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Training 2008 Show Daily: Are You Ready for 3Di?
February 20, 2008
he true promise of 3-D learning lies not in automating the past but in creating the future
By Dr. Tony O'Driscoll, certificate program presenter
You would have to have been living under a pretty big rock in very remote area on this planet to not have been exposed to the Virtual World (VW) or 3-D Internet (3Di) phenomenon.
Second Life has become the poster child for virtual worlds. Business Week describes Second Life as some offspring of the Matrix, eBay, and MySpace. Not a bad description for an emerging set of technologies that integrate around the notion that the Web is evolving to enable participation and interaction as opposed to merely providing ubiquitous access. In fact, Steve Prentice of Gartner predicts, "By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 employees) will have a second life, but not necessarily in Second Life."
Today, Second Life covers about 170 virtual square miles in cyberspace—a virtual space five times the size of Boston. It has more than a million active residents who sell or trade 520,000 unique items each month. That is the throughput of 12 Wal-Marts in the physical world. Add to Second Life other 3-D avatar-mediated environments such as World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, or even Webkinz, and you get to upward of 30 million avatars (or digital personas) interacting in virtual worlds today.
Even if you have managed to avoid all the buzz surrounding 3Di up until this week, it is highly likely that by now you have attended at least one session that has evangelized virtual worlds as THE technology that FINALLY will revolutionize learning.
Those of us who have been in this profession for a while are all too familiar with this hype-collapse cycle. Throughout history, we, trainers, have suffered an awkward relationship with technology. Like a gawky teenager, we become enamored with the potential of a new technology, launch ourselves headlong into the application of this technology to learning fully convinced it will change the world, only to emerge exhausted and exasperated that we did not achieve the change or value we wanted to accomplish with our Herculean efforts.
At the root of this hype-collapse cycle is what Peter Drucker has defined as the routinization trap: the application of fundamentally new and different technologies to improve the efficiencies of existing organizational practices and processes. In our case, the fatal flaw in all of our past forays to change the game in learning is rooted in the fact that we limited the application of powerful new technologies to the automation of our existing paradigms of what learning is and how it should be delivered and consumed.
Today, our profession finds itself at yet another strategic inflection point: Virtual worlds present us with an opportunity to reinvent learning’s strategic role in the enterprise. As has been the case in the past, we are faced with two choices:
• Ensure that virtual worlds do not change the game in learning by repeating what we have done with all other potentially revolutionizing technologies: focusing on automating our current conception of learning, bad assumptions and all.
• Change the way we approach the application of this revolutionary technology to truly change the game in learning by redefining how learning can happen by examining the inherent sensibilities of the technology itself.
Those of us who are not students of history are destined to repeat it. But virtual worlds have too much potential for us to blow it this time. For that reason, we must choose option two to avoid the routinization trap that has plagued the advancement of our profession for years.
This journey begins with understanding the inherent sensibilities of 3-D avatar-mediated technology absent any preconditions on how to apply it to learning. Virtual worlds provide us with a platform to create engaging, socially constructed interactions that are unbounded by geography or the laws of physics. With the emergence of 3-D Internet technology, learning professionals find themselves in the position of being the buggy-whip manufacturer of yore who is being asked to evaluate combustion engine technology as a means of effective and efficient transportation. Our very perceptions of learning cloud our ability to recognize the possibilities for this new and different learning vehicle. To create more effective and impactful learning experiences, we must approach learning from a perspective that is unshackled from the predominant classroom paradigm.
Let's begin with a definition of 3-D learning: The process of being immersed into a 3-D virtual environment where a learner acts through an avatar to engage simultaneously with other avatars and information sources for the explicit purpose of learning, while being guided through a series of 3-D learning archetypes that facilitate comprehension and application of formal learning objectives, as well as enabling informal peer-to-peer learning.
3-D learning has at its core the notion of leveraging interactivity (I) and Immersion (I) to achieve a level of Engagement (E) that compels learners to consume content within the context of a rich learning experience.
The 3-D learning equation demonstrates the multiplicative impact that interactivity and immersion have on engagement:
I*I = E
The primary objective of 3-D learning is to design engaging experiences that logically lead learners along an optimal flow state that allows them to rapidly assimilate new learning. Experience is much more about context than content. In 3-D learning, content is still king, but context is the kingdom. Context renders explicit the topics and principles taught by making them actionable. The learning that occurs in a 3-D context surfaces at the moment of need where the lack of knowledge or capability of the learner intersects with the need to have that knowledge or capability to overcome a given challenge.
The journey required to build both the mind-set and the competence to transform the learning function via the application of 3Di is not a trivial one. The true promise of 3-D learning lies not in automating the past but in creating the future. Enterprises that truly want to become the premier learning organizations of the future would do well to seriously examine the potential for 3-D learning and start experimenting immediately to start closing the knowing-doing gap.
Dr. Tony O'Driscoll is a professor of the practice at North Carolina State University's Jenkins Graduate School of Management. To stay current on his insights and research, visit his Learning Matters blog at www.wadatripp.wordpress.com.
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