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.
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.
Like the last entry, this entry is also derived from a paper I wrote for my master's work in the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. My advisor on this project was noted knowledge networks researcher Barry Fishman, visiting Harvard from the University of Michigan. Harvard Business School Publishing is about to launch the first two products in our new series of online business simulations and I wanted to investigate how we can ensure that this product line produces effective learning for our customers. This paper explores a framework for assessing effectiveness in online business simulations.
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.
I recently attend the Faculty Conference on Learning sponsored by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), an entity "of educational institutions, corporations and other organizations devoted to the promotion and improvement of higher education in business administration and management." AACSB sets the accreditation standards by which business schools are measured. The conference had a track on business games, so it was only natural that the issue of simulation efficacy and assessment was discussed. These discussions affect simulation design and use, especially for those of us developing business game/simulations for higher education.
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.
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.
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.
