One of my clients, Cerego Japan, has built a social learning platform called iKnow that helps learners create and share educational content. They have already amassed several hundred thousand users in Japan, and having added support for numerous other languages from Arabic to Klingon, they are now poised to expand throughout the rest of the world.

What iKnow didn’t have up until now is was a synchronous learning element. Although there was all kinds of ways to share learning materials, the actual learning in iKnow is individual, with a personal browser-based Flash application.

Enter Second Life.

Our Second Life / iKnow mashup uses the iKnow API to pull lists from iKnow into the metaverse. The result is a multi-player game where each question choice appears as its own object, and avatars compete with each other to be the first to jump on top of it.

This builds on some of the work we’ve done before in Sloodle, where we built a Second Life interface for the Moodle Quiz. But iKnow content also features images and sounds, so those are included too. We’ve uploaded the sound and audio for a few featured iKnow lists, and Second Life’s Quicktime-based parcel sound and media for the rest.

Teleport here to try.

One of the main barriers for educators working in Second Life has been the high spec required to run the software.

In Sloodle, we have tried to lessen the impact if these problems with our web intercom - an object which allows chat from the 3D virtual world to be relayed in real time to a traditional 2D chatroom in Moodle.

Japanese company Sun Inc. have gone a step further with a Java-based version of the client that runs on low-spec PCs, inside a web browser. They released a Japanese-language beta last week, and promise that a version supporting other languages is in the works - as well as versions of their viewer targeting Japanese mobile phones. (Their Japanese press release (PDF) is here.)

You can login to their system here. (The login form asks for your avatar’s first name, last name and password.) Once logged in, you can navigate using the normal Second Life navigation, and use the buttons on their page for chat, navigation, etc. For impatient non-Japanese speakers, here’s a bookmarklet you can use to get the Tokyozero Viewer buttons In English.