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technology at the moment, not as a destination in itself but as a
signpost to a future world, which will see increasing use of virtual
environments where people interact and learn and share in
different ways.
Second Life is an interesting example of a virtual world. It has
grown rapidly, picking up 850,000 users in its first couple of years
with five million predicted within the next year. Second Life is a
virtual world with a real economy where you can buy and sell virtual
objects and services using Linden dollars – pretend money but
with a real exchange rate to the US dollar. As a result, the Internal
Revenue Service in the US is very concerned about how to tax
virtual income and how to prevent money laundering. And major
banks are queuing up to be bankers to the virtual world so that
they can charge interest on virtual money! At this point you begin to
scratch your head and wonder what this has to do with education,
MIT internet usage overlaid on its campus, enabling but Harvard University has opened a opened a law school in
the mapping of virtual hotspots and physical location. Second Life offering a course on internet law, its students only
Image: Ispots, SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT
meeting lecturers in this virtual world. Even the judges at Second
Life’s moot court are Harvard professors and students in real life –
a blending of the physical and virtual, a flow between the real
and unreal.
The virtual will be an important part of learning in the future but
it won’t constitute the whole experience, so we need to create
spaces and processes that can embrace it as well as thinking
about social interaction. One of the impacts of all this change in
education will be that people coming out of schools and further
and higher education will expect very different workplaces to the
ones we have at the moment. Those engaged in thinking about
the workplace need to understand that we’ve got about 10 years
to rethink the commercial workspace model so that it blends living,
working and learning, which is what the next generation of workers
will expect.

Learning can take place entirely in virtual communities
like Second Life. Image: © 2007 Linden Research Inc.
All rights reserved

18 Further and higher education