Learning Technology

Disrupting Class: Christensen on Innovation and Education

I've been fortunate to work with Harvard Business School professors Clayton Christensen and Willy Shih on a forthcoming simulation on strategic innovation as part of our Harvard Business Publishing simulation series.  Having read The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution, I had some idea of Christensen's theories on innovation but working on the simulation helped me understand them at a deeper level.  We were also fortunate that Scott Anthony, President of Innosight and author or co-author of many Harvard Business Publishing products, contributed to the project as well.  I'll detail the simulation in a future entry but I'm writing here to give a sneak peek into Christensen's latest work, where he turns his lens to apply his theories of innovation and disruption on the education sector.

Games & Learning: A presentation by Katie Salen

In late April I attended Northeastern University's Teaching with Technology mini-conference.  The event was sponsored by Northeastern's Ed Tech Center, run by director Alicia Russell.  Alicia has always been generous with her time and her staff to help inform the development of educational technology both in Boston and beyond and this conference was no exception.  In addition to some great faculty overviews of technology usage and some great poster sessions by faculty and staff, the conference hi-light was the keynote by author and educator Katie Salen, renowned expert on games and learning.

New business sim: 'Everest' Leadership & Teams Simulation

We continue to develop and rollout our new web-based simulations here at Harvard Business Publishing (recently the name changed from Harvard Business School Publishing).  I already posted a writeup on our pricing simulation so today I'd like to give some info on our second simulation, a leadership & teams simulation called Everest.  As with all of our sims, this one is designed primarily for business school students but can also be used with undergraduates, executive education, etc.  Unlike the pricing simulation, this simulation is team-based.

Immersive Education and Virtual Worlds: Croquet and MPK20/Wonderland/Darkstar

My colleague Nicole and I recently attended the Boston Digital Media Summit, an event sponsored by the Grid Institute, the Woods College of Advancing Studies at Boston College, and Federation of American Scientists (FAS) with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  The event was organized by the Grid Intitute's Immersive Education Initiative and coordinated by Grid Institute Director Aaron Walsh of Boston College.   The summit's goal was "enabling the age of immersive education" and it attempted to mitigate technology challenges associated with appropriating cutting edge virtual world platforms for educational use.  I've attempted to summarize the key presentations of day 1 of the summit, hi-lighting the overviews of the Croquet and Wonderland virtual world platforms.

New business sim: 'Universal Rental Car' Pricing Simulation

As discussed in earlier posts, we've been developing a new line of online business simulation games here at Harvard Business School Publishing.  Our first two simulations have launched and I'd like to give short overviews of them and provide information for interested folks to explore them in greater detail.  The first simulation is Universal Rental Car and it's a pricing simulation designed for use across a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and executive education courses, including marketing management, pricing, business strategy, operations management, game theory, and microeconomics.

Experiential Learning Environments for Business Education

This entry is taken from the first half of a paper I wrote for my master's work in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.  With guidance from my advisor on this project, David Kahle, I researched experiential learning theory and developed the beginnings of a design framework for experiential learning environments.  I then applied the design framework to an experiential learning platform being developed by our new product development team at Harvard Business School Publishing.  This first half provides an overview of experiential learning and that is the focus of this entry.  I'll review the design vision and principles as well as our product plans in a future entry.

Simulations & the Future of Learning

We recently hosted a workshop at Harvard Business School Publishing to help refine our strategy for developing business simulations.  During the course of that workshop we held a panel discussion with our staff and the subject matter expert workshop guests.  This discussion focused on how simulations can help us think about education and learning in new ways critical to understand as we create effective learning technology products. What can simulations and strategy games tell us about how people learn?  About the socialization aspect of learning?  About how to capture, retain, and disemminate knowledge gained during the simulation experience?  We had some of the best simulation experts in the world join us to brainstorm on these questions and more.

Exploring the Virtual World of Second Life

Late to the party, but now we're going to take a peek at the virtual world / metaverse that is Second Life. According to the Second Life (SL) website, it is   "a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents.  Since opening to the public in 2003,   it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 380,834 people from around the globe." This post is a novice's overview of this world for non-users but will hopefully serve as an introduction and foundation for later posts that try and find relevance for business education and publishing. First we'll go over some mind-boggling stats that give a sense of the scope of this phenomenon. We'll look at the economy of this world and the developers who create the real experiences that add the value that drives that economy. Then we'll look at some of the interesting educational aspects and endeavors inside SL.

Educational Simulations Overview

It’s been awhile since the last post. I’ve switched jobs at  Harvard Business School, moving from the educational technology group that builds educational technologies for HBS faculty and students on campus to Harvard Business School Publishing’s Higher Education Group. I’ll be helping launch new product initiatives, one of which is developing a product line of business simulations for distribution to the academic market.

Having had the privilege of working on the teams on campus that developed the Venture Capital Game and the Airline Pricing Game simulations as well as on the teams that enhanced and supported the UpTick financial markets and Beer Game supply chain simulations, I had some familiarity with team-based products in this genre. But what people think simulations are and how they are used differs widely depending on where you look and whom you ask, so this post serves as an introductory assessment of learning simulations in large part by recapping a great book on the subject: Clark Aldrich’s Learning By Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences (Wiley, 2005). This book helped me develop a framework for understanding and assessing simulations and I think it could do the same for others interested in this field.

Social Tagging for Library Science

Our next Brain Gain session will investigate the use of social tagging technology for library science.  We briefly investigated social tagging in an earlier post on social software.  Popularized by sites such as del.icio.us, which offers users the ability to share their web bookmarks by labeling them with a personalized set of descriptor "tags", and Flickr, which allows users to share and find photos via tagging, this phenomenon is part of a larger "social software" movement that empowers users to organize information via a bottom-up "folksonomy".  That's fine for bookmarks and photos, but could this type of social tagging allow users to organize library content?  And if so, why would libraries sanction such a system?