New Zealand’s Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology will receive $500K to explore educational development in Second Life, as first blogged about here by Arweena Stardust, a New Zealand-based IT tutor for NMIT, who goes by the name of Dr. Clare Atkins in RL.

In an interview with the Nelson Mail, Dr. Atkins talked about some of the goals the funding hopes to reach.

“The big part really is identifying the teaching methods that are likely to be most suitable to Second Life,” she said. “The setting can be tailored to a classroom or the workplace or a setting normally impossible to achieve, for example, within a beating heart, a nuclear reactor or a fuel pump.”

The money from the NZ government will be spent on the following, according to Atkins’ blog posting from March of this year:

“…a research report looking at the pedagogy of immersive environments, the identification and building of two learning activities designed to take best advantage of SL, the introduction of educators to Second Life and assistance for them to effectively teach there, the piloting and evaluation of the learning activities with students by these educators.”

Partnering with Marlborough will be Otago Polytechnic, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, IBM, and the Wellington Institute of Technology.