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Cornell Chronicle: Using Second Life as a classroom

Cornell Chronicle: Using Second Life as a classroom: "Students get a 'Second Life' in first 'metanomics' course By Anne Ju Anyone who thinks virtual reality is just a game should have a talk with Beyers Sellers, a virtual-reality character in the online world of Second Life. The flesh and blood behind the sandy-haired avatar (a virtual persona) is Rob Bloomfield, a Johnson School professor who uses the online virtual world Second Life as his classroom for a course that guides 10 students this semester through the complex economics arising in the 'metaverse' of virtual worlds. Beyers Sellers, professor Robert Bloomfield's Second Life avatar Provided Beyers Sellers, professor Robert Bloomfield's Second Life avatar. Business and Oversight in Second Life is a new directed-study seminar for graduate students. Required to create their own avatars, the students use Second Life to study the business and policy issues surrounding the largely unregulated 'wild west' of the metaverse. Created by the company Linden Labs, Second Life has some 9 million subscribers and handles more than $1.5 million in exchanges every day. Bloomfield, the Nicholas H. Noyes Professor of Management, has even coined a new word -- 'metanomics' -- the economics of the metaverse, which answers to a distinct set of masters. 'Metanomics, by necessity, is an interdisciplinary endeavor,' Bloomfield said."