Moodle in English

Hello Sam,

I yawn at your rant.

You are spot-on about the hype problem , PR flack abuses and UI difficulties. The other side of the coin here is a highly engaged community of teachers and learners, large companies making real commitments to develop learning objects and a UI recently gone open source.

You've taken the 20,000-foot perspective and written a broad refutation in general terms.

Can we get some specifics here? Something more like "I saw this at this location.. It said it was accomplishing this educational objective and it didn't because x,y,z." I have to wonder how much actual, hands-on you've done in this environment regarding teaching and learning.

I've never played World of Warcraft, but I do know that some hardcore WoW players bring their tactics and planning meetings in SL using mockups of quests. http://tinyurl.com/ys5mwo It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that useful simulation techniques in support of "communities of practice" are transferrable from the world of goblins into the world of professional training and higher ed.

See these videos of teaching objects about aerospace and astronomy content. http://tinyurl.com/y6s4sy I know personally that educators and managers from NASA's JPL are in SL and thoroughly engaged. Can you do this with an IRC channel? As professor John Bransford (edited 'How People Learn') said in his presentation, we are in the stone age with these tools. See: http://tinyurl.com/llys8

As for questioning number of users, I can remember a time very recently when a fledging open source learning management tool was dismissed because its implimentation numbers were miniscule compared with "mainstream" systems like WebCT. It is a good thing that a dedicated corp of developers judged Moodle on its potential instead of its install base.

What I'm suggesting is that the Moodle framework is a good partner to help solve the problems you're pointing out. Second Life by itself is a painful learning tool. But its Web connectivity give LMS tools a good opportunity to extend into immersive spaces for learning. The Web connectivity makes this tool a new breed.

--Jeremy
jeremykemp@yahoo.com
www.sloodle.com
www.simteach.com

Hello Martin,

First let me say that I'm honored you have commented on this topic!

I support the sloodle.com domain and initiated the concept with Dan Livingstone of Paisley University in paper for the Second Life Community Convention.

See our proceedings: http://tinyurl.com/2xshje
And our specific whitepaper: http://www.sloodle.com/whitepaper.pdf

Our project's scripts in PHP and "Linden Scripting Language" are open source, free of charge - and will always be that way.

All lead developers on our project are university educators committed to helping students achieve their learning and life goals.

I agree with you 100% that 3D is too cumbersome to be of use in most general education classrooms. This will change. We are proposing a new way to scaffold learning in this wild frontier of sociofinancial 3D settings. And much of the excitement for our project (over 1000 accounts requested in three months) comes from the Moodle community.

IMHO most "classrooms" in Second Life now are merely decorative chat rooms. And, IMHO, this is not justifiable from a time-on-task perspective. (http://tinyurl.com/2gesy) Your typical student in a World Literature class, for instance, just doesn't get enough in return for all of the access problems, interface complexity and exotic overhead that comes with avatars and 3D modeling.

HOWEVER... Let me explain why this "mashup" is useful - even remarkable – and stands to benefit teachers in both communities immensely.

1) Second Life is not a game. I see it as the first in a line of open frameworks for content creation and sharing in a 3D space. World of Warcraft, There and Sims Online are obvious predecessors. But, upon closer examination, SL's closest relative is VRML. You will find no quests, the company doesn't filter user-created objects and social engineering is avoided for the most part.

2) Second Life is web-enabled. Millions of learning objects loaded on web servers and Moodle sites are portable for the first time into immersive environments REAL-TIME. This allows for stunning learning widgets. Connecting these objects and designing proper interfaces for them is a monumental task. Second Life needs Moodle in order to do this well.

3) Second Life is unstructured and offers meager scaffolding for teaching and learning. Thus Moodle is its perfect classroom partner. It needs Moodle.

4) The Second Life hype factor will fade and learning activities in the environment will normalize and be assessed for their outcomes. This assessment piece is lacking now. Simple quiz, file submission, asynchronous communication frameworks and grading tools are nowhere to be found. And so Second Life needs Moodle.

All this said, Moodle needs Second Life as well. Millions of "players" enjoy communities of practice, experiential learning and nearly addictive presence in Multi User Virtual Environments like WoW. Learning outcomes in these settings are clinically proven. Imagine a Moodle course that, if you wanted, could turn into a proper 3D interactive classroom with all your Moodle resources available to your students in the virtual world.

Sloodle was recently named one of the 'Hottest eLearning Technologies of the Year' by Sam Adkins, Chief Research Officer of Ambient Insight... http://ambientinsight.com/News/PR-20070112.aspx

Bloggers from a dozen countries have featured this development.

Dan and I are launching Sloodle 1.0 at Paisley University in Scotland on March 22nd. See: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/events/displayevent.php?id=142

I see our project as a perfect compliment to modules in the Moodle family. Educators in Second Life need Moodle. I hope you'll take a serious look at this development and help us as we struggle through this development effort!

--Jeremy

A group of us is working on Moodle interoperability with the Second Life streaming 3D platform. We think Moodle will be the platform of choice for educators who want to do blended instruction in 3D settings.

We have a proof of concept paper here:
http://www.sloodle.com/whitepaper.pdf

We have rented an "island" and are meeting on noon (pacific) the 23rd.
http://secondlife.com/events/event.php?id=315223

Some really cool tools are sprouting up that pass data between web and SL.

See what Amazon's Web evangelist has done:
http://www.rikomatic.com/blog/2006/09/jeff_barr_web_e.html

And a quiz tool that mashes Web and SL
http://sltrivia.com/?pg=about

Comments on the paper would be very helpful - and hope to see you there (in avatar form!)

--Jeremy
www.simteach.com