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September 17, 2007, 02:29 PM ET
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Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Ill., home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it’s a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward L. Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley’s multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second Life.
Ever since Linden Lab, a San Francisco-based company, unveiled Second Life in 2003, professors and college students have flocked to it. Professors use Second Life to hold distance-education classes, saying that communication among students actually gets livelier when they assume digital personae. Anthropologists and sociologists see the virtual world as a laboratory for studying human behavior. University architects use it as a canvas on which to explore design. Business professors see it as a testing ground for budding entrepreneurs.
Read the complete Chronicle story, and take a tour of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus in Second Life.
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