Do you collaborate?

We are assembling a group of companies with existing active Second Life programs interested in collaborative training / collaborative applications of SL.
If you have an interesting project in one of the following areas:

    * company's knowledge base
    * development of e-learning modules
    * personnel reviews and testing
    * new hire orientation program (organization's structure and possible career paths)
    * brainstorming meetings (collaborative thinking and mind mapping)
    * project management
    * and, perhaps, other interesting applications

that will benefit from collaborative work and availability of graphical interactive representations of a concept, procedure, process, or structure you may qualify for
evaluation program of the new Collaborative Knowledge Management tool.
Please, see details at http://tinyurl.com/collaborate-in-SL and contact me via LinkedIn or SL (AHG Hallard)
(if tinyURL does not work, here it is in the full form: http://second-life-training.ahg.com/knowledge_management/Enterprise_Knowledge_Management_and_Collaboration_Solution_evaluation.htm

Here is also a full description of the Collaborative Knowledge Management:  http://second-life-training.ahg.com/knowledge_management/Enterprise_Knowledge_Management_and_Collaboration_Solution.htm The best thing about cKM in my not-so-humble opinion :-) is that it is accessible both from Second Life and the regular web interface)

Corporate Training and Collaboration

I just completed a video trailer for a mine and Gary Woodill's book. We, at AHG, do a lot of simulations and general Second Life projects (including shooting video in Second Life!), but when it comes to editing video I will not pretend to be a pro. Hope, you still enjoy the show! More info on www.TheVirtualWorldsBook.com  

 

 

 

Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds - a new book targeted towards enterprise

As of the end of July, searching amazon.com for terms "Second Life" +corporate (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=%22Second+Life%22+%2B%22corporate%22&x=0&y=0)  produces 43 results starting from The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse by Daniel Terdiman, to Handbook of Research on Virtual Workplaces and the New Nature of Business Practices by Pavel Zemliansky and Kirk St. Amant.  None of these books, unfortunately is really targeted towards a corporate user of virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular. 

More narrow search for "Second Life" +"corporate training," (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=%22Second+Life%22+%2B%22corporate+training%22&x=0&y=0) leaves you with only three results left.  These books, however, mention training only in passing, if at all.

There are great books on the subject of virtual worlds and Second Life, but they are concentrated on entertainment value, use by hobbyists or small businesses catering to those hobbyists.  Moreover, many of the available articles and reports on the use of Second Life in corporate environment emphasize secondary, worthless, or even directly counterproductive aspects such as ability to create a three dimensional conference room or a copy of your corporate campus. They miss really important business-related features such as:

    * Expense avoidance

    * Highly effective procedural training, collaboration and support sessions

    * Great opportunities for effective collaborative work, unavailable by using other technologies

    * Expanding brand by building self-managing communities of loyal customers and outside developers

    * Increasing ROI by connecting training simulations with already existing training programs and Learning Management Systems

That is why when I was approached by McGraw-Hill with a suggestion to write a book on corporate use of virtual worlds, especially in training, I jumped on the opportunity.  Luckily, Gary Woodill of Brandon Hall Research agreed to co-author and share his expertise in emerging learning technologies.  Today I received a copyedited manuscript (that I am now reviewing for accuracy) and by December you should be able to pick Training and Collaboration with Virtual Worlds: How to Create Cost-Saving, Efficient and Engaging Programs on amazon.com, in Barnes and Noble, or another book store. 

Gary and I started with a mutual understanding that in business there is nothing more valuable than experience. We were extremely lucky in that we received unprecedented access to virtual world pioneers from the corporate community who, for the first time, candidly shared both the successes they had and the problems they faced, financial outlays, as well as best practices and recommendations drawn from real life experience in virtual worlds.  Then we proceed to discuss everything you need to learn about the business uses of virtual worlds, with an emphasis on Second Life: what it is, what you need to start a successful program in Second Life or other virtual worlds, what to expect, and how these innovative environments are used by a variety of well-respected corporate players. We pay special attention to security issues and concerns, as well as real-life implementations and use of simulations to achieve competitive advantage and high ROI.

There is more information on the book's web site (table of contents, excerpt, list of contributors, etc.) http://www.TheVirtualWorldsBook.com.

Effective training in 3D learning worlds – doing more with less.

If you are thinking of how you and your team will survive current downturn, you are not alone.  Over the last couple of months this became a theme of many conversations I heard and for a good reason.  Training is not going to be immune to this round of belt tightening.  Regardless of the level of your optimism, budget slashing seem to be the inevitable next item on the agenda, or perhaps it already affected you and your organization.  This is exactly the reason why AHG created a new training tool that allows you to cut budget without jeopardizing your work and future growth.  Trying to preserve budgets in current environment is a loosing battle. The better strategy is to concentrate on a solution that saves significant resources while improving training results – KPI’s, time to ready and durability.  Immersive Communication Training System (ICTS) can create uniquely-effective training solutions in 3D learning worlds, such as Second Life.  But this is only half of the story.  The second half is that you do need to hire or involve inside or outside programmers and training designers do not need to have technical background.  You create training simulations using intuitive Graphic User Interface.  If you are capable of using computer mouse to move color rectangles on a screen, clicking them to interconnect rectangles with arrows, then you can create a training simulation as simple as short sales call, or as complex as equipment handling lesson.

Prior to the age of personal computers, professionals would hand-write their notes and then have them typed by typists.  Similar situation still exists in training where instructional professionals design training and have programmers implement it using computer technologies.  It certainly looks like a silver lining of this downturn might be in the 3D learning environments (i.e. Second Life), and technologies, such as ICTS, to get rid of intermediaries.  Doing this might just be the key to preserve and position your team for better future in the times of slashed budgets.

You will find more information on http://www.ahg.com (click on the Immersive Communication Training System button, or click on the direct URL:

http://second-life-training.ahg.com/training_simulations/second_life_immersive_communication_training.htm

)

Virtual Worlds Training for Corporate Executives

Corporations researching virtual worlds as a training platform quickly realize that they lack expertise to fully capitalize on the benefits and avoid costly mistakes.  If they don’t, quite often they become a good candidate for me to talk about during the next seminar “Avoiding Costly Mistakes When Starting Corporate Virtual World Training Program”.   Steve Prentice, VP of Gartner recently noted that early attempts [working with virtual worlds] suffered from a lack of clear objectives and a limited understanding of the demographics, attitudes and expectations of virtual-world communities.  As a clearer understanding of the dynamics of this new media channel develops, Gartner expects this situation to change.  Despite understandable concerns about investment during a time of growing business uncertainty […] the internal deployment of virtual worlds offers most enterprises significant benefits in cost savings and improved productivity. 

To help corporations realize this potential to its fullest, AHG started a series of new courses taught by a team of experts who have real life experience creating, consulting, and supervising successful Second Life / Virtual World programs. We share our expertise in a series of hands-on courses that encompass corporate training, HR, marketing and other activities as related to corporate use of virtual worlds.  AHG offers two separate tracks: Executive and Instructional Designer / Developer. Instructional Designer track provides hands-on training focused on day-to-day development and maintenance of Virtual World projects. After the courses are completed, students are able to design and build Second Life environments, create simple scripts, implement and modify scripts developed by others. They also develop an understanding of human factor issues that affect productivity and quality learning in virtual world environments, techniques to "flatten" learning curve, importance of standards, methodologies, and life cycles in the management of Second Life projects and resources. 

Executive Track courses provide in-depth understanding of virtual worlds from an executive perspective as a tool for the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage. These courses offer up-to-date information on theory behind successful Second Life implementations, practical approaches, promising new developments, successes, and problem areas in other companies’ implementation of virtual worlds in corporate environment.  As an added benefit, AHG shares audio recordings from our Second Life round table where executives of companies such as Accenture, Michelin, Philips and others describe their experience with Second Life projects.

You will find more information on http://www.ahg.com/courses/second_life_courses.htm

Second Life Corporate Training Roundtable Audio Record

Late June, Linden Lab celebrated the fifth anniversary of
Second Life.  The whole week, starting  June 30 was devoted
exclusively to business uses of Second Life.  AHG, Inc. was
asked to run a round-table discussion "Starting Corporate
Training Program in Second Life: Best Practices, Security
Concerns and Future Developments".

An hour and fifteen minutes - long roundtable discussion
was full of insightful information from people who have
implemented Second Life projects on an enterprise level
and now have unique prospective on both advantages and
deficiencies of Second Life and virtual worlds in general.

Panelists included Chief IT Architect of Michelin and
Business Director of Linden Lab,  Senior Analysts from
ThinkBalm and O'Reilly, Accenture Internet Channel Lead
and Business Director of Royal Philips Electronics, computer
and behavioral scientists.  We discussed security issues,
corporate use and growth patterns,  world-wide recruiting
project,  ways Second Life helps in enterprise mission,
and other issues of importance.

The audio record of the event  is now available for
download. If you are interested, you can request audio at
the following page:

http://www.ahg.com/Second_Life/roundtable_reg.htm

Second Life roundtable / corporate training

It’s hard to believe, but Second Life is officially turning five years old.  Linden Labs (the company behind the Second Life) is celebrating the anniversary with a series of expositions, discussions, conferences and other events.  The whole week, starting June 30, will be devoted exclusively to business uses of Second Life.  I was asked to run a round-table discussion "Starting Corporate Training Program in Second Life: Best Practices, Security Concerns and Future Developments".  We already have a list of respected panelists that includes folks from the industry who implemented Second Life solutions in training and marketing, analysts with well-known technology and market research company, business liaisons from Linden Lab and others. 

Given that you are reading this blog I think it would be inconceivable to miss this opportunity to gather more valuable information in one hour then you otherwise  would be researching for years.  And the best part:  you will be getting information directly from the people who has been involved in business implementations of Second Life solutions. 

Tentatively, we set up round table for Monday, June 30th at 9 AM Pacific / 12 noon Eastern.

Please, e-mail me at info1 @ deltaltraining.com if you would like to attend.

Right now we are researching possibility of streaming video+audio from Second Life using GoToMeeting for those who would like to be present, but their corporate network prevents them from connecting to SL directly.  If this works out, the number of people who will be able to connect using GoToMeeting will be limited to 15, "first come/first served, single computer connection from a company," so if your firewall "filters out" Second Life, but allows GoToMeeting connections, you might want to register asap.

Second Life: best practices.

It is characteristic of a paradigm shift that significant differences and disagreements on implementation strategies exist during early adoption stage.  As a result, I was not surprised finding myself in the middle of such disagreement past Friday, April 25^th.  That day I was privileged to be on the Corporate training in Second Life panel of the vBusiness Expo (http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/marketwire/0389917.htm). [An important note: Congratulations to Clever Zebra (http://cleverzebra.com) for great organization – rarely have I seen an event run so smoothly in any life – real or otherwise.] The discussion highlighted two opposing approaches in using Second Life in corporate environment.  Champions of the first approach first and foremost see Second Life as a social tool best suited to facilitate communication within the enterprise. Indeed, few people would argue that Second Life is a great communication platform.  What I would argue, however, that social networking is the most obvious, but not the strongest side of virtual worlds in general and Second Life in particular.  Indeed, you can find other tools that allow your team to remotely communicate, often using wider possibilities, such as use of whiteboard, VOIP, streaming video, etc.  In many cases your team will even feel more comfortable using remote conferencing tools, so if conferencing is the only reason you consider Second Life, you will be better off googling “remote conferencing software”.  My search produced 2,750,000 results for this term.  Not surprisingly, though, search on double-term “remote conferencing software”+”Second Life” produced no (as in “zero”, “null”) results, in its own way proving that Second Life is not a remote conferencing software. 

You might be surprised to hear that from such as committed supporter of Second Life corporate use, but I agree – if anything, conferencing is only tangential, at best, use of Second Life in the enterprise.  Second Life is unmatched in corporate training where it allows you to create experiential, immersive environment.  Even more importantly, it has tools to create training simulations in distinctly different areas, such as teamwork and leadership, communications, project management, technical training and others (see Second Life training simulations). Remote conference does not benefit much if every team member is represented by a three-dimensional avatar.  However, ability to run your three-dimensional avatar through a sales simulation in an environment closely resembling the real thing, or ability to assemble/disassemble piece of machinery in 3D before doing it in real life, or training tag-out/lock-out or other OSHA requirements, or training managers in giving meaningful annual reviews, or dealing with difficult people – these and other areas where companies spend a bulk of training budget and time – all benefit from the inherently strong experiential and 3D qualities of  Second Life.

Up until recently wider acceptance of Second life in corporate training was blocked by necessity to conduct training in a synchronous mode with instructor leading training at all times.  Indeed, in e-learning we expect trainees to be able to learn and practice on their own and instructor serve as a figure of authority and a safety net.  With the introduction of specialized e-learning smart robots (see Second Life robotic avatars) Second Life training can be switched to asynchronous mode.  Smart robots look and act as if they represent real people, but in fact are operated by computer software.  Every time a trainee logs in to complete assigned task the system logs the process for future assessment by trainee and instructor.  Detailed reports on specific tasks and progress reports are available.  Since robotic avatar software and training-related data are located on a corporate network outside Second Life data security is drastically improved.  This raises the whole issue of data protection and security in Second Life – too far from the topic of this post, but I hope I will have a chance to return to it next time I get to this blog.

I Need an Answer Quick--Help!

By Mona Piontkowski, SeminarInformation.com

We certainly live in a fast-paced world. It used to be days, even weeks before most of the nation learned who won the Presidental election. Now, everytime one of the candidates attends a rally, gives a speech or makes a misstep we hear about it immediately. And we all know that the minute we walk out of a store with the latest techno-gadget somewhere someone is developing one that will do more...faster and easier. How can we possibly keep up with it all?

In an age where daily newspapers are often outdated before they even go to press it is difficult for professionals to stay on top of their professions, i.e. be state-of-the-art. Of course you could look for a book in the bookstore - but by the time it is available the information will, most likely, be outdated. The Internet could be a good starting point for help - but then the information on many of those Internet sites is only as good as the person who posted it.

One industry, the training industry, has always tried to address problems as they develop. Seminars are developed overnight and are usually presented within days or weeks of a new technology, new problem or new idea. Seminar providers have jumped in to help indivduals and organizations solve problems as they crop up.  As we are headed towards recession and the numbers of foreclosures increase Lorman Education has come up with a presentation,  "Foreclosure and Repossession" (http://www.seminarinformation.com/qqbpun/foreclosure-and-repossession) and Sterling Education Services has "Foreclosure Procedures" (http://www.seminarinformation.com/qqbufw/foreclosure-procedures). Both of these seminars are directed towards attorneys and real estate professionals who must face this ever growing problem.

It has always been difficult for those in the health care profession to stay on top of it all. Cross Country Education and Therapy Network Seminars present a whole slew of programs directed towards health care professionals. "Autism Spectrum Disorders: Guiding Families through Acceptance, Understanding and Progress" (http://www.seminarinformation.com/qqbugb/autism-spectrum-disorders-guiding-families-through) from Cross Country Education assists health care providers in dealing with the current increase in autism cases in the US. Lorman Education presents " Individuals With Asperger Syndrome Or High Functioning Autism: Understanding Their Community And Educational Strengths And Needs" directed towards special education teachers, classroom teachers and parents.

It has always easy to find a seminar that explains the latest version of  software as well as any new software that is developed. Seminars are probably the best way to stay on top of  the latest release from Microsoft and others without having to try to work it all out for yourself. Some seminar companies who present these type of seminar include Learning Tree International, CompuMaster, Hands of  Technology Transfer and Global Knowledge. You can find a quick one-day overview seminar or a week long in-depth coverage.

Seminars have always been there in the past - right after the horror of September 11th seminars were developed on disaster recovery for those firms who feared that they too might have to recover after a major impact on their business. Learning Tree International's "Disaster Recovery Planning: Ensuring Business Continuity" (http://www.seminarinformation.com/qqbtkc/disaster-recovery-planning-ensuring-business-continuity) teaches businesses how to continue to function after a disaster either man-made or natural effects their business. CareerTrack Seminars developed "Emergency Planning and Disaster Management for Your Organization" (http://www.seminarinformation.com/qqbsqx/emergency-planning-and-disaster-management-for-your) that also addresses dealing with earthquakes, floods, fires, and computer issues such as hackers.

You can always find seminars that address common problems like stress and time management or help you brush up on skills like finance and accounting but now, more than ever, seminar providers are addressing issues as quickly as they develop. So next time you need a quick answer look for a seminar provider on the Internet or check out the local community college and you may find help is not very far away.

New Second Life Training Simulation

How many times have you seen a project hit a brick wall of teams’ inability to work together: from mild cases of overblown ego and tug-of-war to vicious in-fighting?  Some folks think these problems can be fixed with just a little bit of extra of communication and explanation. I beg to differ. Building a team from people who like working with each other is obviously the best scenario.  If it is unavailable, serious teamwork training is in order.  These ideas were the foundation of Delta L designing Teamwork Tester. We used Second Life platform and Education Island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20Island) to create a simulation based on the following concepts:

• Observing a group of people performing a simple task that requires group effort, provides data allowing to draw conclusions on their teamwork abilities and attitudes (that is you will find if it’s a group of quarreling individuals or a team).
• Observations are important, but metrics is what validates conclusions. While subjects are working on the team task, each step is recorded and processed.
• At the end of the session you receive measurable results of the performance of the team as a whole, as well as metrics of a variety of characteristics of individual members. The results are saved in the database and are accessible via the web for review, analysis and comparison of different teams / team compositions.

Along with the team characteristics, Teamwork Tester allows you to assess individual characteristics of the team members, such as:

• speed
• effectiveness
• participation in the task
• ability to finish assigned part of the work
• helping others if needed

Important! I am writing all of this not to plug our latest and greatest product (although that as well), but to invite you to test and comment on the work and features. We are considering developing Teamwork Tester further and would like to “compare notes” with you. You can see the demo of Teamwork Tester on Education Island (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Education%20Island) and get more information at http://www.ahg.com/Second_Life/training_simulations/teamwork_tester_1.htm