NMC Campus Observer

SaLamander Visit for NMC Campus Teachers Buzz

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Jan 19, 2008 05:32pm

Coming up Monday, Wainbrave Bernal (aka Jonathan Richter form University of Oregon) is visiting the NMC Campus Teachers Buzz Session to tell us about the SaLamander Project — an interesting weaving of several technologies designed to have educators tag and catalog the best resources and learning materials in Second Life.

As described by Wainbrave,

The SaLamander Project is an open Second Life education community with a mission to develop a searchable peer-reviewed database of educational builds and tools in Second Life. Using inworld tools - such as the Salamander HUD and on-location surveys - the project hopes to assist SL Education to develop the common language and set of “best practices” in the emerging profession of 3D Virtual Education. By making well crafted virtual educational learning materials accessible to more educators and providing useful and timely feedback to builders and scripters, the SaLamander Project hopes to provide an ongoing service to the Second Life Education Community.

Presently in the beta stage, The SaLamander Project is now planning to anchor it’s activities and practices toward developing a showcase of exemplary Second Life Learning Materials to be presented at the next Second Life Community Conference in September 2008.

Join us for the Buzz on Monday…

When: January 21, at 9:00 am PST (check local time)
Where: Teaching 2 (135,124,22)

Wainbrave Bernal - his avatar may look scary, but he is quite nice

To help seed your interest and to better understand the project, we recently met up in world with Wainbrave to have him talk through a demo of how SaLamander works:

Interview with Wainbrave Bernal (18.6 Mb MP3, 27:01)

People who wish to contribute to the project can get and wear the SaLamander HUD. When they come to an interesting resource or place in Second Life, they click the pushpin. This HUD is actually a modification of the SLOOG HUD, a rather interesting tool in itself- SLOOG is a tagging tool for Second Life, allowing any SL user to mark locations with descriptive tags, which are saved on the SLOOG web site under the avatar’s name. Call it SL.del.icio.us.

For the SaLamnder project, the venerable Eloise Pasteur reprogrammed the general SLOOG HUD with a series of questions that get at some more education descriptors, which in fact are the same organizing questions used to catalog web based learning materials on MERLOT (that will connect in a minute).

So after clicking the pushpin button, the HUD prompts with several questions via chat messages, and you respond by selecting from choices in one of those blue dialog boxes, or sending open ended questions via chat:

When the process is done (it takes but a few minutes at most), the information is posted at the SLOOG site, with the information entered appearing as tags, including a special Salamnderproject tag that helps them locate all items tagged with this special HUD.

So for our little demo example for the audio interview, we tagged the NMC Orientation, which now is registered in SLOOG under my avatar http://www.sloog.org/users/CDB_Barkley.

And you can see by aggregation all of the places in SL tagged with salamander.

But wait, there’s more.

For the SaLamander project, they have some automated routines that “scrape” the data from SLOOG and put them as wiki pages in the project site– these become a “stub” entry such as for Renaissance House.

The next phase of the process is that educators who have visited, used one of these resources can edit the wiki to add additional information, pictures, descriptions, how the sim might be used, etc– see for example the more complete example of Bailey’s cafe and Brewster Place.

And the ultimate plan is that the most highly rated resources in SaLamnder would then become part of the MERLOT site, expanding its reach from the 2D web scope to virtual worlds.

For a complete explanation see the video “How the SL-Sloog-SalamanderWiki-Merlot system works”

But all of this is based on educators participating in the tagging, cataloging and rating. So come to the Teachers Buzz Monday, learn more about SaLamnder, get a HUD, and start tagging!

Story filed under: Audio / Video, Teacher's Buzz, What's Happening

See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)