From time to time, I mention Studio Wikitecture -- an SL group, open to anyone, that is exploring how to use SL as a platform for collaborative architectural design. As you may know, the group recently won the Open Architecture Network's Founder's Award in an international design competition (http://50x15.amd.com/en-us/news_feature_item.aspx?iid=106) and has been featured in the RL media, e.g. O’Reilly Media(http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/wikitecture-radical-collabor.html), and the Architectural Record (http://archrecord.construction.com/archrecord2/work/0810/wikitecture.asp).
Studio Wikitecture's current project is different from the last in that the goal is to produce a design for an SL, not a RL, build. The University of Alabama has asked the Studio Wikitecture group to design a virtual classroom building for teaching RL University courses in SL. The University has put up a $250,000L award, to be shared among the SL contributors, according to the degree of their contributions. (The contributors themselves determine everyone's relative contributions.)
The current project has been underway for almost two months, but has received relatively little attention, perhaps because it is "only" a design for a virtual world. The University recently extended the deadline to Jan 19, 2009. This is plenty of time for new contributors to come up to date on what has happened so far, and to make their own contribution.
Anyone, with or without SL building skills, is free to join the group and fully participate. But the exercise will probably be most rewarding for people who are willing to think hard about what it will take to really make SL a good place for teaching, plus have the skills (building, but also scripting, animation, ...) to concretely render their ideas in SL.
If you're interested in participating, the best place to start is probably http://studiowikitecture.wordpress.com .
Hope to see some of you join the group.