Today was the first day of the eLearning Guild’s 2008 Annual Gathering and I’m flying already! I spent the night trying to figure out how to join the various AG|08 Twitter, Meebo, and Flickr groups. Plus, I flew around in Second Life prepping for the “optional intensive”, Web 2.0 Innovations for Learning with Anders Gronstedt of The Gronstedt Group, Inc.
Anders lead a great discussion and facilitated a lively group. We debated the definitions of training vs. learning vs. education, and which of these could Web 2.0 tools accomplish, if any.
We talked a lot about generational differences and the new millennials. These folks are the “digital natives” while the rest of us (and yes, I’m old enough to be in the “us” group which I can’t even believe) are “digital immigrants”. Anders had a great slide illustrating these two camps with a young man carrying a cell phone and an iPod while climbing Kilimanjaro, and an older man banging his head and his fists up against a traditional chalkboard.
Anders also talked about mobile learning and other alternatives to death-by-PowerPoint. He pointed out the (past?) mistake of simply slapping PowerPoint content up on the web and calling it “eLearning”, complete with all of the same poor design and content as the original. I question the finality of the word past because at my organization we are just now starting to do that and everyone is pretty excited. Hah.
We looked at organizations like Sun Microsystems who are using blogs like crazy. The employees are allowed to post and it’s all public. Very cool. Check out the CEO’s blog here.
The podcasting section was one of my favorites. Anders had some great case studies and examples to share with us including what EMC, Ericsson, and Jamba Juice are doing. This was really inspirational and got me thinking. Our folks wouldn’t carry around iPods… but he says 80% of podcasts are still be watched on computers and laptops anyway. Our folks could do that. And with the success of our recent safety video, my head started swirling with ideas. I know by the time I get home at the end of the week I’m not going to be so interested in our 3-day, classroom, ILT financial management course. Nor am I going to be interested in simply videotaping it the next time we hold the 3-day session and slapping that on the web. No more slapping!
Anyway, I’m saving the best for last which I know one isn’t supposed to do in a blog post but I’m reporting items of discussion in order… After lunch we all launched our Second Life applications and met in the virtual world created by The Gronstedt Group, called Training for Success. And there was a train there… and a bunch of us circled around Anders’ avatar to hear what he had to say and see what he had to show us. A colleague of his joined in to demonstrate the voice capability so we could hear him talking. The makes for a MUCH MORE INTERESTING online meeting. Some of us got silly and started dancing and trying on funny hats. Wow, text chat is so boring to me now.
After Training for Success we traveled to the following locations. If you haven’t visited them in SL, they are well worth the teleport:
Sun MIcrosystems – Main Pavilion
Tsunami Demonstration (Check this out for the feeling of a big tsunami coming right at you!)
Greenies Home (Weird and fun place – can’t tell you any more)
Virtual Palomar West: Hospital of the Future (Prototype site to solicit feedback on new hospital design)
Basically, the potential applications for virtual worlds are endless. There is really no end to the creativity that can be generated and what it can be used for in terms of learning, training, or education. Now that I have concurred that it can be a useful and serious “game” for meeting educational goals, I’m going to go play. I have more flying to do!
This is going to be a great week…
WAW, this is a really great read. My 2cents will be much less elloquently written.
Looking forward to the week as well.
[...] was spent showing my best friend (in RL) all of the cool sites that Anders Gronstedt had shown us yesterday. But I dragged myself out of those soft hotel sheets cause today was the second awesome day of The [...]
[...] finally got to watch his demo. He took us to the NMC island and we checked out a classroom. Just as Anders had done, he demonstrated the new voice capabilities in this virtual world. I think this is really [...]