But what if you are on a course where skills such as digital image editing or modelling or PR or whatever are part of the course? 😉

Downes had a number of good points, and educators using Second Life for their teaching of course should ask themselves why and what they hope to gain out of it. In fact these discussions go on all the time within the Second Life education mailing list.

From the outside, when presented with a big list of things that students could potentially learn from working in Second Life, I’m not at all surprised that it isn’t too convincing. Despite being fairly active in the SL education community, I don’t think it is the future for everything and I don’t think it should be. But I do think Virtual Worlds with user created content are certain to become established as a useful educational technology across a wide range of disciplines in the coming years.