I have wondered of late if Second Life is dying in much the same way that virtual worlds peaked and died in the 1990’s. With this in mind, I read a press release I received last week about a European project that uses a virtual world for soft skills training.
I asked Thibault Firer, from the French firm partnering on the project, who had contacted me:
Who is the intended audience?
How is your project different from Second Life and other virtual worlds?
Are there language or cultural issues that are important?
Thibault’s responses:
The SINAPSI project is a 3D platform dedicated to people who wish to learn team working skills, how to behave as an individual in a group in order to be effective, and how to maximize the efficiency of working sessions.
The main difference between Second Life and the SINAPSI platform is that the latter has a working purpose. The session builder creates all sessions. This means that only those informed of the login and password can access the session.
In other respects, cultural issues can be avoided by the use of the English language. The SINAPSI platform offers the possibility to go beyond the bounds of what is possible: there are no distances anymore, and culture isn’t a drawback but becomes rather an advantage as it allows sharing different points of view.
Thibault left me a message to follow up and ended with, “Have a nice day.” That drove home, to me, the importance of culture since it is such an American thing to say. Haven’t we all tried to fit in, make others feel comfortable, bridge a cultural gap?
I was left wondering if anyone in France ends an exchange with “Have a nice day” and, if not, what they are likely to say so that I know what to say that is culturally appropriate. Maybe I need to venture back into a virtual world to seek the answer.
Discussions about eLearning (or rather, education in general) in Africa have really surprised me, in a good way.
The leaders of the education movement, it seems, are prepared to take bold steps by skipping a whole bunch of technology in their education agenda and jumping full-on into using what they’ve got: mobile phones.
Mobile phone use and ownership in Africa is huge. So why not use that accessible, ubiquitous technology to reach people?
From the eLearning Africa email blast a few days ago:
eLearning Africa: Will Africa Learn by Mobile Phone or by Computer?
Teachers and technologists gathering at the eLearning Africa 2010 conference in Zambia will be debating a billion dollar question, attempting to work out whether future African students will learn from the telephones in their pockets or from the laptops in their classrooms.
The African continent stunned the world by leapfrogging several stages of traditional telecommunications development and a third of all African citizens are now mobile phone subscribers. Some debaters at eLearning Africa 2010 will argue that the existence of these millions of mobile phones means it may no longer be cost-effective to use scarce resources to install laptop and desktop computers in schools. Despite some huge investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in most African states, the millions of mobile telephones now in private hands may provide the best gateway to learning for the school children, students, apprentices and technicians of the new Africa.
The eLearning Africa Debate will be held at the 2010 conference in Lusaka, Zambia, May 26 – 28.
See more at elearning-africa.com.
On April Fool’s Day, one tends to be wary of news. Elliott Masie’s newsletter, Learning TRENDS, reported on “Friends-R-Us: Outsourcing Friends and Social Media”. Elliott’s announcement:
As professionals and large organizations consider the appropriate use of social media, a new industry has started to provide outsourced assistance. We were recently contacted by the CEO of an about to be launched company, Friends-R-Us’. They will offer several key services:
o Managing Your Facebook or LinkedIn Account: For busy professionals, they will go in every day and provide interesting stories, updates and make up engaging tidbits to provide you with a great presence online. They will also accept your friends and more. For extra fees, they will Twitter on your behalf every day, hour or with the Gold Plan, every 15 minutes.
o Leasing ‘Friends’: Some senior executives are quite worried that they won’t have enough friends showing on their accounts or following them on Twitter. This group will lease you ‘Friends’ in blocks of 50. You can define the demographics or region of these friends.
The CEO of Friends-R-Us was quite interested in expanding their services to support Social Learning and has considered starting a division to outsource learner’s collaborative assignments in online education processes.
When Donald Trump started a blog, my vision was that he would write an idea on a scrap of paper, toss it, and one of many underlings hovering nearby would write a post for him. If this new company isn’t a joke, then it will provide instant popularity. But doesn’t that seem counter to the whole point of social media?
A distance learning pioneer, Anne Slack, died. The elegant Algerian-born Mme. Slack, who had a perfect Parisian accent, “pioneered distance learning before the term even existed” through her television shows in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s, “Fun with French” and “Parlons Francais”. Mme. Slack, according to her obituary, “was on the forefront of a teaching method educators are still trying to fully integrate into classrooms: distance learning.”
I learned French in the classroom, and, after 8 years of classes, remember reading Albert Camus and Victor Hugo in French but can not carry on a basic conversation. Perhaps the estimated 2 million children in the US and Canada who learned French from her have better conversational skills.
Did you see Julie and Julia? Is Lisa and Anne next? It would be fun to devote a year to mastering French. Au revoir, Mme. Slack.
Lisa Neal Gualtieri, Editor-in-Chief of eLearn Magazine previously wrote about scented learning after she picked up a story about scented webinars.
Here’s another interesting webinar idea, from the Constellation Academy of Wine. The webinars are part of a blended learning solution I wrote about yesterday. I think this is an excellent way to educate. Of course, it’s probably a BYO (bring your own) wine event.
Here’s a link to a recorded webinar about Sauvignon Blanc . It’s interesting that the instructor uses such descriptions as “smells like cat litter.”
I imagine this would be a good way to provide training to anyone who needs to use the sense of taste in their job. Of course the product would need to be readily available. It would even be great for consumers.