I’ve been pretty busy with other things and haven’t been in Second Life much recently. However, I’ve been getting a bunch of interesting emails about different developments related to Second Life and other virtual worlds, and I thought I should highlight some of them here.

… Education

One email that particularly caught my attention was the idea of building an Opensim / Moodle implementation, similar to Sloodle, but with some important differences from Sloodle.

Let me explain a little of this to people whose eyes glazed over as they read that. First, Second Life is a three dimensional virtual world. You run a Second Life client that connects you to a set of Second Life servers. You can move a representation of yourself around in this three dimensional virtual world and interact, real time, with other people doing the same thing. You can see videos, share course material and create objects in the world that you can interact with. You can go beyond whatever physical limitations hold you down in your physical life.

Opensim is a project to create open source server software that acts in a manner similar to Second Life servers. A person with a Second Life client could connect to Opensim servers that are available only to people within a certain community such as a place of business or a school.

I came to Second Life after having spent a lot of time working with text based virtual worlds. One type of text based virtual world is MOOs. I’ve been active on large MOOs, participated in educational MOOs and run my own MOOs. When Opensim first came along, I wrote about how with Opensim, schools could have their own three dimensional virtual worlds, just like how they used to have their own text based virtual worlds.

Moodle is a popular open source course management system, learning management system, or virtual learning environment, depending on who you talk to. I don’t know what sort of relationship there is between Moodle and the MOOs of old, but many of my education friends from MOOs seemed to get very interested in Moodle.

Sloodle is an open source project that integrates Second Life with Moodle. The problem is that Second Life is a close proprietary system, so the integration is limited. Since OpenSim is open source, the possibilities for deeper integration are much greater and much more interesting. However, Opensim is still in alpha testing and changes rapidly. This presents problems for deep integration because what you are integrating with may change significantly, and hence your integration may need to change significantly. Nonetheless, it is an interesting development.

A friend of mine teaches anthropology at Brandeis. Years ago, Brandeis had a MOO up and running that I would visit. When I finally got a chance to visit Brandeis, I knew my way around the campus fairly well from my explorations of their MOO. I would love to visit a Brandeis Opensim world someday in the future, or even a Beecher Road virtual world school. Integrating it with an Opensim / Moodle implementation would make it all the more compelling.

… Healthcare

One of the things that I’ve gotten the most out of Second Life has been becoming friends with people in the disability community there, and learning so much from them. There is a non-profit called Virtual Ability. Their “mission is to enable people with a wide range of disabilities to enter into virtual worlds like Second Life®, and provide them with a supporting environment once there.”

There is a wonderful blog post about health care in Second Life. In a recent email with Second Life educators about videos explaining Second Life, I recommended this video as a good starting point to get what Second Life can really be all about.

... and civic engagement

Then, today, I received a message via Identi.ca pointing me to another great video about health care and Second Life. This one was about people interested in healthcare talking together via Second Life and provides another great view of what Second Life, or related virtual worlds can do when used properly.

Whether your top issue is education, healthcare, civic engagement, or whatever other cause, it is crucial to find effective ways to communicate with others, and more and more virtual worlds, like Second Life are proving to be an important part of the mix.