Many educational technologies are justified in terms of "authentic learning" – the attempt to make the content and form of educational experiences personally relevant to learners and directly relevant to "real-world" activities. Virtual environments such as AW raise a number of questions regarding the meaning and purpose of authenticity. First, many of the affordances of the virtual environment—the ability to create and manipulate objects, to collaborate with others, to occupy and work with spatial topographies—all seem to be conducive to creating real-world relevant simulations and experiences. However, other affordances such as the ability to creatively engage the surreal and non-real, the imaginary, the fantastic, would allow exploration and creation that transcends the real or the real that is accessible through the senses. Virtual environments might be extremely useful and effective in teaching and visualizing certain abstract scientific concepts or providing powerful vicarious experiences to motivate learning, such as immersing one’s avatar in a human body. Virtual environments can enable learning that emerges from looking- and acting-from-within rather than looking-at. Hence, the limits of the rhetoric of authenticity are highlighted by such an environment. The challenge becomes more one of making or creating real-world relevance for the imaginary and the fantastic constructions and experiences AW enables.