Croquet anyone??

croquet.jpg

Here’s something I like the look of. Andrea sent me a note recently in response to my thoughts about LMSs. She recommended I take a look at Croquet , a combination of open source computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users.

I had a good look around the site – there’s plenty of information about the product, including these gems from their introductory section:

  • Croquet is a computer software architecture built from the ground up with a focus on deep collaboration between large numbers of users.
  • Croquet makes it possible to change and author virtual worlds in collaboration with others inside them while they are operating.
  • Croquet users, with appropriate sharing privileges, may visit and work inside any other Croquet-based world on the network.
  • Croquet users have the ability to create and modify a personal information space and create fully dynamic connections to any other Croquet spaces and network-deliverable information resources (such as the WWW).
  • Croquet utilizes a software environment where anything can be created or represented; where everything can be modified; where development and user environments are one in the same.

The product is designed to with interoperability in mind – running on Windows, MacOS or Linux etc.

From my small poke around it looks like this product meets most of the expectations I’d have of a future online learning environment – keep up the good work!

One thought on “Croquet anyone??

  1. Hi Derek, I saw this demonstrated at the San Diego e-Agenda Summit last December. It was very impressive although still very much in the development phase. I reflected on it an as far as I could see (apart from the technical stuff) the most significant point was that it moved away from a book metaphor (2 dimensional) for the Internet driven by hyperlinks to one where, starting with a flat and bare landscape, users can build a world of their own that is 3 dimensional.

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