 The room is packed with faculty and staff. The event is the Faculty Showcase 2008. For a Friday, the showing is impressive. Everyone is here to see what Dr. Carl Scott is doing with his classroom in Second Life.
The facilitator starts the session by playing a couple of introductory videos on Second Life and its potential for education. Then logs into Second Life, teleporting to IT World, an island owned by the Information System Research Center at Bauer. We enter the conference room. Here, we are greeted by Plato Atlantis and Blake Stringfellow.
Plato Atlantis begins to share his experiences on getting started with SL, his current teaching activities in ITWorld, etc...
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As you may have figure by now, both Plato Atlantis and Blake Stringfellow are “avatars”. Both are research faculty in DISC and using SL for teaching and research.
For Dr. Scott, the benefit are very simple and logical. As a supplement to his face-to-face class, IT World allows him to interact with his students  outside of class, without requiring them to travel to campus or his office or the classroom. As long as they have access to the world wide web, and a machine with Second Life client installed, they can log into the virtual conference room from anywhere. Every Wednesday, the class convenes here for a problem solving session. Communicating via text chat or 2-way audio, they are able to pose questions, get answers, share project information, etc. Yet the experience is profoundly different from any other virtual conferencing platforms. The avatars help bridge the distance. Coming as close to real life presence as possible, with extant technologies, the avatars provide the virtual extension of real selves.
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“This is just the beginning” says Dr. Scott. To him, the possibilities are endless. He is currently taking his time-tested teaching strategies and using them in-owrld (In Second Life). As his comfort-levels and expertise increase, he plans to experiment with other approaches that leverage the technology and afford other learning goals, otherwise a challenge in First Life. 
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