Learning Technology

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.

Learning Portals: Blackboard vs. Custom vs. Hybrid

I recently attended a seminar at Brandeis University hosted by the Educational Technology Group that Peter Hess runs out of MIT.  The focus was on Learning Portals, and specifically the differences between the Blackboard and WebCT products (which remain distinct products despite now belonging to a single merged company).  This was a natural and enlightening discussion since for most higher education institutions, "portals" does refer to some sort of off-the-shelf (OTS) / learning management system / enterprise product.  But some institutions like Harvard Business School -- those with software development capabilities -- initiatly opted to create custom portal solutions because at the time the shrinkwrap solutions did not meet functionality or enterprise integration requirements.  And others, like Emerson College, choose hybrid solutions where they augment OTS solutions with custom feature development.  Our next Brain Gain session will explore OTS vs. Custom vs. Hybrid solutions in an attempt to reset the build vs. buy framework in light of recent advances in OTS systems as well as the changing nature of portal functionality.

The Technology of the HBS Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness and Microeconomics of Competitiveness course

The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness (ISC), led by Michael E. Porter, Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at the Harvard Business School, studies competition and its implications for company strategy; the competitiveness of nations, regions and cities; and solutions to social problems. The Institute is dedicated to extending the research pioneered by Professor Porter and disseminating it to scholars and practitioners on a global basis.  The global mission necessitated the creation and creative deployment of several technology platforms designed to facilitate distance learning and collaboration. Our guest will be Andrea Sneiderman, Project Manager in the HBS IT Group, who has led technology initiatives for the ISC for the past several years.

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?

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute -- Platforms & Usability Info Sharing

Our first early May 'Brain Gain' session will look at Tomorrow's Learner.  At our second session we'll be visited by the Web Group from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI).  Our senior software engineer Leo knew that the work they were doing was very similar from a platform and usage perspective.  They are also a JSP shop with an Oracle database environment.  During an initial virtual meeting we discovered that many of the *utilities* developed by WHOI have correlations on the HBS/Harvard side, but usually grouped differently because they have evolved to address different challenges and serve different constituencies. 

Tomorrow's Learner Today

We'll have two Brain Gain sessions in early May.  At the first one we'll take a peek at today's tech-savvy students -- the same "neomillenial" students who will fill our higher education classrooms in the coming years.  There are several technology-related challenges facing the higher education environment as these students enter it, including:

• MySpace, social-networking, and identity management for children of the Internet era
• Plagiarism -- what constitutes originality for kids in a cut-and-paste culture?
• The digital divide and its effect on this and future generations of students

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Our next Brain Gain meeting will give us an overview of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.  The Center's mission:

The Berkman Center's mission is to explore and understand cyberspace, its development, dynamics, norms, standards, and need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

We are a research center, premised on the observation that what we seek to learn is not already recorded. Our method is to build out into cyberspace, record data as we go, self-study, and publish. Our mode is entrepreneurial nonprofit.

Using DITA to Develop Reusable Learning Content

Our next Brain Gain session will focus on using DITA (IBM's Darwin Information Typing Architecture) to develop reusable learning content. This blog entry is based on a post from our boss Larry Bouthillier (Director, Educational Technologies and Multimedia Development, Harvard Business School IT Group) on his learningAPI.com blog. I highly recommend reading that post as he captures the essence of this topic and also relates it to the academic environment.