LifeLongLearningLab

The Second Life Roundtable: Best Practices, Security Concerns, and Future Developments was held in Second Life on Monday, June 30, 2008, as part of a week-long celebration of Second Life’s fifth anniversary.

The event was done in Second Life, but for people who aren’t able to get into Second Life, a GoToMeeting Web conference was available so we could see what was going on in Second Life.

Overall, I have to say that I’m not sure that Second Life was a good venue for this particular event. The speakers’ avatars just stood on a stage and talked. Some had slides and some didn’t. The slides were hard to see because depending on the view of the room, they were far away or off to the side. So, I think a simple web conference with a teleconference line would have worked just as well.

There were several references to the difficulties that corporate people may have in getting into Second Life. However, it seemed like these were more related to security and firewall issues than the graphics card issue that some of us have experienced.

Here are my notes from the presentations:

1. Presentation from Michelin: Enterprise Architecture training

Phillipe Barreaud, Michelin

Project they worked with on IBM.

Feedback from attendees: The interactivity and game-like feel kept people engaged.

Best practice: They allowed 5 - 10 minutes at the beginning of the session for people to get used to being in and navigating in the environment.

Question for presenter: There were a lot of people who could not attend this event because of their corporate environment. Do you think Second Life is ready for the enterprise?

Answer: It’s getting there. Security, PCs have to be checked to ensure that they support SL.

Best Practice: Michelin used a progressive approach to get learners used to the Second Life environment. First, they conducted their Second Life class with all participants in the same location. This allowed the facilitators to control the experience and help people as needed. Then, they gave participants access to Second Life so they could play with it on their own.

2. General View–Where We Are and Where We’re Going

Erica Driver, ThinkBalm, Independent Analyst–company focused solely on corporate use of virtual worlds

3 reasons for using virtual worlds:

1) Increase engagement: Comes through immersion–that feeling that you’re really there.

2) Increase proficiency gains: Example: Study that came out of Stanford University Medical School, traditionally set up a simulation to train doctors on how to communicate with each other during an emergency. When replacing the physical simulation with a virtual one, the proficiency was exactly the same. But costs went down.

Did an interview with Microsoft: Microsoft has begun using virtual worlds within developer communities; did a launch of some products in SL, and part of that included training. Typical product launch costs $45 - $55/ head. When did a virtual launch instead, spent about 5%, and people stuck around a lot longer.

Learning and training is where people are most excited about investing in 3D worlds.

3) Minimize costs

Trends for corporate use:

• Teaching and learning; practicing work–hottest investment
• Turning presentations into tours–instead of just talking; show you what I’m trying to talk to you about.
• Managing real-world systems in a 3D environment.
• Networking/conferences and events

3. Current State of 3D

Ben Lorica, Senior Analyst O’Reilly Media

Use both qualitative data (following the “Alpha geeks”–leading technologists) and quantitative data to find out the latest trends. They merge the interviews with the Alpha geeks with solid quantitative data.

Here are some of their findings:

• Google searches of SL are down. Could mean that people are losing interest. But could also mean that it’s reached a level of maturity where people don’t need to Google it anymore.
• There are been major growth in the sale of books covering 3D worlds in the past few years.
• The number of job postings for virtual worlds is also up–61% since May 2007. The largest number of postings are from media companies–even more than the virtual world software companies themselves.

He sees a lot of opportunity to provide cognitive cycles away from TV. Even 1% means a lot of virtual world cognitive cycles.

He thinks that SL is growing, but the growth is slowing somewhat. Expects a second wave of growth once usability issues have been addressed.

4. How does SL behavior resembles behavior in real life?

Anne Massey Indiana Univ.; Mitzi Montoya NC State

Studying teams using various tools of online collaboration. Found that the immersion and engagement of virtual world improved performance.

Then started looking at which parts of virtual world most correlate to performance.

Virtual presence–complex subject; been studied for 10 years or so.

5. Other corporate uses: Recruiting and new hire orientation

Susan Raycroft, Accenture’s recruiting efforts in SL.

In late March 2008, Accenture launched Career Island to provide a single area for global recruiting efforts. It includes:

• Interview building
• Event auditorium
• Career Central building–provide info about careers at the company; try to make the content interactive
• 9 interactive games to create engagement; provide something to make people come back and to tell their friends about

Because Acceneture is a global company, all the content and signage is in 5 languages.

The area can be customized for specific events.

The recruits that they’re targeting are comfortable in Second Life, but Accenture’s recruiters were not. So, Accenture took some special steps to try to make the recruiters comfortable:

• Developed a How To guide for using and navigating in Second Life
• Created a marketing toolkit, with a full suite of tools for communicating about Second Life
• Offered live training and support for recruiting events

They are making progress in helping non-GenYers feel comfortable in Second Life.

So far, they have had 4 or 5 networking events in-world. In monitoring engagement, Accenture has found that most people that attend the events stay.

6. Royal Phillips Electronics

Dolf Wittkamper, responsible for developing 3D internet capabilities at Phillips.

Interested in virtual worlds from various perspectives–started doing it in 2007.

Looking at how virtual worlds can be a part of value propositions.

Focusing on co-creation this year.

Launched first sim for Co-Creation

Ideation Quest: developed with University of Innsbruck; testing and exploring how people can engage in co-creation in a playful way. Different stages that people go into. All facilitated. And ultimately, people can submit ideas.

Right now in Co-Creation area, people are discussing ideas for Sustainable Living.

Dolf has found that when people go to a virtual world, they are more committed. They are there at all different times of day because of global audience. When project stops because of budget constraints, people get really mad.

7. Dr. Gary Woodill, Director of Research and Analysis, Brandon Hall Research 

What changes does SL and can SL bring to corporate training?

One of the reasons that SL may not be growing as much is because there is a chasm between those who are early adopters and those who want to wait and see what other people are going to do.

Marshall McLuhan: When we have a new technology, we tend to look backwards and do what we’ve done before. Gary is interested in what we can do that’s new.

Gary’s advice on SL to corporate trainers: Proceed with some degree of caution. This is a transitional technology.

He believes that this technology will start to be combined with other technologies. For example, it may be combined with the Wii so that people use the Wii controller to interact with objects in-world.

There aren’t a lot of studies yet showing how SL aids learning.

The conundrum for corporations: Do you get in now and make a conscious decision to ignore ROI so you can be a leader? Or do you wait knowing that if you wait, you won’t be a leader in this space? You have to decide how much risk you want to take.

Go forward, but be cautious.

8. Glenn Fischer, Director of Business Programs, Linden Labs

SL approach to security for corporations:

Two issues:

1) have to open a number of ports for communication

2) people don’t understand the private regions. With a private regions, only people you’ve given access to can access. Can also have private calls even in a public setting.

So much data out there, would be hard to find people’s private data.

Working with IBM on externally hosted servers that provide a higher level of security.

Smart Robotic Avatars–can test them in SL on Education Island on 7/1 and 7/2.

(One of My Social Networks)

We’re over a week into Social Networking month here at the LifeLongLearning Lab. Lots of activity so far, not as much blogging as hoped for.

Here’s a quick recap of some lessons learned:

1. Social Networking is Hot
Last Friday, my colleague Jenifer Lippincott and I conducted a Webinar on Social Learning. In preparation for this Webinar, I decided to Google the terms “social network,” “social learning,” and “social networking” to see how many hits were returned. Here’s what I found:

• Social network–71 million hits
• Social learning–54.6 million hits
• Social networking–39.4 million hits

By way of contrast, I found that “Angelina Jolie” returns just 37.3 million hits. Her husband, “Brad Pitt,” returns a mere 20.7 million hits. So, I think it’s safe to say that social networks and social learning are BIG. (But not quite as big as Britney Spears, who returns a whopping 96.4 million hits–I don’t even want to consider what this says about our society.)

2. Considerations for Running a Social Network
During the Webinar, we had some good questions about social learning. And these are some considerations I plan to think about as I work on some social networks for clients:

• If you are asking questions about an area outside of your usual knowledge domain, how can you be sure you’re using the right search terms? For example, you may not be finding a lot of helpful information because you’re not using the right term.
  Cindy Rockwell of CustomerVision mentioned that you could use forms so that people could select from lists to pick keywords.
• Is there a way to search on experts? How do you find who has the expertise?
  The response to this is to provide a means for people to identify their areas of expertise in their profiles. If it’s in their profiles, then you can search on it.
• How do you control information creep in wikis? What should you do if you have so many wikis that you’re not sure where to start looking?
  The group agreed that wikis really needed some type of facilitator to keep things organized. If a group uses multiple wikis, perhaps they could provide a main page with descriptions and links to all the wikis–something like a wiki portal.
• Do the characteristics of the group determine the amount of participation on a social learning site? The participant hypothesized that if you had a more informal, less hierarchical group, you would get more participation. No one on the call knew the answer to that question, but the hypothesis makes sense to me. If any of you know of any research in this area, please comment to let us know.

3. Remember, Your Family Is Your Original Social Network
Last night, I realized that all my research into social networks is hurting my original social network–my family. So, instead of blogging last night, I read in bed with my daughter. It pays to remember that social networks do NOT have to be technology enabled. In fact, most are not–at least right now!

4. Expanding My Definition of Social Networking
Last night, I started to write a blog post about expanding my definition of social networks so that it would include my family and friends. Right now, when I hear that word, I tend to think “Facebook or LinkedIn.” So, I think if I did expand my definition, I would see even more possibilities.

But that line of thinking made me realize that unlike the kids who spend every possible second out on MySpace, most of my social network is not yet out in those technological social networks. That’s why I haven’t been as motivated to spend time here yet. But if someone told me that there was something I’m doing today either without technology or with a different technology that could be done more efficiently on a social network, I’d be ALL over it. So, I think that’s the place to start in helping businesses see the value–find a business process that can be done much more quickly and/or cheaply on a social network.

5. The Structure of Social Networks
I sketched out the structure of ning, and this week, I plan to sketch out Facebook’s structure, so I can compare them. Stay tuned!

(Note: Image created by Judy Loftin of Vangent, Inc.)

For the month of May, the LifeLongLearning Lab will be focusing on social networks. I actually belong to several: Facebook, LinkedIn, and ning. I rarely use them. Mostly because I don’t feel like I have time. But also because I’m not quite sure what I’ll really do out there.

But this year, I’ve discovered that month-long experiments are a really good way for me to focus in an area and learn a lot, without that fear of having to commit to something forever.

So, for May, I will spend at least 30 minutes a day in a social network. I’m also planning on sketching out the functionality so I have a map of what’s available and how it all relates, and how various social networking tools are alike and different. In addition to the networks I already belong to, I’m going to try out some new ones–like Elliott Masie’s learningtown, which my colleague Judy says is very good.

And to kick off this Social Networking month, my colleague Jenifer Lippincott and I are going to lead a Webinar tomorrow on Social Learning.

The Buzz was busy as a bee this week, so this is a slightly abridged version. I didn’t have time to look through all 50 blogs I usually track. But here’s a run-down of the professional organizations. Plus some summaries of articles worth reading out there. Enjoy!

Also, a quick glance through my RSS aggregator showed a lot of references to the E-Learning Guild Annual Gathering. So, if you want to catch up on that event, plenty out there to read.

Buzz in the Professional Organizations

• ASTD Learning Circuits: April’s Big Question: What would you like to do better as a learning professional? There are some interesting answers to this question–about interactivity, ROI, and pushing back. There’s even a post from Bulgaria.

• E-Learning Guild: Reminder to members to update survey responses on the Guild’s Web sites. (not updated since end of March–probably busy with the AG.)

• ELearn Magazine: Usability testing of e-learning. Interesting article that talks about why to usability test and provides tactical information about how to test.

• Training and Development Blog: Celebrate Diversity!–article calling for companies to celebrate April as Diversity month. There’s also a good article on April 4 about problems with communicating with millenials.

• The MASIE Center: Masie’s learnings and impressions from his Learning Systems event last week where he met with 370 learning leaders to talk about learning and LMSs/LCMSs. Also, info about an interesting learning event in Atlanta for high school students–called FIRST Robotics Co-opetition. “It involves intentional use of a game challenge, atmosphere, coaching, “gracious professionalism”, short/intense action spurts and a design/build experience. Creative use of “failure” is also leveraged in a way that could be deeply emulated within corporate learning designs.”–Intriguing! Masie will be live blogging on this event and posting video interviews.

• Training Day: Discusses ways to relieve stress at work.

• Educause: Several new books are featured; there’s also an interesting article about a keynote speech at the 2008 Midwest Regional Conference, in which Susan Metros talked about new IT strategies for a digital society.

Bytes

The Power of Networking
Really, really great article about a group of bloggers who met online, wrote a book together, and finally decided to meet in person. Talks about the value of having a powerful social network.

What Work-Learning Audit Reveals
Will Thalheimer, who always offers excellent analyses of what’s going on in the learning world, provides some interesting data about where learning happens for retail clerks (hint: only a small part happens in classrooms and e-learning).

Seven Habits of Highly Connected People by Stephen Downes
Really good list of habits for a socially networked world. Good snapshot of the Web 2.0 culture.

Extreme User Research
This may seem old-hat to analysis pros, but I think this article puts forth a quick and easy way to get valuable user data for a design. I especially like that he uses sticky notes to organize his data and look for patterns.

Running Virtual Groups
Jay Cross posts some lessons learned from interviews that he conducted at a company that “lives and breathes community.” Another good description of Web 2.0 culture.

Today, I am experimenting with Microsoft Windows LiveWriter. I do like the interface, and it appears to be easy to use. In fact, I clicked Publish to see if it gave me any publishing options, and boom!–post was published.

There are two features that I’m looking for in LiveWriter that I’m not seeing:

1. The ability to export a Post to Word so that I can share a post with someone else offline–for example, suppose my manager wants to see a post before I publish it. There doesn’t seem to be an option to do that. I’ve got to do a bit more research to see if there’s something I haven’t seen. But my quick glance through the menus and the help does not show this kind of feature. So, I guess instead I can: 1) Copy the post to Word to send to others or 2) Post to an internal blog site that’s set up for just this kind of review. I’m leaning toward option 2.
2. The ability to write a post and then publish it at a later date. Again, I don’t see that option in LiveWriter. But I think I’ve found it here in WordPress. So, I’m going to try it now. Right now, it is April 15 (Tax Day!) at 6:04 a.m. I’m going to set this post to publish on April 17 at 6:00 a.m. Let’s see what it does!

Today, I have been updating the design of my blog.

That first step of setting up a blog is so easy–click a couple of buttons and then you have a blog. But now I’m ready for that next step where I really think about what features I want on my blog and how I want it to look.

I’ve been participating retroactively in the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog series that Darren Prowse ran last August. I discovered this excellent series from Michele Martin’s Bamboo Project blog. And through the Building a Better Blog community that Michele set up on ning, I’ve been working with a few other people who have the same goal.

After about 3 months, I’m still stuck on Day 2 of the 31 Days. I think my experience will be more like 31 Months for a Better Blog, and hopefully not 31 Years!  But then again, hopefully I am still blogging and trying to make a better blog in 31 years (if there still is blogging then).  On “Day 2,” I conducted a Reader Audit of my blog, that is, I had friends, family, coworkers, and other bloggers review my blog and suggest improvements. Many thanks to my husband, my writer friends–Marlies and Heather, and the good people in the Building a Better Blog community who took the time to look over my blog and provide thoughtful comments.

As a result of those comments, I have:

1. Changed the theme. If you’ve been here before, you probably noticed a startling change in look-and-feel. Someone told me that the image on my initial theme made her think of Princess Diana’s death–not something I want associated with my blog. Plus, I thought this new theme was a bit cleaner and made it a bit easier to find things. And I like the font better. What do you think?
2. Added my picture. So readers can know more about me.
3. Added an RSS feed. So that interested readers can subscribe to my blog–just scroll down to the bottom of the right sidebar and you’ll find the RSS buttons.
4. Updated my About page.  To make it a bit friendlier and less “me” oriented. And to add my e-mail address.
5. Added a disclaimer. To formally state that the opinions on my blog are completely my own.
6. Added recent posts. So, you can see at a glance what I’ve been thinking and talking about most recently.

So, what do you think? What works well for you? What do you think I could do to improve it even more?

• Design–4
• Humor pieces–3
• Info on Conferences/Classes–3
• Writeups on software apps–3
• Web 2.0–3
• Podcasts–2
• Second Life–2

The rest was all miscellaneous, everything from someone’s trip to Norway to a really inspirational video about what a father has done for his son who has cerebral palsy.

Buzz in the Professional Organizations

• ASTD Learning Circuits: April’s Big Question: What would you like to do better as a learning professional?
• E-Learning Guild: Reminder to members to update survey responses on the Guild’s Web sites.
• ELearn Magazine: Ten Web 2.0 Things you can do in 10 minutes to be a more successful elearning professional
• Training and Development Blog: In Ohio, dozens of staff members were ordered to change their focus from human services to human development (basically changing the mentality from “giving them a fish” to “teaching them how to fish”).
• The MASIE Center: April Fools edition with some outrageous predictions, including a new Google product called Giggle used to search for humor, an e-learning for super-delegates, Level 9 evaluation, speed presenting, and outsourcing classroom participation.
• Training Day: Discusses issues with labeling people as “high potential” and ask readers to think about how they know those people are really high potential and not just good at playing politics.
• Educause: Wikis and emergent roles for teaching and learning; update on key U.S. copyright developments; how innovators can learn from Hollywood how to address resistance to change
• HCI featured blogs: Interestingly, HCI does not seem to be featuring blogs on their home page anymore. Within each of their communities, they link to a lot of different blogs, but they do not seem to be featuring any in particular anymore.

Bytes

Search Patterns: This site has a collection of different types of search patterns with commentary on how each is useful and what each says about user behavior and the information architecture of search. And what’s really interesting is that they used Flickr to do this.

PowerPoint Accessibility: Really interesting article on PowerPoint and accessibility—deficiencies in PowerPoint with regard to accessibility and how to fix those.

Benchmarking Your Learning Culture: Jay Cross describes a free tool from Harvard Business Review with questions to help define organization’s learning culture and then compare it to benchmarks.

Project Initiation Checklist for Rapid ELearning: Links to a document with a checklist of things to consider at the beginning a rapid elearning project. The checklist includes many of the things we already do, but it goes a step further into implementation considerations, such as marketing and communications. I have put this document out on the Home Team Connection Shared Documents folder, under Rapid E-Learning.

Work/Learning Blog Carnival: A blog carnival! Different bloggers unite to talk about the same topic, in this case—“working at learning;  learning at work”. Very interesting approach, and very interesting reading.

In Which I’m (Almost) Convinced of the Value of Twitter: Michele Martin of the Bamboo Project Blog talks about some exploration she’s doing into the value of using Twitter. What’s really great about this article are all the links to more information about Twitter and how people are using it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the great experiences I had in San Antonio was at a piano bar called Howl at the Moon. Those musicians were masters at creating a totally engaging audience experience, something so “sticky” that it was really hard to leave, even after a long hard day of conference attending.

So, I wanted to step back from the experience a bit and think about the elements of that experience. What specifically was it that made it such a great experience?  How could I translate that to learning design?

So, here are the reasons I stayed and stayed at Howl at the Moon, with some thoughts on how instructional designers might use those same approaches to keep learners engaged:

1. Relevance and emotional appeal: They played songs that I knew, and more importantly, songs from my past that carried an emotional appeal. When they sang Queen’s Somebody to Love, I felt like I was in high school all over again.
   Implications for learning design: Make it relevant to the learners; tie to what they already know or have experienced, and ideally, tie to a past experience that has a positive emotional association for them. So, for example, if you’re launching a new initiative for an organization, try to relate that experience to a successful initiative from the past.
2. Audience control: Through their requests, the audience determined what music was played.
   Implications for learning design: Allow the learner to control the environment. That’s easily done in a Web-based environment. For a classroom session, a show of hands can be used to let learners request what’s important to them. Or perhaps, you could use a flipchart as a request board.
3. Audience Expression: The audience could express themselves not only through requests, but also by paying to have their messages written on the mirrors behind the pianos. These messages could be anything–a quote, a greeting, some teasing or taunting; one guy even advertised his accounting services. They changed throughout the night as people paid to have their messages featured.
   Implications for learning design: Let audience members express themselves during your training–perhaps using something like Twitter. Or you could have a flipchart up throughout a class where they can post comments when they see fit.
4. Friendly Competition: They included some friendly competition, such as seeing who could sing louder–the men or the women.
   Implications for learning design: Use friendly competition to motivate people to try a little harder. For example, you could have teams compete to see which group can best summarize the key messages from the class.
5. Surprises: There were lots of surprises. You weren’t sure what they were going to do next, so you stuck around to find out. They previewed these surprises a bit too, like TV shows do, so you’d stay a bit longer to see how things turned out.
   Implications for learning design: Throw in some surprises. Sometimes we’re so focused on making things “user-friendly,” that we hold people’s hands too much. We take away the excitement that comes of figuring things out for yourself. Or we’re so consistent that we put learners to sleep. Every now and then we need to shake learners up so they wake up and learn.
6. Easy to Participate: They made it easy to participate. You could tap your toes, clap your hands, sing along, send money in for requests. You never even had to leave your chair if you didn’t want to. Braver souls might stand up and dance. The really daring would go up on the stage to be picked on, while the rest of the audience enjoyed the hazing from afar.
   Implications for learning design: Give people a low threshold for interacting at first. Don’t expect them to jump in and start role-playing or ad-libbing at first. Build them up to those more interactive activities. Recognize that some people just don’t want to have the spotlight on them, and give them unobtrusive ways to participate.
7. Changed Up the Leads: There were about 5 musicians–two playing piano, one playing guitar, one playing bass, and one playing drums. All 5 musicians could play all the instruments, so there was a lot of rotating. That provided a lot of variety in style and songs.
   Implications for learning design: Change up the people who are leading the learning experience. For a facilitated session, have different facilitators for different segments. For a Web-based course, use different narrators or different coach characters.
8. Pacing: They kept the pace moving. There was never any down time, so we never had a chance to think, “Maybe I should leave now.” Instead, the next song would start playing, and we’d think, “Well, let’s just stay for this one more song.” Needless to say, that went on for many, many songs.
   Implications for learning design: Think carefully about the pacing of your course and how you can optimize that. Keep learners so engaged that they never have time to think about clicking off to something else. This means catching them right away with an intriguing idea and then giving them something they have to do to follow the path of that idea.
9. Know Your Audience: They talked to us as if they knew us, and they did. Their comments, such as, “I bet you guys really want…” hit the mark pretty much every time.
   Implications for learning design: Know your audience, and be sure that they know you know them. There’s nothing so satisfying as feeling that someone understands you and knows what you need.
10. Appeal to the Senses: The experience at Howl at the Moon was definitely multi-sensory. There was a lot to look at, especially when people were willing to get up on stage and make fools of themselves. Of course, there was great music to hear. The beer was good, so we had something good to taste. I can’t say much for the smell, and I don’t think I really touched anything, but the kinesthetic sense of dancing to the music felt good.
    Implications for learning design: Think about classes you attended in the past where all the materials were bullet points in black and white. Dulled your senses, right? Think about adding some color, some sound, some motion, maybe even a little taste to your learning materials and activities.
11. Involved the whole body: When they played a good song, it was almost impossible to sit still, and the musicians encouraged people to get up and dance. So, my whole body was engaged in the experience. I was singing, clapping, dancing, laughing. It was as much a physical experience as an emotional or mental one.
    Implications for learning design: Look for ways to involve audience members physically. This could be as simple as providing play-doh or pipecleaners on the table so that kinesthetic learners have something to play with while they learn. Or provide activities that force learners to get up and move to different parts of the classroom. Set up stations and have them travel to each station to complete activities. Current brain research shows that exercise prepares the brain to learn and increases intelligence. So, think about staging a few optional physical activities for ice-breakers or optional break activities.