The quest

LOL! presents the solution to the great Open Life treasure hunt which took place 11th/12th July.

On arriving at the landing point on OLiVe treasure hunters are greeted by a large black sign announcing the treasure hunt and giving the first clue:
Type the correct postcode of The Open University's Walton Hall headquarters.

A quick look at the OU website provides the answer MK7 6AA. Typing this into local chat brings up the second clue:
I face the cardinals but tell one of them a lie, just for you.

The cardinal points are North, South, East and West and our clock tower has a face on all four sides. So off to the clock tower we go to discover one of the sides has a hand missing. Clicking the rogue number 11 brings up the third clue:
There are many free houses on OLiVe, but only one free house. To find out where to trot off to next, see what's on TV.

As stated there is only one free house on OLiVe - The Open Arms. So off we trot to the pub. In the corner hangs a TV and above that a picture of horses. Clicking on the picture brings the fourth clue:
Count the legs. It'll save time later.

Easy enough - 8. Next stop is the paddock on Open Life Island to see the horses from the picture and here we are given a clue to the first part of the codeword:
Remember the first part of the code word is the opposite of female.

So that’s male. We also obtain clue five:
Lucky cows might use this to keep from floating away.

It’s off to Open Life Ocean to search for an anchor. Once located a quick click on it gives both the second part of the codeword and the next clue:
The second part of the code word is NKY. Your next clue is Sailors R.I.P.

Sailors RIP turns out to be Davy Jones’ locker. Another look round the ocean floor and we locate a locker. Clicking on it brings up the seventh clue:
You are SO close to the treasure now! X marks the spot, but just where is X? Remember the erroneous hour? Add nothing and that will be your goal. But Y should you bother? Just ask yourself how many horse legs there were. Add nothing once more, then tread the ocean floor.

From this we deduce our treasure lies at a spot with the co-ordinates X=110, Y=80 on the ocean floor. Sure enough when we get to this spot there is a green sphere which, when clicked, confirms we have succeeded in our quest:
Congratulations! You have found the treasure.

So that’s it folks, hope you all enjoyed it!

SLOODLE

Kickaha Wolfenhaut tells us about the next big thing.

The Open Life regions are witnessing a quiet revolution. After months of planning and technical jiggery-pokery by the computer boffins at Walton Hall, we finally took SLOODLE out of its box this morning. Over the coming weeks and months it will be tested with the help of an elite band of OU volunteers.

SLOODLE stands for Simulation Linked Object Oriented Learning Environment. No, I didn’t have a clue either, but let’s just say that while it might stand for Simulation Blah-de-blah-blah, what it actually means is this: Cool stuff in Second Life. SLOODLE is a set of tools and web based widgets that together enable us to do something hitherto impossible: Link the Second Life avatar you use around the OU islands to the “real” you – the one that logs onto http://www.open.ac.uk/ to submit TMAs and read course materials. For example, a quiz created by course staff on the website can be taken in Second Life and its results then fed straight back into your student record. And that’s just the beginning.

I foresee a time when virtual worlds will form a mainstream part of many Open University courses. I won’t rake over the case for virtual proximity, or start quoting from the massive amount of published research – chances are, if you are reading this, that I’d be preaching to the choir. Open Life has already hosted exploratory building tutorials for an engineering subject and unless you are a complete SL Muggle, it doesn’t take much effort to imagine an assignment in, say, an art & design course which is set, created and submitted within Second Life. SLOODLE’s Prim Drop tool makes the administrative side of such a proposition far easier and more scalable.
On the next page of this article you’ll find a list of the main SLOODLE tools and short descriptions, but I’d just like to give a special mention to one. Once you take rank paranoia and media hype out of the equation, the single biggest (and only really compelling) objection to the mainstreaming of virtual worlds in education is accessibility. Or rather, the lack of it. I’m not just talking about those with visual disabilities, for whom Second Life must seem at best a pain in the backside and at worst an unattainable Shangri-La, but also the technically impoverished – those for whom a high-specification computer and high-speed Internet connection are geographically impossible or just plain unaffordable. When defending Second Life and its peers in the face of jeering Luddites (did I say that?!!) the one statement which stops me in my tracks is this: “I can’t run Second Life.” There’s no objection in that. It’s just a bald fact. Enter WebIntercom, my favourite SLOODLE tool. WebIntercom allows those without Second Life to participate in live text chat with a group of in-world classmates. And what’s more, it’ll do it on a machine which would likely melt if its owner attempted to run Second Life. OK, so WebIntercom doesn’t allow non-SL users to build in-world. OK, so the interface looks like the north end of a southbound cow. But the biggest obstacle to mainstream SL has definitely begun to evaporate before our very eyes.

SLOODLE Website: http://www.sloodle.org/

YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/Sloodle

SLOODLE on Twitter: http://twitter.com/SLOODLE_News

SLOODLE on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2396239341&ref=search


Some other SLOODLE tools

SLOODLE Presenter* - Create media presentations mixing images, video and web-pages, without having to upload images into Second Life.

Sloodle WebIntercom - Synchronizes chat (live!) between a course chat and Second Life.

Sloodle Toolbar - Wearable toolbar/HUD for blogging, classroom gestures and more. A SLURL for the user’s position and a snapshot of the location may be automatically included with a blog entry. Note that at this time the OU’s preferred blog system is a non-standard one and is therefore not compatible with SLOODLE. We may be able to recode the SLOODLE side in the future.

Sloodle Quiz Chair - Fetches questions from the course Quiz module and gives students the quiz in-world.

Sloodle Pile On Quiz - A multi-user quiz to involve a whole class.

Sloodle Prim Drop - Accepts Second Life objects and logs transactions in a Web database. A great way for students to hand in assignments in-world!

Sloodle MetaGloss - Lets you access a course glossary in-world

Sloodle Choice - Lets students respond to a course Choice in-world

Sloodle Vending Machine - Allows web-controlled and in-world distribution of objects for courses, tutorials and other activities.

Sloodle Awards System - Enables points to be awarded to students in Second Life, and also connects with the course grade book.

Jacquie Sholokhov

Elsa Dickins tells us the story behind the name of our former halls and the village tor - Sholokhov.

Jacquie Bennett was an associate lecturer on several courses, including T175, and was a teaching fellow with COLMSCT at the OU. Her project was to get an island in Second Life - called Cetlment - and see how people might use it. She was a lifelong gamer and had been in SL as Jacquie Sholokhov since SL started. She always believed virtual worlds were going to be big for education and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up with her.

It was Jacquie that got me into SL by nagging me to give it a try, and when I did I was blown away by the potential of it, and I immediately started working with her. She was one of my closest friends and we often said that we talked to each other more than our families, as we would be on Skype or in SL all day, often joined by lizit.

We were both tutoring T175 at the time and we started bringing our tutor groups into SL and working with them together, and it was all very new and exciting and our students were really enthusiastic, so we had great results. About 11 months after we started working together in SL that cohort of T175 came to an end and we wrote a paper about our experiences, to present at the international conference on computers in learning in Austria, in September 2007. I wasn't able to go, so she went by herself to present it and the night she arrived she said she was going to bed early with a migraine. In fact she had a brain haemorrhage and died that night - the hotel staff found her in the morning. Her death was totally unexpected.

COLMSCT bought a new island, which was Open Life (Linden wouldn't let us transfer Cetlment so it had to be abandoned), and we put it next to Schomebase. Jacquie and I were both very active members of Schome and were working on the Schome project in the teen grid at the time (the kids had an inworld ceremony as an act of remembrance, which was very moving). I did the development of Open Life and Schomebase and when the halls on Open Life needed a name it was a good way to keep a reference to her memory on the island. Nobody ever asked about the name, which was as I’d hoped, so it was just part of the way things were.

Jacquie and Elsa enjoying a tipple, early Cetlment days

Cut to the village, and when we moved here and didn't have the halls as such any more we had the requirement for a spiritual/peaceful area, and it seemed a natural thing to transfer the name. It means something to those of us who knew her, and it has a whole other meaning to people who were around for the original halls, which is nice.

She wasn't a sentimental person, she was very kind and a brilliant tutor but could also be bitingly funny, and she wouldn't have appreciated anything soppy, nor would it have been appropriate, particularly as the project expanded and more and more people came on board who had never known her in the first place, so I like the way it worked out.

She had a husband and 2 young children, and about a year before she died they moved to a remote farm in Wales and bought some sheep and goats. They loved their new lifestyle and Jacquie was learning to sheer and spin in order to start a business selling their own wool. I do believe that however successful it became she would always have continued to spend significant time each day in Second Life.