Michael/Terran's learning continued

As I met and interviewed the kind and generous educators who were the subjects of this research, I found that they represent institutions of every size and character. Tiny private colleges, community colleges and systems, and major research universities have presences on Second Life. Some of these presences are vast archipelagos of linked islands taking up miles of virtual landscape, while other institutions have a cottage and a sandbox on 520 meters of rented land. Intellagirl Robbins wrote on her Second Life Researchers (SLR) listserv in March of 2008 that there were 4700 members of the SLED (Second Life Educators) listserv, and another 1200 members of her researchers list, and that there were 1300 regions in SL involved in education and training.
The types of disciplines that use SL represent the full spectrum of higher education, while it appears that education; instructional design, library science and media studies have the heaviest proportions. It appears that every sort of course taught in RL has at least one early adopter experimenting with using virtual worlds. There is little in Second Life that places limits on the sorts of learning that can occur. The lack of “hands-on” learning that one might find essential for some courses is balanced by the incredible opportunities for constructivist and experiential learning, simulations and immersion.
Not all educators in SL are of the same mind about the role that it plays in courses taught in-world. It has been refreshing to be associated with a community of researchers and educators who agree to disagree while making ongoing dialogue and a push toward innovation in teaching their common causes. SL may play a role as a technological enhancement of RL classroom activities, an experimental pedagogical tool, or the actual topic of the course. It may provide the environment: one that is on one end of the spectrum a replacement lecture hall or amphitheatre, and on the other end a well-designed learning environment that leverages all of the features of a synthetic world. SL does act as one large simulation, albeit one that is actually alive and organically functioning. It is a model for how virtual communities form and prosper, how economies develop, and how a new sort of culture is born and matures. Some educators hold great hope for ethnographic and other sorts of field studies in SL, while others have been pleasantly surprised at the social context, the in-the-hall or commons experiences that even brick and mortar institutions seem to be loosing as the undergraduate demographics change.