The SaLamander Project

The SaLamander Project is a project coordinated by The Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE) at the University of Oregon to create a system enabling Second Life educators to find places and materials of educational value in Second Life (SL) and "tag" them using a set of metadata descriptors for placement in the MERLOT.org repository of digital learning objects as part of MERLOT's Center for Learning in Virtual Environments (CLIVE). Using a Heads Up Display within SL, users select a landmark that they wish to submit for peer review and are prompted - through a mix of drop down menus and typing answers into a chat window - to detail the Second Life teaching or learning material. When complete, the HUD sends the descriptions to Sloog.org, a web database of user-tagged sites of interest, where anyone can search through the Second Life URLs sorted by users and keywords. All tags with the "Salamander" tag on Sloog.org are then filtered by the SaLamander Team at CATE and the appropriate ones placed within the SaLamander Media Wiki community - where educators can register and further describe, discuss, and vote on the relative value of these HUD-generated wiki stubs. Those educational plots within Second Life that registered members consistently rate as quality are then checked by content experts and placed within the MERLOT's CLIVE virtual teaching commons."Discussions are underway with the Immersive Education Initiative about the potential for adapting the HUD for reviewing and rating Immersive Education content and enabling the HUD to support any Immersive Education virtual world platform including Croquet and Wonderland.

view recording of presentation