference for further research in online education platforms.”

In the past few years SLOODLE has been mentioned and cited in a steadily increasing number of academic publications (I have counted 63 so far, but I am still looking!). I would like to highlight one in particular which I encountered today in the KCKS proceedings from WCC2010:

“A side-project of SLOODLE [10] called quizHUD [13] can be considered as a pioneer
to assess the acquisition of knowledge using not only classical interfaces in
multiple choice questions, but also mechanisms inherent to 3D virtual worlds such as
immersive navigation and choice of 3D objects.” (Ibáñez, Crespo, and Kloos 2010, p166)

This quotation comes from the following article, which is due to be presented at the World Computer Congress on 22nd September 2010:

María Ibáñez, Raquel Crespo, and Carlos Kloos, “Assessment of Knowledge and Competencies in 3D Virtual Worlds: A Proposal,” in Key Competencies in the Knowledge Society, ed. Nicholas Reynolds and Márta Turcsányi-Szabó, vol. 324, IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology (Springer Boston, 2010), 165-176, dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15378-5_16

Found any other good SLOODLE citations? Please let us know.