Spend some time engaging some of the best sims in the world

If you want to see some of the best examples of educational simulations and serious games, go here: http://www.actonsims.com/.

You do have to register, but it only takes a second and there is no downside to doing so.

A bit of background: Acton Business School for Entrepreneurs in one of the newly accredited (within the last decade) universities that give me faith, even excitement, in the future of formal education.

These sims are great for the following reasons:

• Despite their cartoonish looks, they are deep and real. The content is absolutely top-tier. You will learn real, advanced business school content.
• They take about an hour or so to play.
• They are completely flash based.
• They represent a level of depth and production value that is deep enough to really help the students, but not so deep as to not be a valid challenge for all other academic (and corporate) institutions.

There is no question but that these represent the future of content.

I would challenge any educational institution, from MIT and Harvard to Microsoft and General Motors, to use these as their benchmark. There is not excuse for any organization with a desire for a competency in formal learning to produce a lot of these.

I am not sure for how long these sims will be available to use for free, so take advantage while they still are.

Beware the Dark Facilitator

This blog talks about definitions around sims, so there is one tangential addition to this lexicon I would like to make. The dark facilitator.

These are people who start off as real facilitators or coaches. But along the way, either because they switch jobs or get hungry for self gratification or just want more and see their chance, use their facilitator skills systematically towards a selfish and zero-sum agenda.

These dark facilitators still use their key words like: "fair", "right", "honest", and "open". They still use tones suggesting they are impartial. They act as if they are listening to you, and pretend to care. They still strive to control/"be helpful in" all interactions. But typically they are either asked for advice or to support a project as a trusted "just there to help" third party, and at the end, by their deliberate subverting of the process, they have gained significant personal power.

They show up at meetings when no one invited them. They ask for help from others "for the good of the cause," but remarkably end up with the credit for it. They ask others for paycuts during hard times, while their own salary is increasing. They are great at pitting friends against friends.

There is always a creepiness to them. They get increasingly and more obviously shifty. They get more and more controlling. They always sound confident and definitive, but their ability to sound right has no correlation with their ability to be right. Typically his or her peers in an organization catch on, but often resistance is only formed after it is too late. Worm-tongue is in charge. They are the last survivor.

You may have had some experience with dark facilitators. If so, I would appreciate any tales below. And if so, you have my sympathy.

Clark Aldrich and Phaedra Boinidiris on IBM Serious Games Podcast

I did an IBM developerWorks podcast with Phaedra Boinidiris on Serious Games a few days ago, which is now available. If you want to give it a listen, go to their launch site here, or download the mp3 directly here.

The Emerging Unifying View of Highly Interactive Virtual Environment (HIVE) Learning

Many practitioners have been struck by a paradox. They have sensed an overlap between virtual worlds, games, and educational simulations on one hand, and yet they know that one does not equal the other.

Virtual worlds are vast social environments and interactive toolsets.

Games are fun ways to gain exposure and familiarity with some tools and ideas.

Educational simulations are rigorous processes to develop specific skills to be directly transferred into the productive world.

Likewise, virtual worlds are an infrastructure, closer to a telephone or television system, while educational simulations and some games (especially serious games) are prepackaged media, closer to movies or magazines.

However, it may be increasingly useful to realize that these concepts, rather than synonymous or unconnected, are best seen as nested. This is in part because:

• All games take place in some type of virtual world (if not necessarily a massively multiplayer online environment). If you want to play air hockey or basketball, you access a synthetic world with specific rules, feedback mechanism, and tools.
• Likewise, all educational simulations can be best understood as a very rigorous game. When a pilot uses a flight simulator, he or she is still entering a challenging, synthetic world with feedback and rules, but it is a special case with high transferability and ultimately some type of certification.

And, people push from one area to another. If I were put into a flight simulator, I would first treat it as a virtual environment ("let me look around"), and then a game ("let's see if I can get under that bridge"). Some people start playing scrimmage basketball as a game, but get really good at it and start using it as an educational simulation.

Finally, there is a concept of a sim, which: includes all prepackaged educational simulations and many serious games and group challenges; presents some abstracted world and the players role in it; and that have some transferability to the productive world.

So What?

What are the implications, if any, of this Highly Interactive Virtual Environments (HIVE) taxonomy? Here are some:

1) Accessing a virtual world does not give you a game for free, nor does having a game give you the transferability of an educational simulation for free. If you have a virtual world and you want an educational simulation, you still have to rigorously design it, just is if you were using Adobe Flash. What you have is a set of tools with a virtual world, that both enables and restricts the subsequent sim. Likewise, a serious game like SimCity is not the same as an educational simulation. You are not going to be a better mayor just by playing it, but it may be a good first step.

2) There are overlaps of processes.

• The same steps to help students get access to a virtual world also help them get access to an educational simulation. This includes help desks, technology test tools. downloads, and passwords.
• There is a common need for introductory levels, that asynchronously allow students to learn and then show basic competencies in manipulation, navigation, and communication before moving on to the "real" part.
• There is the same need for light games (so-called "class games") to get students comfortable with the various interfaces. These are all "living off the land" techniques that experienced instructors use, such as scavenger hunts, simple manipulation of the environment under competitive time pressure, or ice-breaker one-on-one interactions between students.

3) Finally,virtual worlds in education should include virutal classroom segments, with lessons learned from generations of Webex, Centra, and Illuminate users (Virtual classrooms fit in the outer HIVE ring, even if they are not a virtual world per se. One can play games in virtual classrooms, and one can do rigorous sims as well). But they should also go also beyond, into lessons learned from years of stand-alone educational simulations deployments. Likewise, stand-alone educational simulations may be better than virtual worlds for the time being for certain deeper skills that cannot be adequately built in a virtual world environment.

This emerging, unifying view of HIVE learning is the future of education. It represents, finally, the practical convergence of best practices and technologies, leveraging and building upon what we already know for better results for all involved. The critical trick, however, is knowing when to look at virtual worlds, games, and educational simulations as part of a greater whole, and when not to let this holistic view obscure the critical differences between them.