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(Update) Role-playing Madness
By philobean | July 14, 2007
Amazing. INSEAD, the premier french business school, uses Second Life, a virtual second world built especially for the MMORPG fanatics and others of the sort, as a playing ground for business students in a new online MBA track!
The Economist (online) reports:
Is this for real?
In a novel twist on the idea of the online course, on March 20th, INSEAD, a French business school with campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore, became the first institution to announce its intention to offer classes to students who exist solely online. INSEAD plans to open a campus in Second Life, an online environment in which users can create virtual representations of themselves—“avatars†in Second-Life-speak. Within the virtual campus, INSEAD plans to hold information sessions for its new virtual students, organise meetings with virtual recruiters, and offer space for virtual conferences.
Planned courses include an entrepreneurship class in which students can test their ideas on the simulated campus. To those sceptics who prefer education to be more grounded in the real world, its proponents call Second Life an ideal laboratory for perfectly practical experiments: users have been marketing, buying and selling virtual items, using “Linden dollarsâ€, the artificial world’s currency, for years. There is even a Second Life currency-exchange market, where the Linden dollar is running a rate of about 280 to the real-world greenback.
Just when I was beginning to think the virtual world tended to lead people away from their real lives, I am presented with an innovative way by which the virtual world can be used to improve how we conduct ourselves in the real one. Absolutely cool.
Topics: Technology, A little political, Personal |
July 15th, 2007 at 11:06 am
but, i hope they take a good look at their choice of virtual communities such as second life. the idea and concept of supplementary virtual learning is great.
however, the top selling product in second life today is genetalia.
July 16th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Good point! Well, I guess it could also be argued that the Internet’s hottest selling product is genetalia. But then again there should be safeguards available for *good people* like us to be able to take advantage of the benefits of the platform without having to immerse ourselves in such *less sensible things*.