New Media Consortium

From Sl Wiki

The New Media Consortium describes itself thus:

"The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of nearly 200 leading colleges, universities, museums, corporations, and other learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. NMC member institutions are found in almost every state in the US, across Canada, and in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Among the membership are an elite list of the most highly regarded colleges and universities in the world, as well as a growing list of innovative museums, research centers, foundations, and forward-thinking companies.

The consortium serves as a catalyst for the development of new applications of technology to support learning and creative expression, and sponsors programs and activities designed to stimulate innovation, encourage collaboration, and recognize excellence among its member institutions. Through its many projects, its comprehensive web site, and its series of international conferences, the NMC stimulates dialog and understanding through the exploration of promising ideas, technologies, and applications."

With regard to its substantial involvement in Second Life, the NMC has this to say:

"The NMC Campus (in SL) is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments.

Ultimately, Second Life was chosen, and working with an advisory board drawn from its membership, the NMC began designing a space within Second Life expressly to support collaboration, learning, insightful interaction, and experimentation — and to encourage exploration of the potential of virtual environments.

The goal of the project was to create an immersive 3-D virtual environment for higher education and museum professionals to interact, collaborate, and experiment that would provide a low entry threshold for newcomers, while simultaneously exploring the boundaries of what is possible. "

As the membership list is so large here is a link to it!
They also have a wiki that is worth checking out.