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"Warcraft: Culture, Gender and Identity," a credit-awarding class being offered at Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota. At the helm of this innovative course is Landon Pirius, Ph.D., also known as Nodnal the Gnome Warrior of Blackwater Raiders-US. No stranger to the convergence of WoW and academia, Dr. Pirius wrote his doctoral dissertation on "Massively Multiplayer Online Virtual Environments: A Potential Locale for Intercultural Training." We didn't go quite that deep in this interview; we simply visited with him about his wildly successful college course and how it's helping shape modern educational methodologies.

Learning From Online Worlds; Teaching In Second Life was a research project at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London. The project was funded by the Eduserv Foundation. The team worked part-time on the project from June 2007 to May 2008. Update: We are teaching more MA sessions in Second Life in spring 2009. Introduction: During 2007-2008, the project team, Diane Carr, Martin Oliver and Andrew Burn, researched learning in two online, social worlds, Second Life and World of Warcraft.