Virtual Education spreads the word that the Education Grid was launched Friday June 20 at the Sun Microsystems Island in Second Life.

The Education Grid is a project of the Immersive Education Initiative, a group comprised of research centers, education groups, Sun Microsystems, and others. The main purpose of the launch was to connect initiative members, mostly educators, with an early preview of Sun Microsystems Laboratory’s Project Wonderland virtual world servers and to give users a chance to see what a virtual education space might look like in the near future.

VirtuEd provides a good overview of the launch itself, going into detail about the pros and cons of each of the servers on which the Grid was hosted. Overall, VirtuEd seemed pretty impressed, even with the cautionary note thrown their way from Aaron Walsh, Director of the Grid Institute” “Understand that this is VERY EARLY-STAGE TECHNOLOGY: Please be patient, and prepare for a bumpy ride.”

But VirtuEd gives Sun credit for opening up the project at such an early Beta stage. The hope, they write, is that “this move is partly to build excitement and involvement in a platform that will eventually be open source and community supported.”

VirtuEd also follows up their report with a list of related blog posts on the launch, including ones fromNew Media On The Go, Tim Wang, Fleep, and Yaximixche.