Second Life + Moodle = Sloodle!

Image by VRider goes Web3D via Flickr

Mari Cruz García who is a Learning Technologist at Carnegie College has created a course explaining how to use virtual worlds in education. She says:

The course I have created is very humble, but I thought that it could be useful for beginners as it illustrates what you can do in Sloodle with very limited budget. The course includes free Linden scripts and objects, as well as a backup copy of the Moodle course. The only object which I couldn't display is the Presenter, until the IT Department can review the firewall settings that are currently blocking it.

I say: she's being modest and you should check this out at:

http://carnegiecollege.ninehub.com/course/view.php?id=7 (self-registration)
Password: tortilla.

The course is also available via SMUG (the Scottish Moodle User Group) at:

http://s-mug.org.uk/testbed/

Access in Second Life is at:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Sloodle/14/229/22 and click on the "Registration both" object.

Thanks Mari.

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JISC Get On Board Open Learning Bandwagon

Good to see that JISC have thrown their weight into getting open source learning into the virtual marketplace.

With any luck this will be the push required to make it "acceptable" to institutions to share their work.

Experimental Blog: JISC09 Last Post Open Learning Resources

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Free, as in speech

Image via Wikipedia

The Online College has a great post on free or open source tools particularly applicable to students.

From image editors to IDEs and to-do lists to web browsers you'll find something of interest here.

69 Free or Open Source Tools For Students | Online College

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Make Use of... Anything

Image via Wikipedia

Make Use Of is a great site with tips for doing all sorts of things on your computer. On the day I looked the front page had a link to:

• Best source code sites
• Grabbing MP3s from FLV files
• Making use of Research features in Word 2007
• Using Gmail offline
• Online image editing

Add it to your feed reader today.

Cool Websites, Software and Internet Tips

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Area #3 - Funding

Bottom line - money talks.

When deciding on a funding model for Computing students, the SFC (Scottish Funding Council) must look beyond its standard model and consider the work involved in delivering the Computing curriculum.

To illustrate the challenges, we can consider programming. As noted before, to become a proficient programmer it is necessary to spend significant time developing knowledge and skills – time that is not always available. This leads to practitioners that may not, potentially, have the skills to ensure learner engagement with the programming language.

The inevitable outcome of this problem is that colleges throughout the country are removing computing awards that incorporate programming from their prospectuses. The knock on effect for industry will be a dearth of programmers, just as the requirement increases.

To address this problem, Computing courses that incorporate programming units should be funded in a similar way to music courses where practical units are given double SUMs. This will translate to more time available to staff to teach the more challenging units.

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Open Source Image Programming

Image via Wikipedia

Processing is

an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for
learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.

For anyone looking to teach programming images it looks a good bet.

Processing 1.0

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Microsoft SmallBasic

Image by via CrunchBase

Microsoft have released a new version of basic designed for children and novices called SmallBasic. It has only fifteen keywords to learn to allow newbies to get up and running quickly. The web site says that

Small Basic is a simple and easy programming language with a friendly environment that provides a cool and fun way of learning programming. From making turtles animations to running a slide show on the desktop, Small Basic makes programming natural and effortless.

Might be a good way of introducing programming to your classes.

Featured Windows Download: Small Basic Teaches Programming Fundamentals

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Tutorials for Programming Languages

Image via Wikipedia

I've blogged before about StackOverflow.

For those who haven't come across it here's the site's own introduction:

Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers — regardless of platform or language. Jump in and share your software engineering expertise! No registration or account required.

As a part of this aim it has put together this page containing tutorials for many different programming languages. Many of them are on-line and free - perfect for education...

Language Books/Tutorials for popular languages - Stack Overflow

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