I spent yesterday at the San Jose Convention Center, attending the Engage Expo 2009 conference. This two day event focused on immersive 3D and virtual world business solutions. It featured speakers and sessions that explored issues of interest for running a business in a virtual world - e.g., exchanging virtual goods and services, digital law and - the part I was particularly interested in - providing 3D Training, Learning and Collaboration services and support.
I arrived just in time to hear Tony O'Driscoll's session during which he described chapters from the upcoming release of his new book on Learning in 3D that he wrote with Karl Kapp. I had a delightful lunch meeting with Mark Oehlert, Learning Evangelist from the Defense Acquisition University and Koreen Olbrish, CEO of Tandem Learning. Mark and Koreen are both deeply knowledgeable about the promises and perils of virtual worlds, so it was great to have the opportunity to talk with both of them about virtual worlds (VW), social media (SoMe), learning innovation and the future of learning design. I had the good fortune to see Clark Quinn from Quinnovation, and was pleased to connect with Tim Martin from the eLearning Guild before making the long road trip home. All in all a great day.
Listening to the 3DTLC speakers, I was reminded that in many respects, VWs today are at a point where elearning was in the years before Howard Block's 1999 eBang Theory declared that elearning was an economic force to be reckoned with. MY OPINION: No doubt that VWs offer some tremendous possibilities for engagement and collaboration. It's great that there are talented and visionary individuals exploring possibilities for using VW for enterprise learning. There are enough business success cases to point to that one can see that this is going to be a very cool development to play with. Having said all of that, to going to take 3 - 5 years before we will be ready to see mainstream VW adoption. This last part isn't just my opinion - the recent Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies (2009) showed virtual worlds deep in the Trough of Disappointment.
This particular awareness made me sit up straight yesterday when IBM keynoter Chuck Hamilton, commented that virtual world "inworlders" are in a much better position to do innovative work in learning than what the old-time elearning people tried to do (his words), as evidenced by the bad courseware that plagues the industry (my words to his inference). That kinda bugged me. Because it presumed that early elearning visionaries didn't consider the boundaries. Having just re-read the eBang Theory, (Dr. Block's analysis of the elearning industry from an equity research perspective for Banc of America Securities) I knew just how far-reaching the vision for elearning extended, back in the day. It was huge.
But here's the rub - In spite of all the possibilities for elearning that its advocates were able to demonstrate, all people really wanted to pay for was scalable, repeatable, online courses. So that, along with LMSs, is precisely what we got.
It's ironic to think that the dissatisfactions about eLearning are due to the fact that we were not willing to pay for any more that we did. Wasn't a question of the failure of innovation - it had everything to do with what we were willing to adopt when it came time to integrate the innovation into practice.
So I quickly posted my 140 character opinion on the #3DTLC tweetstream: Why assume that early elearning visionaries didn't explore the boundaries? Innovation and adoption are vastly different outcomes. Each one demanding a different design sensibility. It's when we confuse our outcomes that we get into trouble.
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