I took the opportunity to attend a lecture and the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of the virtual campus of the San Jose State Unviersity's School of Library and Information Science in Second Life yesterday. The campus is very large and impressive (I'm building an album of screenshots here). The commitment by the university to using Second Life to extend their educational program and reach is also quite impressive. The lecture involved a live demonstration of their own virtual environment learning system called SLoodle, which connects Second Life (SL) with Moodle. Because I've been testing out Moodle as a possible alternative to the courseware management system we're using for our RUSA Professional Development Online course, I was very curious about SLoodle.
All avatars present at the lecture were invited to click on a tape recorder on stage and agree (opt in) to being recorded 
on a transcript generated in SLoodle's chat room. (Good thing I'd already registered!) See the image to the right, it shows Second Life in the background window, with SLoodle open to the chat transcript, with particpant icons to the far right. By typing into chat boxes in either window, the text was shared, meaning that someone could particpate whether they were in Second Life or not, or whether they had “opened” SLoodle. Having used WebCT's chat rooms for the past two years, I could see right away what a wonderful advantage this would be for handling discussions. In the Reference Interview and Readers' Advisory courses, we pair off particpants to roleplay interviews between librarian and information seeker. SLoodle would add another dimension to such activities. (It's also a shortcoming of SL that transcripts aren't automatically generated.)
When I asked about security issues, which have been raised by people I know and trust, I was told that Moodle is being used by a wide range of universities with very few issues. I'll be taking a course from the University of Illinois starting next week that uses SL and Moodle, so I'll ask about their experience with security as well as see from the student perspective how this blending of technologies works.
