Yahoo! News has an article on education and how it's seeping into games, not just the other way around, as is sometimes assumed.

For those who think that online worlds created in venues such as Second Life and online games such as World of Warcraft are just fun and games, think again. Business school professors and economics researchers are turning to these virtual worlds as dynamic laboratories to shed light on some of the venerable mysteries of economic behavior.

As proof, all you needed was to crowd into a packed conference room in Second Life earlier this month for a panel discussion on the evolution of stock exchanges, the role of regulation, and other issues facing this new economy. The panel was hosted by Cornell B-school professor Robert Bloomfield, whose real-world specialty is using lab experiments and mathematical models to study the effects of financial market regulation on investor welfare and how psychological forces affect financial markets.

Read more here.