Academic research on Second Life
Although you may not realise it, Second Life has a huge group of educators active within it, many of whom have been active for some time. The process of writing academic papers however, is long and sometimes painful. We are starting to see these papers appearing dotted around the place:
- Jennings and Collins (download the paper as PDF) survey some 170 institutions with a presence in Second Life.
- Kamel Boulos et al look at Second Life as a tool for health and medical education and its implications for librarians in these areas (abstract only – full article with subscription or single payment).
There will, doubtless, be many of more these to come, and there are probably a few I've missed already – but we are starting to see Second Life enter the academic mainstream: not only in use by many institutions around the world, but appearing in peer-reviewed journals as well as at conferences.
I'm too much the academic not to cite properly:
Jennings, Nancy, and Chris Collins. (2007) ??Virtual or Virtually U: Educational Institutions in Second Life.?? International Journal of Social Sciences, 2(3), 180-187
Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Lee Hetherington, Steve Wheeler (2007) Second Life: an overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health education . Health Information and Libraries Journal 24 (4), 233–245.
[Thanks to MB Chevalier and Chris Collins for the tips]