This seems great:
Title: World of Teachcraft: The Learning Quest
Date: November 2 – December 16, 2010
Location: Rockcliffe University http://slurl.com/secondlife/Rockcliffe%20Library/215/73/23
Campus portion 5 pm SLT Tuesday and Thursday (On Rockcliffe in Second Life)
Reporting over 12 million paying subscribers, World of Warcraft (WoW) is the most popular massively multi-player online role-playing game on the Internet. Rockcliffe is looking for 6 adventurous educators to participate in World of Teachcraft course!
Your Quest: After participating in a 6 week pilot project, you should have experienced, researched and analyzed how this MMORPG could be used in your classroom, online course, after school program or professional development activity.
Your Battleground: Each week, participants will attend a synchronous meeting in Second Life. World of Warcraft will be used for the laboratory portion and online discussions will take place in at Rockcliffe University’s Moodle course.
I loved playing World of Warcraft but I was so addictive I decided to stop. Recently I could not longer resist and I returned with a new character, Wilbear.
Note however that the course also uses Second Life, which is an open-ended while World of Warcraft – to my knowledge – is focused on a specific game experience. I guess World of Warcraft is more popular among younger people, just because it provides well-defined goals even though it allows for a variety of behaviors (for instance catering for players who primarily want to roleplay). The open-ended nature of Second Life is more flexible but makes people wonder “what the hell am I doing here”, so it seems a nice idea to combine both environments in this learning experience.
More information can be found in this page on the site of Rockcliffe University Consortium.
Because I can’t resist, here is the trailer for World of Warcraft ‘Cataclysm’: