The Learning Webvolution

By Karl Kapp and Tony O’Driscoll

Webvolution—the current evolution of the Internet from a static, one-way, read-only conduit of information through a browser into a three-dimensional virtual world in which people, as avatars, interact, work, and collaborate—is beginning to permeate the learning and development field.

Stepping into a new era

To many, virtual worlds sound more like science fiction than a practical business tool. Overcoming the resistance to the application of virtual worlds for training purposes can be addressed by following four specific steps. Steps that will help the learning and development field move toward a greater understanding of how 3D learning environments can be leveraged to maximize human performance, understanding, learning, and productivity.

The first step is to learn the confusing terminology, jargon, and acronyms that accompany this new technology. For help in this area, read the article, Defining and Understanding Virtual Worlds, which provides a good foundation in basic terms and provides information on the different types of virtual worlds.

The second step focuses on addressing and overcoming the resistance to, and misapplication of, new technology. The learning and development industry has yet to fully realize the impact that technology can have on learning. Though many organizations have implemented e-learning, they are still not achieving the full potential of web-based technologies to revolutionize training approaches. Virtual world technologies provide us with a unique opportunity to change the game in learning.

The third step focuses on having learning and development professionals understand what makes virtual worlds so appealing to millions of people. Using virtual presence, content sharing, and the social network aspects of virtual environments have many appealing aspects that are not evident at first or to a casual observer.

The fourth step is leveraging the aspects of the virtual worlds that are effective for training and education. Virtual worlds are not appropriate for every training or educational situation. Choosing the right training scenario for a virtual world is critical for ensuring the proper learning occurs.   

Understanding technology resistance and misapplication

Those of us who do not study history are destined to repeat it. As Webvolution begins to impact society and organizations, learning and development professionals should critically examine the field’s prior successes and failures in applying radically new and different technologies to improving the transfer of knowledge.

An unbiased and honest assessment reveals a common pattern:

§       Our estimations of a new technology’s ability to change the game in learning are often too optimistic in the short term.

§       Our application of new technology is typically confined within a “course” paradigm and therefore the potential for any new technology, however revolutionary, is thwarted from the onset.

§       Our unbridled enthusiasm wanes and turns to resignation or even disgust as we lament the failure of the new technology to deliver the change we so desperately needed to redefine our profession and its value to the organization.

Ironically, recent disruptive technologies such as the Internet have had a profound impact on almost everything they touch, except training. In fact, in describing truly disruptive technologies, Bill Gates has noted that their impact tends to be overestimated in the short term but underestimated in the long term. The Internet is a clear example of this phenomenon. In the short-term, there was the dot.com bust as a result of irrational exuberance. However, in the long-term, the Internet has had a profound impact on how we live and work.

An ancient Greek would have no problem identifying the classrooms of today.

Show this same time-traveler a Wal-Mart or a pharmaceutical assembly line and you would blow his mind, but a classroom would produce little dissonance.

So, why is it that a technology like the Internet can change the world but have so little transformative impact on how we train employees, teach students, or transfer knowledge? Gloria Gery said it best: “We don’t need new technology, we just need new thinking.” The classroom paradigm is so pervasive it is in fact limiting our ability to take advantage technology. We are missing an opportunity to forever change the teaching, training and learning processes of our institutions.

Time is of the essence here. If our initial analysis holds true, the third-generation Internet is going to have at least as profound an impact as its read-only grandfather, and probably a lot more. We have already missed the opportunity to transform learning during the first two waves; we can’t afford to miss the third.  

The first step in righting our surfboard is to overcome Peter Drucker's concept of routinization, which is defined as our collective tendency to use new technologies to automate what was done in the past without questioning whether or not the technology affords us new opportunities for change. The training industry needs a frontal lobotomy to eradicate the current dominant design of training. Business people are often challenged to think out of the box. Taco Bell challenges us to “Think Outside the Bun.” As learning professionals’ our challenge must become: “Think Outside the Classroom.”  

What makes virtual worlds appealing

To begin this journey we must study what it is that makes virtual worlds so appealing to the millions of people who spend hours and hours operating in these environments. We must take the ethnographers approach and study the aspects of the virtual world environment to better understand its intrinsic value. Initial analysis of virtual world technology has uncovered seven characteristics of that make them appealing for individuals.

These are known as the “Seven Sensibilities of Virtual Worlds.”

Sense of self

One navigates a virtual world with an avatar. Put simply, an avatar is your digital sock puppet. You control where the avatar goes, what it looks like and how it behaves. It is a digital version of you. People in virtual worlds invest hours primping and dressing their avatars until they are pleased with how they appear. In many cases, the avatar looks similar to its physical owner; in other cases, it more accurately reflects an aspect of its owner’s personality rather than resembling them physically.  

Customizing an avatar in the virtual world of ProtoSphere.

It is quite surprising how quickly you become one with your avatar and how emotionally invested you can become in its well being. Emotion and investment in crafting an avatar are powerful forces which become manifest in a real way in a virtual world. When your avatar crash lands after falling from a high altitude, you wince. When she bumps her head, you rub your forehead and say “ouch.” When speaking with another avatar in-world, you keep your proper social distance. The sense of self is something that cannot be intellectualized it has to be experienced. 

Death of distance

Meeting someone in a virtual world is more than just meeting online at the same time in a chat room or synchronous learning site. In a virtual world, avatars are in the same virtual space at the same time. Distance is not bridged by an IP network that allows us all to connect to the same 3D webpage, it is instead a virtual place all of its own. People from different physical geographies can share the same digital geography. Virtual world environments are not web pages you access they are virtual spaces that your avatar inhabits.

Power of presence

Because your avatar inhabits a virtual world and because you have a real sense of self through your avatar, there is an authenticity to virtual worlds. This is not the kind of virtual reality that we strove for in the past where we tried to make virtual spaces as photorealistic as possible. Photorealistic graphics may win style points, but the real substance in virtual environments comes from the fact that there are real people behind the digital sock puppets. In virtual worlds everyone is truly in the “here and now” irrespective of where they are geographically and what time zone they are on in the physical world.

Sense of space, size and perspective

In virtual worlds our avatars have the ability to go beyond the limitations of space, size, and perspective. We can take on the form of a letter plowing through the postal system, or a white blood cell flowing through the body, or a photon traveling at the speed of light. In virtual worlds, many more degrees of freedom exist than in the physical world and that affords us the opportunity to see things anew and from a very different perspective.

Exploring the bottom of the ocean in a virtual world.

Capability to co-create

In Serious Play, author Michael Shrage discovered that innovation was more social than personal, and how people behaved and interacted around different versions of a prototype would overwhelmingly influence how value was created or destroyed. In essence, Shrage proposes that the key to successful creative collaboration is the creation and management of shared space. Virtual worlds provide that ability to create and manage shared space and for all of the participants within that space to create and interact with prototypes.

Pervasiveness of practice

Virtual worlds give learners the ability to try something over an over again in a safe environment that can remain in a steady state indefinitely. Because these worlds are perpetual and the objects in them are infinity reproducible, learners can attempt the same activity over and over again until it is virtually mastered.

Enrichment of experience

Beyond the obvious opportunities for people to change the way they look or overcome a disability, such as sharing a dance with a partner in a virtual world when bound to a wheelchair in a physical one. Factory workers can investigate the in workings of a machine, tour a virtual factory, or experience a birds-eye view of a corporate campus. Engineers can bring in data and overlay it on 3D models to augment their contextual understanding. Researchers can shrink to the size of an atom to observe chemical reactions and prototype new molecules. We have only scratched the surface of what’s possible here.

Academics and researchers are just now beginning to study the interactions of the Seven Sensibilities in virtual worlds to see how they may impact inhabitants and the learning within those worlds. Some related research seems to indicate that the three-dimensional and third-person perspective of these worlds may have a positive outcome for learning.

The New York Times article, This is Your Life (and How You Tell It), describes an experiment in which researchers had college students who described themselves as socially awkward in high school recall one of their most embarrassing moments. They asked half of the students to re-imagine the humiliation in the first person, and the other half to re-imagine it in the third person.

Students who imagined acting in third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since the incident first occurred while those who re-imagined the incident in first person did not indicate that they had changed significantly. It appears that the third-person perspective allowed the students to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues and then actually grow and change psychological while the first person perspective did not cause a similar change.

Not only did the ratings of themselves change, but the students’ behavior changed as well. According to the article, "a subsequent experiment showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. 'They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,' said Lisa Libby, the lead author [of the study] and a psychologist at Ohio State University. Dr. Libby and others have found that projecting future actions in the third person may also affect what people later do, as well. In another study, students who pictured themselves voting for president in the 2004 election, from a third-person perspective, were more likely to actually go to the polls than those imagining themselves casting votes in the first person."

With this in mind, if a person is asked to perform an activity in the virtual three-dimensional world where one of the most frequently used "modes" is the third-person perspective, it seems reasonable that the person's behavior would change as a result of viewing themselves performing that behavior in third person. While more studies are definitely needed to confirm this connection, Dr. Libby's research indicates that real and lasting behavioral changes could occur as a result of learners performing desired behaviors and activities in a virtual world using the third person perspective.

Leveraging virtual worlds for learning

While training in virtual worlds holds a great deal of promise, certain learning activities are better suited for virtual worlds than others. One design that has already proven successful in virtual worlds is a collaborative learning event such as role playing.

Virtual learning worlds are synchronous learning tools complete with voice and text communications. This means that virtual worlds are highly effective tools for helping learners to collaborate with one another through role plays and group exercises. A particularly effective instructional design is to divide learners into various groups and require them to perform a task together, such as building a prototype, coordinating a rescue effort, solving a problem.

Group doing a teamwork exercise on Education Island in virtual world of Second Life.

Once the exercise is completed, the instructor debriefs the participants or answers questions about what they did effectively and areas that require improvement.

First responders conduct a role-play exercises in which personnel from different response units log into the virtual world, don the appropriate attire, and confront such incidents as explosions, hostage situations, or chemical spills. The group coordinates efforts and work to extinguish the virtual fire, clean the spill, or free the hostage.

In a less dramatic example, sales people role play selling situations. An experienced, senior sales person plays the role of the customer while the new hire assumes the role of sales person. The two meet in a virtual store and commence the role play as the new sales person attempts to upsell the "customer" using a previously learned set of techniques.

In another scenario the learner assumes a different gender or race for a diversity role play and no-one knows who they really are. The learners observes themselves and how the react to others in that role. In fact, there is a lot of interest in virtual worlds on the part of training firms focused on diversity. Such firms live and die by the experiences they create and the paradigms they shatter as a result of that experience.

For years learning professionals have endured a love/hate relationship with technology. Printing press technology dislodged the Socratic Method and ushered in the classroom paradigm. In turn, the classroom paradigm has limited us from seeing the truly transformative potential that the internet virtual world technologies afford us. Virtual worlds provide learning professionals with the first truly scalable and transformative experiential learning platform. Realizing the value that this platform offers us will require that we unlearn everything that has blocked us from achieving breakthroughs in the past. This realization starts with looking at the field’s past resistance to technology, the sensibilities of the technology itself, and seeing where technology can be applied to help people connect and learn.