Richard C. Longworth is a former Tribune foreign correspondent, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of the new book, "Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism" (Bloomsbury).

I grew up in a small town in central Iowa, a county seat called Boone, a safe and secure place, confident in its isolation. This was lonesome-whistle territory, where passing trains announced another world out there. In time, some of us got on those trains to seek that world. We knew it wasn't going to come to us. When a British newspaper proclaimed it the typical American small town and sent a reporter to write about it, he interviewed one local elder who said: "We are pretty well self-sufficient. We don't need the world."

At last, the Video Recordings of the invited speakers and some other material, from The 13th International Conference on Thinking, Norrkoping, Sweden, June 17-21, are now available from the conference web site.

At a recent HeLF (Heads of e-Learning) meeting at the University of Wolverhampton, there were presentations and discussions on Virtual Worlds and Second Life (SL) in particular.

Here's a link to the site where you can see the programme and download the slides:

http://asp.wlv.ac.uk/Level5.asp?UserType=11&Level5=5781#12

You may also want to look at some of the work at Edinburgh University.  The link includes many disciplines: http://vue.ed.ac.uk/