Reflection on "7 Things You Should Know About Virtual Worlds"

Recently, I came across Educause's short introduction to virtual worlds. Within this short piece, the authors describe a scenario where a student doctor interacts with virtual patients while being supervised by her instructors. In this scenario, the instructors are free to pause the interaction at any time to provide feedback on developing patient relationships. The thought of this seems intriguing to me- I imagined a lesson in which I sent my students into a virtual world with a discussion topic- perhaps to research and share their findings about a historical event. From there, I could moderate and adjust the flow of conversation as necessary by providing feedback. This seems like a neat laboratory to try a real constructivist approach to lesson development. Has anyone tried, or can offer recommendations about virtual worlds that might work for that purpose?

References Educause (2006, June). 7 things you should know about virtual worlds. Retrieved from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7015.pdf