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This isn’t definitive of course, education is starting to spread all over the place and there is lots of education happening in SL. In today’s melting pot:

Continues below the fold

USC has opened a micrcontinent (4 sims) including Public Diplomacy Island adding 3 new sims to its much older Annenberg Island. According to the Daily Trojan article SL offers the inevitable networking solutions and the ability to meet people from different cultures, but has also enabled people to look at things such as refugee camps in Darfur in a new way too. There are a number of international partnerships already established and the US State Department is watching the programme with interest.

Havard Law school ran a mock trial of the Josh Wolf case. A report on the trial can be found on Virtually Blind. Rerunning trials and the like is, I believe, a fairly common process in law school, and easy enough to do in SL too. What makes this newsworthy is that the RL defendant, having been released from prison, attended to watch it again. It might not be a first, but it is an interesting wrinkle and one facilitated by SL.

The a href=http://www.sleducating.com/>SLEDucating blog has been around for a while, providing comments and in particular audio blogging for SL educators. What has changed, is that Beth Ritter-Guth, who will be running open access American and British Literature classes in SL starting soon is using SLEDucating to publish her course material, and, of relevance to the next issue, in written and audio forms. The classes will run at 6pm SL Time on Mondays for American Literature and Tuesdays for British Literature - my technology and Google Calendars seem not to like each other, so I’m not sure of the start date, but I’d guess next week or the week after.

Finally, the main SLED list had a bit of a storm in a teacup about teaching wholly in SL, particularly as the various access for disabled students legislations are considered. One US-based college administrator feels he cannot offer 100% SL-based courses because of poor accessibility, particularly for those who are blind or have severe motor disabilities. I’m not 100% convinced these problems are insurmountable (but UK law is different to US law about this) but I will freely acknowledge that whilst SL does have some good features for disabled access, it could do a LOT more and will have to do so some time soon if it really is going to continue to be “the future of the internet.”

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