The Education Dept's ERIC Clearinghouse gave notice of this recent report on educational potential in Second Life:

ERIC #: ED493670
Title: Proceedings of the Second Life Education Workshop, Part of the Second Life Community Convention (1st, San Francisco, California, August 18-20, 2006)

As a volume of proceedings, this is a compilation of papers. My favorite paper based solely on title from these proceedings is "Down the Rabbit Hole ... or How the NMC Took the Red Pill and Got a Second Life (Larry Johnson)."

From a government information perspective though, people might be more interested in "Designing an Educational Island inside Second Life for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) (Eric J. Hackathorn)"

Both papers can be accessed at the link above.

It also appears that at least some of the content in the ERIC database is visible to Google, since I received this link in a Google Alert. It would be interesting for someone to research whether ALL of the ERIC content is accessible through Google since we've reported on significant amounts of government information are hidden from Google.