Second Life is a darling of the media and of tech enthusiasts, a virtual, 3-D graphical world where people adopt avatars that may or may not resemble their real-life personas. Corporations as well as educational and cultural institutions are setting up shop there, hoping to attract customers and serve patrons and students in a hip, twenty-first-century kind of way. Molly Berger decided it might be a good virtual classroom for a seminar on culture and computers for first-year engineering students at Case Western Reserve.