“Everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available without distinction of good or evil. This is the principal law of our age.” —Jacques Ellul, 1954

I just returned from Orlando, where I attended the Sloan-C International Conference on Online Learning, and can’t stop thinking about Ellul’s views on technology. While I can’t claim to be an expert on his seminal work The Technological Society, my take on him is that he believed the advancement and implementation of technology as inevitable, but that we can choose how we respond and adapt. In essence, tech is here, tech is staying, more tech is coming. What shall we do about it?

Ellul came to mind as I thought about the heated arguments against Second Life I heard at Sloan. Some people are angry—really angry—about the idea of Second Life in education. I found myself wondering what it is about Second Life that’s so threatening. Is it the learning curve? The time and money it takes to develop a viable presence in-world? Or maybe it’s the fear of losing an old and trusted way of teaching in the headlong rush to embrace the new and unproven. No matter. That Second Life and the technology it represents and exploits will be widely implemented in education despite our fears is given. How thoughtfully we’ll use this technology and to what ends are the things we should be researching and debating, not casting stones about in an attempt to forestall the inevitable.

I think I understand the objections some educators have to Second Life. It’s often difficult to point to a sound pedagogical reason for having a Second Life campus. It’s expensive to purchase, develop and maintain an island. It’s still relatively clumsy to navigate and interact in-world. It’s still more a novelty and a pleasant diversion than a proven learning tool. And just how do you justify the expenditure of resources for a virtual campus when your physical campus has its very real needs? Are we going to build virtual campuses just because students think Second Life is cool?

Well, yes. That’s exactly why we will. We will build institutions in Second Life because online learning students in the near future will demand it. They’ll insist on access to it for social connections and interaction and a palpable sense of user presence that smashes the psychological walls of distance; a presence, connection and interaction unmatched by cost per user or ease of use by any other technology currently available. We’ll build them to market our institutions, to strengthen our brands, to compete for students and prestige. We’ll build them for many of the same reasons we fund and field sports teams and build student unions and fitness centers for our on-campus students; because it adds to the social experience of higher education and because that experience has value in and of itself.

And we’ll build them because we must be prepared for the inevitable. The technology that Second Life exploits will become cheaper, more stable, easier to use and impossible to ignore. I’d bet that we’ll see some kind of 3D virtual environment incorporated into Blackboard et al within 5 years. Will we make creative use of its potential? Will we maximize its benefits and mitigate its drawbacks? If we use Second Life and its descendants merely to deliver the same old course content and methodologies, we’ll fail our students and ourselves. We need to think now about how we’ll use this technology, how we’ll exploit its strengths, and how we’ll create new learning methodologies and possibilities for experiences and connections. Second Life is here. The rise of the virtual campus is inevitable. Will we be ready?