Learning Platform Mashup

After having been immersed in learning platforms for a number of months now, I find an increasing dissonance between my vision of where we should be in terms of functionality of these tools and what is possible in practice. I want a mashup and I'm getting... a flashback to the early 90s. Observe:







MASHUP





LEARNING PLATFORM


Notice the difference? Obviously this is an extreme example and some learning platforms offer a lot more in the way of customisability and aggregation of multiple sources of information. But they ALL have a long way to go to reach my idea of the ideal.

In the quest to achieve what I want using the tools which are available, I have turned to the world of widgets. I had never realised what an explosion of widgets there has been recently. You can embed a widget for anything from creating your own penguin:



to evaluating the environmental impact of paper products:



Before very long we will be able to embed anything into anything else (mashup heaven!). Maybe learning platforms need not progress at all. Maybe they need to regress and simply become a widget canvas, pure aggregators of information - whether this be at the behest of the the user or the platform. A learning platform could intelligently assess the best information to provide to a particular user at a particular time in a particular context and pool this information together dynamically and in real-time. The technology is already here, but when will I see it on my desktop...

Tools for a Second Life

I try to keep a keen eye on how virtual environments are being used in educational contexts and have come across two spin-offs of Second Life recently which show great educational potential. They are built on a tool called OpenSim.
The first is a totally non-commercial virtual grid called OSGrid where anyone can sign up for a free account and create their own region without spending money on a monthly subscription.
The other grid I stumbled upon was ScienceSim, a Science focused grid where groups of Scientists can run simulations and experiments. The distinction with ScienceSim is that it is decentralised - users can host their own region on their own servers using OpenSim. From an educational perspective, this is potentially very powerful. Schools can have their own private second life running on their own servers with no data relating to their student body being housed elsewhere. This is a highly preferable situation from a data protection perspective and allows schools to develop their own MUVE without cost or e-safety concerns as they can choose the links they want to create from their environment. So could we be seeing Virtually Literal Learning Gateways in the not too distant future? Both ScienceSim and OSGrid are accessible using the Second Life viewer, just go to the relevant sites for instructions on how to connect.
Another technology I have come across which may bridge the gap is Sloodle. This tool is a SL plugin which allows communication between SL and a school's implementation of the popular Moodle learning platform. This gives the school the ability to create virtual real-world tasks within SL which are then linked directly to their Learning Platform for assessment and review. The Moodle user accounts of students can be linked to their SL user accounts, blurring the boundary between the two even further.
One last interesting find to do with SL is SLiSchool, an initiative from the Middlesborough City Learning Centre. They have recreated a yet-to-be-built BSF school in Second Life in order to allow teachers and pupils to teach and learn in the school before it is built in order to iron out any issues before plans are set in stone (as it were!). I thought that this should be possible and wondered how it might be done after a conversation with a BSF developer about the issue of designing a building for people who had yet to use it. He said they rely heavily on (physical) 3D models to gauge opinion (that's SO last century, I thought). And lo and behold, on further research - someone has already done what I had imagined. Shouldn't ALL BSF developments be done this way??