Charlie Nesson spoke to the alumni association today about Second Life and some of the problems we must address if we are to use it as an educational platform.
He said that in the case of Second Life, he was concerned that in the course of developing educational strategies– which could scale to the breadth of the Internet– we have to develop within the framework of a corporation, Linden Labs.

One of the questions is whether the next generation of immersive 3-D environments can be seen as an open educational environment. Open in the sense of its fundamental organization as part of the university world. That is a challenge for those who are in the educational business.

He pointed out that the possibility of the Internet acting as “mode of communications that could aggregate willing energies of institutions towards a common goal of creating open education” has been in the background but now is coming towards the fore.

We have a growing realization that the Internet is our library of the future. Where we do our research. That open environment is one that suggests utility of all sorts, of which Second Life is interesting, but very much only one.

-yvette wohn