Learn 4 Life

Mapping what Education and Business can learn from each other on the Immersive Internet, Virtual Worlds and Social Media

August 29, 2009 on 7:16 pm | In Adult Learning, Continual Professional Development, Digital Literacy, Digital Media, Educational Change, Futurelab, Innovation, Learning Platforms, Learning Tools, Mediated Reality, Peer to Peer, Personalised Learning, Second Life, Virtual Worlds, Web 2.0, advisory, distributed networking, informal learning, mediascapes, metaverse, pedagogy, training |

MAPS

Image attribution Thomas Roche on Flickr under this CC licence
This blog has always, and will continue to be, a record of my personal journey through the realms of what is innovative in education in social media and immersive environments; a charting of the individuals and communities I meet there along the way.

This year has been exceptional in the richness, the granularity of experiences and interactions with people I have encountered in those landscapes. That is what I do in the main, document these sojurns, pass them on for others to speculate and consider how new models, better ways of engagement might effect a step change in society. To make a rough hewn map of possible future territories in the area.

ISLANDS

On this journey I have come across whole islands of activity metaphorical, real and virtual where people are working at the very fringes of innovation.

Once such place is ThinkBalm Island on ReactionGrid. Here, I attended my first ThinkBalm Innovation Community Immersive Brainstorming Event. I was highly impressed and honoured to be there. And very fitting for a firm working as pioneers on the frontier of digital immersive platforms, ThinkBalm does things differently.

The session was led by Erica and Sam Driver. ThinkBalm is a grand experiment in collaborative innovation and ideas sharing; they use these events and their industry analyst firm as a conduit for numerous excellent highly focused reports and research around business activity in what they call the Immersive Internet. Basically they do what they scrutinise and are a living laboratory in effective communication and dissemination of ideas and information in that sphere.

I was drawn in to the ThinkBalm landscape simply by exploring the exponentially burgeoning sims on ReactionGrid and decided to do a little digging because I was intrigued by their business model and some of the parallels it has for education.

I saw that I had narrowly missed their last professional networking event in Second Life documented in this YouTube video.

When I saw that, I immediately realised the cross-over parallels and interconnections with Pecha Kucha and the growing TeachMeet phenomenon in UK education circles that I am documenting in videos sponsored by Futurelab.

In fact I was a bit in awe of the pedagogical models and the deep thinking and preparation that must have gone into facilitating that Second Life networking event. It appeared to be far slicker, more focused and superbly staged than many of the academic gatherings I had attended in Second Life in the past.

SILOS

Image attribution to y cstreet.us on Flickr under this CC licence

One of my personal remits for this year is to informally research different social professional silos working in social media, immersive and mobile platforms. Then bring together the best I have seen from those discrete arenas and highlight what seems to work and draw comparisons. But also to find those points of common reference that resonate with my own experience. This has always been the purpose behind my blog but this year I have widened the scope.

FISSURES

Image attribution to  jcmeloni on Flickr under this CC licence

I am finding it increasingly hard to work with partners who haven’t got the same mindset of openness, sharing and parity in their dealings whether in education or business. I find, in almost every case, I get the benefit of immense expertise and countless value added experiences in my own professional development from this modular way of working with more elastic partnerships - one benchmark earlier this year was interacting with the growing community of fellows at the RSA (particularly Tessy Britton, David Gauntlett and David Wilcox) who are involved in transformational change in that particular organisation - another is Amplified, another is Tuttle club and yet another is MirandaMod.

My outlook has changed so much, so that if I now engage with gatekeepers or proprietorially hierarchical organisations I just can’t work fluently - it was a common concern when I was teaching too; there’s a dysfunction there that goes against my own ethical values and it just doesn’t sit right. So I tend to avoid these non-flat institutions in the main -  one of the reasons I became an independent educational consultant in the first place and left teaching.

TRIBES

And once you read a book like Tribes by Seth Godwin you never go back. In the video below Loic Lemur who founded Seesmic, interviews Seth Godwin about the concept of Tribes - now there are two people who look like they’re having fun.

Now transpose that thinking onto the education system - any education system, anywhere you can think of, and you might start to get an inkling of why I am searching for some some form of personal and social credence in my business dealings with others. But, dear reader, I digress…

HOMECOMING

Image attribution Atelier Teee on Flickr under this CC Licence

From the very start of my educational consultancy, over seven years ago, I have always trusted my gut instinct in business. I have always worked in the innovation field, often years before others, trialling and testing ‘proof of concept’ ideas, no matter how outlandish, to probe those boundaries.

Learn4Life was established to act, not only as a personal, ad hoc, informal research project but also to be a way of enabling, mapping out and binding in, the emergent social media educational landscape and to disseminate and document best practice through video. I wanted to try and take soundings, find strategies for growth in that area; new ways of doing things that sit more easily with me and that directly address some of the more obvious shortcomings of the present school system as I see it.

On this journey, and it is a lifelong one, I have met fellow travellers and in each and every case it has felt like what I can only describe as ‘coming home’. The usual pointers are a passion and drive for what people do, a dedicated concern for change; the desire to adopt and forge new concepts and ideas. This homecoming is  often marked by the qualities of authenticity, narrative and community.

I got that similar feeling ever since arriving on ReactionGrid with many, many conversations with the individuals working on different projects in there and yes, it felt like coming home.

MASKS

Image attribution to icathing on Flickr under this CC licence

But what really drew my attention, or what Howard Rheingold currently calls Mindful Infotention, to ThinkBalm in particular, was a reference to of one of Erica Driver’s comments in my never ending RSS stream about the convention of using real names when interacting in business immersive environments. Unlike Second Life, ReactionGrid allows you to choose an avatar with your real name. So my curiosity was triggered. Over the course of this last year I have also been looking at issues of identity surrounding working and learning online and particularly the work of Yishay Moor and Shirley Williams with occasional glances over at what Josie Fraser is up to.

So when I joined Erica’s Linkedin group and saw the title of the event ‘How to write an immersive technology business case‘ (this coupled with the fact that I have recently confirmed the imminent launch of a business partnership with someone who has been working in allied fields for years in gaming and broadcast) I just had to go. Trust me dear reader I am getting to the point.

LEGEND

Image attribution to Jeff Lowe on Flickr under this CC licence

On arriving at ThinkBalm island in avatar form I was immediately launched into a highly focused brainstorming event facilitated by Erica and Sam. In the company of about 20 highly energised people with far more expertise in this area than I will ever have, I was given a masterclass in business writing techniques. This all through the medium of Jeff Lowe’s BrainBoard tool which has the facility to save all comments and ideas written on it in the form of notes to a database and email.

Image attribution to Jeff Lowe on Flickr under this CC licence

The hour went quickly and was a marvellous use of the platform and the interactions orchestrated within it. I would say it was an excellent case study in how to use this medium to best advantage. At the end of the session opinions were garnered in Jeff’s Attitudometer (touch the green top if you are in agreement about a question or statement, red if you aren’t and the middle if you have a neutral opinion). It’s an instant  feedback aggregation visualiser - simple and efficient.

COMPASS

Image attribution to exi-stencil-ist’s photostream on Flickr under this CC licence

So what do I draw down from this first experience of the business community in an immersive environmental platform and what can education learn from this?

Well, all of the participants were highly motivated self-starters who weren’t afraid of taking risks - very similar to many of the teachers I have met at various TeachMeets. And like them they are working in highly distributed small pockets of communities outside of main institutions bound together by their passion for learning.

These business models of working, at their best, seem very efficient and unencumbered by the usual barriers to productivity. There is fluency and focus, especially in the business community and it is able to fasttrack, prototype and instantiate ideas quickly and act on them with similar speed. I have also seen several similar instances of effective distributed work models on Tom Barrett’s blog.

In the UK firms such as Headshift are beginning to join up the dots between business and social media and could have a lot to offer education in terms of scoping out radical new ways of working between both areas…

But educators are necessarily wary of business; there has not been a good track record between the two communities in the UK especially - many teachers have felt disempowered and locked in to big corporate IT structures underpinning what they do and for the most part putting blocks on innovative practice. The rise of mobile device ownership in those communities in particular is beginning to change that and especially the use of Twitter for professional development. But a lot of what I have seen in both communities in the last year has led me to believe much cross-fertilisation is possible.

What marks true north, as well, in both communities, is the use of real world ‘face to face’ meetups to build genuine social community and those relationships then help pump prime subsequent distributed virtual gatherings on numerous platforms. The models are very similar - they seem to fit well.

I do think at some point there will be a merging of the two with each being able to give value to the other. Teachers like Viki A Davies and Trevor Meister both of whom are also on ReactionGrid are starting to pave the way. But more of them in my next blog post.

I personally believe that the role of educators will start to evolve and that many will begin to use the creativity and drive that underpins entrepreneurial enterprise in their professional practice and vice versa. The best of both communities will have a lot to teach each other.

But for now the map is very much equivalent to the one at the start of this post - the Mappa Mundi and the social systems and frameworks that surround the building of 21st Century working very much mired in the same conditions that underwrote the Medieval world before the coming of the printing press and Caxton. Who knows what will happen in the next decade but it’s fun trying to see what may pan out…