I think the issue isn't so much that universities aren't taking an interest in SL, or other virtual worlds, but that mainstream support is still very poor at many institutions. There have recently been a smattering of blog postings defending the role of IT Service departments in supporting e-learning (e.g. http://www.masmithers.com/2009/12/09/direct-from-the-innovation-prevention-department/), and I find these arguments to be largely disingenuous - if not completely naive. In recent weeks, working for different universities, I've encountered IT departments that will install SL just for a workshop, then uninstall it directly afterwards. At another university I was guaranteed a computer lab that had SL running on the machines, only to get there and find that it wasn't. Luckily the incompetence of the room timetabling people was cancelled out by the incompetence of the IT people (they'd forgotten to set up admin protection) so the students could download SL and we could go ahead with the session. This is a constant battle educators still face, that really we shouldn't be. Virtual worlds technology has been around for so long now that ITS departments should have caught up. If you have your own machines, and your own funding, using VWs for teaching is possible, if not, then most educators in most institutions will be forced to give up.