Catch-up

I've been holed up for the past several days (and nights) reviewing over 200 proposals. I'm a little over half way through, but needed to take a mental break before embarking on more reviews tomorrow.

One thing became abundantly clear as I was reading. There is still so much work that needs to be done in the model, simulation, and gaming field specifically and e-Learning field in general. In a way, I guess that should be encouraging since it provides a degree of job security. However, there are many disjointed efforts going on and despite recent attempts to standardize one or more domain (think SCORM, HLA, etc.) there is a long way to go. It's true that many companies thrive off of the disjointed nature, but this is driven largely by financial lenses.

As part of my mental health break, I dusted off Clark Aldrich's book titled "Simulations and the Future of Learning" from my bookshelf in order to see how close we were getting to the "future". His first chapter (called "Do you want fries with that e-Learning") has always been my favorite. In it he discusses what the world would be like if e-Learning truly worked. Some of the epiphanies include:

• Training people would be more powerful than lawyers
• Schools would have class sizes of 5, not 25
• Education would be a multi-billion dollar annual export
• E-Learning would produce buzz

We still aren't quite there:-) Unfortunately, I still think we tend to gravitate more toward Clark's analogy to the fast food industry (i.e. low cost...high profit...at the expense/health of the individual).