This is the first of a series of short posts highlighting colleges in Second Life. Each college or university featured in Grid Works will be an institution of higher learning teaching some level of engineering-related curriculum in the "real world." The first college for today's post is Ashworth College located in Norcross, Ga. This school offers online or correspondence courses in many fields including the following:

If you’ve been sleeping all day in order to star gaze all night, you might have missed the fact that this year has been designated the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IVA 2009) by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and UNESCO.

Innovative companies are beginning to realize that virtual worlds like Second Life offer the opportunity to create 3-D representations of their products at a minimal cost. These digital models can then be used to demonstrate ideas and concepts and showcase capabilities and appearance of products to existing and future customers.

Professional societies have been building communities long before Web 2.0 emerged on the scene, and incorporating new technologies like virtual worlds is only one more tool to help these groups better serve their membership.

While virtual job hunting in 3-D worlds may be considered an emerging trend, virtual job fairs hosted on Web sites are happening on a regular basis. Recently Building, a U.K.-based publication, sponsored Building Virtual Careers 2008—a two-day event held completely through a Web site.

From virtual job fairs accessed through Web sites to 3-D facilities constructed in virtual worlds such as Second Life, job seekers are finding interactive and rewarding paths to follow for securing employment. And well-established companies in the employment services industry are helping to blaze the trail.

Ryan Schultz began to contemplate the application of crowd sourcing to architectural design after reading “Wisdom of Crowds,” by James Surowiecki and “Wikinomics” by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. And when Schultz discovered Second Life (SL), a 3-D virtual world accessed through the Internet, he realized that the actual implementation of this open source approach to architecture could become a real possibility.