Crushed velvet curtains and lava lamps

In a provocative post on the Ancient Geeks blog, Martin Poulter decries the current emphasis on research into Second Life as being irrelevant to the needs of mainstream educators. I particularly like:

I expect that some sort of virtual world will be seriously mainstream in the future, maybe even a killer app for education, but I’m sure that it will be very different from SL, which we’ll remember the way we now look back at crushed velvet curtains and lava lamps.

I don't strongly disagree with the main thrust of what Martin says, though I'm not totally convinced that SL is really seen as 'cool' (not by the people I know anyway). As I mention in my comment on his post, I also think we need to distinguish between the level of noise around SL (which is still relatively high) and the level of educational research funding being made available (which, I think, is still quite low).

And whilst I agree that people tend to be a bit sniffy about the use of YouTube for educational purposes, I don't think there's a lack of activity (or noise) around the use of audio and video podcasting more generally.