At the rate technology is growing these days, professors are taking advantage of newly-marketed pieces to make learning more interesting and more convenient. The appearance of Kindles to replace eight-pound textbooks is slowly catching on, and iClickers are used to take attendance instead of the regular pen-and-paper roll-call. The other craze, it seems, is professors holding classes in a Second Life environment—that is, students congregate as “avatars” in a virtual reality world set up like a classroom without having to trouble themselves with the commute.

This movement of education into a virtual reality world is still a fledgling idea, and only a handful of colleges possessing tons of available bandwidth have experimented with this concept. Yet somehow, there is a sort of growth potential for education and even work environments online. In fact, there have been numerous case studies and success stories of businesses which participate in a Second Life meeting. Some notable names even vouch for the use of virtual reality to conduct business, such as IBM and Intel.

Colleges are catching on, too. Harvard Law School bought Second Life “land” in order to build a virtual courtroom; this area was used by law students who could further practice their skills for argument. The Arts Institutes of California (San Diego) and Pittsburgh have already created their own Second Life classrooms. Protein and chemical structures are rendered online to help students visualize objects from their science classes. Other universities even have nursing simulations that try to mimic real-life experience.

According to Joanna Scott in The Guardian, “Researchers are creating 3D objects and are able to walk around them as avatars. I see particular applications for genetic coding, mathematics, chemistry and architecture. After all, even top mathematicians find it difficult to visualise certain structures. I think Second Life has the potential to be really, really important for the future of research.”

There are other ways to take advantage of the virtual reality program. Architects and computer programmers can design and manipulate objects and buildings to their vision. All of Second Life is user-created, and people on the site have its own way of rewarding the talented designers and object-manipulators. Plus, there is also extra practice in the scripting languages.

Of course, these are only the beginning stages. Hands-on experience is still irreplaceable, and with every user-manipulated program, there are still things students need to learn before diving into the virtual reality world. Creating a character may be the simple part of being immersed into the Second Life environment, but students would also have to deal with dressing and moving the character from one particular space to another. Not to mention while there is some good to hiding behind an avatar, eye-to-eye contact is lacking, and educators find that it is almost impossible to gauge the students’ interest levels through the use of computer-generated graphics.

All in all, however, the virtual world is still evolving and opening new doors for educators out there.