Second Life-Yielding results in corporate trainings?

It’s exciting to see the world go digital in different manners and see businesses adopt these new technologies. The most intriguing experience in bringing a whole new dimension to holding meetings was the introduction of teleconferencing. I liked the idea that a medium like TelePresence (by Cisco) could enable you sit in a ‘virtual’ round table and have meetings while viewing other participants in the meeting via a screen. I saw this as a whole new way to cut costs in businesses by having meetings between participants from distant locations on TelePresence.

However, the same feeling doesn’t enfold my perception of Second Life (SL). I feel really skeptical about the effectiveness of this social media tool in the professional world. Having meetings or trainings might not yield the optimum level of results using this communication channel. Though I had heard a bit about Second Life before today, I had never experienced using it so decided to sign up today after reading the article: Fast Talk: Getting a (Second) Life. Not to my surprise, I got a first turn-off while using it when Second Life crashed due to system incompatibilities!
IBM’s decision to make this a training tool raises many questions within me. Knowing well the implications of a delayed training on employees swinging into full actions on their job, has IBM fully weighed the risks of delays due to technical difficulties when using SL in this training? The site connects users via different servers and thus functions like any IT based architecture that is prone to server breakdown, connection issues, etc.

Aside technical difficulties that may be encountered, I also believe the ability to have a physical interaction during training about a company’s culture would be much more effective in building the company culture in new employees rather than just listening to any explanations via an avatar. I see huge risks of passing inaccurate or insufficient information to the new employees in using SL as a training tool. This is consequently critical to their success on the jobs and as such should be carefully analyzed.

SL might be able to prove its worth in other areas I haven’t explored since it has quite a wide variety of applications by its users; However, I feel it shouldn’t be used for delicate and very result-driven circumstances like trainings or business meetings.