Steady Stream of Virtual Worlds

The past week (and upcoming two days) seems to be filled with a steady stream of information on virtual worlds.

First, I attended the Corporate Advisory Council at Bloomsburg University. Although "virtual worlds" was not the emphasis for this Spring's RFP (it actually was for last year's), Karl Kapp always gives out nice, short, little white papers on a topic of interest. This year, the white paper was called "Real World Instructional Design for Virtual Learning". He gives a brief overview of virtual worlds (a.k.a. metaverses), and then discusses advantages and disadvantages of different design activities. The design activities ranged from synchronous activities to self-paced exploratory activities. The design activities included:

• Classroom Emulation
• Role Play
• Scavenger Hunts
• Guided Tours
• Operational Applications
• Critical Incident

The bottom line that Karl drew is that the basic tenants of instructional design still apply in virtual worlds. He mentions that "building an environment in a metaverse and turning the learners loose to go 'learn' without guidance, goals, or objectives will not lead to effective learning."

Then, Monday morning, the latest version of Training & Simulation Journal arrived. The cover story was called "Gathering of Avatars: Harnessing the potential of virtual worlds". It contained three articles on virtual worlds: one was basically an introduction to virtual worlds, another was an article on how the National Guard is using a virtual world, and the last was an article by COL Howard of TRADOC. The article by COL Howard was particularly encouraging because he basically gives a swift kick to the DoD (and Government at large) to stop arguing about the downfalls (like security vulnerabilities) of virtual worlds and look at the advantages.

During the next two days, I will be participating in the Federal Consortium on Virtual Worlds at the National Defense University. I will actually be presenting a paper there on a project I'm working on. The inaugural meeting last November drew almost ~500 individuals in person and in world. That's right, the conference was (and will be over the next two days) available through NDU's islands in Second Life. I'm looking forward to a couple of days of seeing how much growth there has been since the inaugural conference in November. From the looks of it, there are already several more agencies and organizations that are looking into virtual worlds.