Tech4learning

Look Lively!

I've not returned to the theme of using virtual words for corporate training solutions for a while and I'm still firmly sitting on the fence with this one - still waiting to see some real examples of solutions delivered in this way and to an audience of average PC users in a typical corporate setting.

But I noticed the other day that Google has entered this area of Web 2.0, with a new program called Lively that enables you to create your own virtual room. Given how Google likes to make things easier for everyone, I thought I'd give it a go.

It certainly was easier to create my first room than I thought, although I still can't get to grip with moving objects such as pieces of furniture around my virtual home. Things have tended to end up where they last fell - and not upside down! But given that I'd only ever been able to walk/fly around some of the set-piece scenes in Second Life, I was thrilled to have been able to build a rudimentary virtual home.

My room is below. You'll need a Google account to enter and download the Lively software.

In this video from Google, they make it look so much easier...but I was impressed nevertheless.

You can make your rooms private too, which would be preferable if you're going to try it out with a corporate training audience. The challenge, as always, will be to find the best use of this environment.

The Big Wide World of Web 2.0 in Your Pocket

I've got a number of books on the go at the moment...and too few long train rides in which to finish them...but my latest learning technologies book arrived this week and having gotten over how small it was, compared to the picture on Amazon, I was amazed to see how much content had been fitted onto its small pages and how easy it was to read.

And it's packed full of new information for anyone who is looking to see how they could embed Web 2.0 technologies into their learning solutions.  "Blogs, Wikis, MySpace and More" is big on the "more".

Each chapter starts with a good overview of a handful of the main players in that area.  So in the blogging chapter, space is given over to Blogger; Del.icio.us takes pride of place in the tagging section; whilst Second Life and MySpace lead the virtual worlds and social network chapters.  But at the end of each section, the author lists out a much wider range of alternative players in that area and for me, that's where the true value of this book lies, in revealing a wealth of numerous other providers who could offer services for corporate learning...even it they don't yet know it themselves.

I'll be particularly looking at the chapters on Web 2.0 for education and knowledge, personal management tools (some great collaborative scheduling programs in there) and the wikis and collaboration section.

2008 - The Tipping Point for Learning in a Virtual World?

A lot can happen in 6 months since I lasted questioned on this blog if training within the Second Life (or similar) virtual world was going to really take off.  And if I had been asked earlier this month what my thoughts were going into 2008, I would have replied that I was dying to see real examples of corporate training solutions being delivered to an everyday, non-techy, non-game savvy audience of line managers.  I've been frustrated with murmurings about this, sketchy press releases, but no real solid case studies.

But already this month, I've seen two things that will be worth following.

This week, it's the Learning Technologies 2008 conference and exhibition in London.  I like this event as it gets the year off to a good start for those of us with an interest in applying technology to corporate training.  And it's one of the new faces on the exhibition floor that has caught my eye.

e-doceo has arrived from France with a portfolio of e-learning solutions, including an LMS and authoring tools, but what I'm most interested in is their take on the virtual classroom, which appears to be a training centre based in a virtual world. e-learning-live offers three training rooms that can take up to 30 people, all equipped with the latest learning aids such as whiteboards and PowerPoint projections.  In fact, that last sentence wouldn't look out of place in a hotel meeting room brochure - just here, we're in a virtual space. This space is available to rent or can be installed on a local server and I'm delighted to see that you don't need any of those dreaded plug-ins for participants to be able to log on and take part.  You also appear to be able to hold audio conversations.  If that's via VoIP, then that might cause some headaches for some, but over time we'll see more of that outside of the US, I'm sure.

The second sneak preview of something-of-interest-to-come came to my attention from a short news-story from PersonnelToday.com.  The Institute of Leadership and Management - always in my mind the most progressive of all the business education institutes in the UK - has partnered with JBE Training & Development to create a virtual management development centre.  Looking at the screen grabs, it's similar to some of the existing learning spaces in Second Life and not that different from e-doceo's environment, but different in that for the first time, we have a European provider and a UK institute collaborating together, which will definitely score brownie-points with the domestic audience.

And they've put together a great guided tour too.

I hope we get to see and hear some more about this new joint venture in due course.

 

Are We Agreed? Using Consensus Applications in Webinars

Almost a through-away comment on the last page of my latest great read, The New Virtual Classroom, led me to today's findings.

I'd not really heard of the term "consensus applications", so I decided to Google the term.  After a few pages of results, I came across a number of solutions, firmly in the collaborate decision making arena...that all shouted "learning application" to me.  Most are based on a simple five-step approach, that we use time and time again in our face-to-face classrooms:

1. Present the issue
2. Brainstorm answers
3. Sort and categorise
4. Prioritise
5. Make action plan

So why not integrate these into our webinars - I truly believe that webinars should be about creating content there and then - not being preached at - or maybe even run them outside of any web-class?

The first "top end" solution I saw was ThinkTank from GroupSystems.  They declare they offer the technology standard for brainstorming, decision-making, consensus building and collaboration and having reviewed their on-line demo, I can see that they offer a sophisticated solution. 

You can choose from a number of templates depending on the objective of your on-line session, from a simple brainstorm to a comprehensive strategic planning.  Once you've set up your event logistics and invited your group, your participants can use a clever application of chat window technology to brainstorm new ideas.  After that stage is complete, the group can then collectively organise the ideas raised into a range of easily determined categories.  At any stage, you can add additional comments to a particular idea.  Then you can begin to weed out the good ideas from the less appropriate, but permitting everyone to vote on them.  If needs be, you can go one stage further and get the group to jointly prioritise the ideas, as well as casting their votes, i.e. a rank order vote.  You can even dig deeper and use multiple criteria to produce an analysis of alternatives.  Finally, you can create action plans around each of the chosen ideas and share the plans and all the event results in a range of reports with a wide variety or graphing and presentation styles.  Very comprehensive indeed.

The next solution I found was FacilitatePro from Facilitate.com.  Their approach follows a very similar process but they also highlight the surveying abilities of their service too - useful if your facilitators want to be better prepared for the session.  Their website walks you nicely through the various steps and their colourful interface and modules that address each stage in the process. 

Price-wise, both would appear to be very similar.  Whilst Facilitate.com publish their pricing on the website, an earlier third party review I found of ThinkTank quoted a similar amount, albeit for an earlier version.

I did find a third option....much simpler...and free...but one that could easily emulate the processes already discussed.  The interestingly named Thinkature offers a free hosted meeting space, characterised by the use of virtual sticky notes that you can post, move (aka sort) and prioritise in a rudimentary way, but no different from what we'd do on a flip-chart in a classroom.  You can chat too in the room and this can be both live and asynchronous and you can use annotation tools as well, which opens up additional learning possibilities.  I signed up to test it out and here's a screen grab of a mocked up brainstorm event.  Click on the image to view it larger and apologies for the fuzzy quality, but I hope it illustrates the tool's possibilities.

So whether you decide to use your webinar's application sharing or integrated web-tour/Internet browser feature to facilitate an on-line consensus building session or use these tools on a standalone basis, it's good to see that we can increase the interactivity of our web-based learning sessions in this way.

Second Chance for Second Life?

In a previous posting I noted the apparent exodus of some of the early entrants into the virtual world, Second Life, including the winding down of the NETg on-line training centre.  I also commented that my own experience of this new environment left me struggling up the learning curve and my fears that the average participant would also find the technology a barrier to learning (and the IT department too).

It was with interest then that this morning, I received word that a virtual worlds conference had been cancelled with just a few weeks to go.  The slconference 2007 was due to have taken place in Berlin in September, but clearly hadn't attracted much interest. In their press statement, the organisers reported:

Generally, there was great interest from companies and participants that thought the idea of the conference an excellent one. We were able to acquire a lot of interesting and compelling speakers as well as topics that they would present in their conference sessions and workshops.

Unfortunately, the conference did not offer enough impelling opportunities to companies to support it financially, even though there was a desire to support the conference in other ways and to help to make it happen for which we are very thankful. Nevertheless, the financial risk is still existent. Hence, the slconference 2007 team regrets to announce that the slconference 2007 is cancelled.

I have to admit I'd never heard of the conference prior to today, so maybe their marketing let them down, but there again, maybe it's a further sign of some nervousness in this area.  Again speaking personally, I would be less likely myself to attend such an event now.

So why have I titled this posting, "Second Chance".  Well, having reflected on my last comments, I remembered that I'd recently come across a company who is making a living from creating private virtual environments, plus another company who has a sound offer in simulations that emulate a real workplace and it occurred to me that some of the problems of Second Life, could be avoided or at least minimised by keeping the virtual world within the firewall.

Protonmedia offers corporates the opportunity to create their own internal virtual world that combines the full range of Web 2.0 tools to create a dynamic on-line environment for collaborate working and learning, ProtoSphere.  They base a lot of their ideas around the now popular concept of informal learning and for the technical savvy organisation, I'm sure this would add a new dimension.  They talk about "always on" meeting spaces and I like this concept for knowledge sharing, especially in a global company where you could span timezones to find new contacts who could get you out of a sticky situation, with some timely advice.

The other company who I last met at trade show in 2006 is PIXELearning.  They specialise in a range of generic "serious games", all of which resemble a virtual world and they are working on developing a range of tools so that a non-programmer could easily compile their own game.  I've always found the thought of coming up with a concept and then the functionality of a serious game a quite daunting proposition, so it will be interesting to see how easy they have made it.  But what I saw last year, was most impressive and a lot of time and energy, not to say budget, has gone into their work.