I went to this one to see what people are actually doing in terms of CME in Second Life, which I had jumped into a couple of years ago and have kind of backed off of in the past year or two. It has a lot of potential, but I think the drawbacks are still pretty daunting for a lot of CME providers (drawbacks being the bandwidth it takes, participants have to download software and learn how to work their avatars in the virtual environment, among others).

The presenters really hadn’t gotten too far into their experiment in SL yet, so it was more of an exploration of what SL is, advantages and drawbacks. I think we all agreed that what so many are doing — basically recreating their bricks and mortar lecture halls virtually and putting first world content into a virtual context — isn’t the best use of SL. But what a perfect place to build simulations of all kinds, and do the kind of CME that would cost a fortune in reality, but just a few Linden dollars in SL.

If anyone is really using SL for CME that isn’t just a replication of real-world lectures in a different environment, I’d love to hear about it. I still think there’s a lot of potential that most of us haven’t realized yet.