More of Michael's summary: "classroom" communicating in SL

All of the educators do seem to agree that the collaboration and helping behaviors that students exhibit through design and as a by product of the virtual environment represent benefits that are near to impossible to realize in the “flat web world” (two dimensional Learning Management Systems). It feels like a place where students from differing time zones and cultures can feel a “togetherness”. And many speak of the sense of presence and heightened level of social comfort afforded by the near anonymous and playful nature of the av as a representation of the self. Nearly all of the educators I spoke with agree that using a virtual 3D identity, as an extension of RL. will be common in the near future. It is just where we are going, and becoming proficient at living and learning in a second life will prove to be a survival tool.
I was interested in the extent to which courses taught using SL were completely in-world. The answer to this question is “it depends”. Most of the educators using SL as a teaching tool or environment seem to do so as a supplement to some RL classroom experience, although as educators become experienced using synthetic environments and new pedagogies move toward guided collaborative learning as the standard, a significant and growing number of courses are completely scheduled in-world, especially those that lend themselves toward distance learning technologies, with students and instructors participating from around the globe. The need for a RL location for anything more than an administrative center is diminishing.
Before I had any experience of educating in Second Life, I thought that the form of communication was a significant notion, one that might influence the appropriateness of using a virtual world. My question was born of my prior research into distance learning, and my assumption that asynchronous communication was a barrier to student engagement in learning. Not every undergraduate can feel in touch with his or her classmates when the mode of communication is much like email. It appears that the chat generation has already conquered that barrier. In SL, there are two nearly synchronous channels of text communication: one public, and one potentially private. In addition, Second Life introduced voice communication in 2006, which has evolved to the level of high quality synchronous voice-over-internet.
There is no common mix of these channels in use during on in-world class, but there almost always seems to be a mix of all three. The Web2 student is proficient at managing multiple near synchronous chat conversations in addition to real time voice, and they use it all. Much as a RL brick and mortar class might, SL classes come to quick and organic agreement about the mix of signals, and who controls the voice. It is common for the instructor to hold the control of voice until students are invited to join, while the public chat is the formal classroom conversation and the private IM is the “backchannel”. Because for the next few years not all users will have the same voice technology available to them, some educators use text exclusively to insure that every student is receiving the same messages. An additional benefit might be gleaned by using the private IM channel as a group channel because an av can choose to have this chat saved to text, providing automatic lecture notes. Programs that activate gestures and mouth movements when an avatars driver uses voice are in development; these may change the dynamics of class communications somewhat.