Read a fantastic post this morning about videoconferencing and virtual worlds – which is better for education? Seems virtual is. (surprise, surprise)

This blog post from Campus Technology talks about Sun’s Project Wonderland and the Media Grid. I was in Boston in January for a summit about the Media Grid and posted about that initiative at the time.  It’s a great project and certainly has some exciting potential for education in the coming years.

It’s certainly not time for everyone to abandon all other virtual worlds and run to Project Wonderland and the Media Grid, but it’s exciting to think about what changes lie in the future and how virtual worlds will really start to shape how we learn, interact, and build communities.  With Vivaty’s public beta, Google’s “Lively”, and the announcement that avatars were able to move from one virtual world (Second Life) into another (Open Sim), this is a crazy exciting week for people working with virtual worlds.  So glad to be part of it.

With the launch of Sun’s Project Wonderland toolkit, and my recent trip to Boston for the Digital Media Summit on Immersive Education, I’m realizing that my avatar is going to need a way to move easily between virtual environments – she needs a passport.

There’s been discussion of this recently – of ways to allow your avatar and identity to move with you through the different virtual environments and I for one, applaud this. Micala should be able to live in SL or WoW, or Kaneva, or There, or Project Wonderland, or wherever else she wants to be. Just like I have a specific email address, I should have a specific “passport” ID that allows me portability between these worlds.

There are a lot of VW’s out there now.. and it’s really just “getting started”. Think about what we’ll have in five or ten years. I fully believe that there will never be “ONE” virtual world that we all log into to do every single thing we need to do online, so we need ways to move around easily.

Plus my avatar’s passport photo would look a MILLION times better than my real passport photos have *ever* looked.