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Simulations and the Future of Learning
This isn't really a technical book -- it's a manifesto aimed at the middle- to upper-level manager, and indeed the very first page is an executive summary that attempts to convince you to read this book while swilling martinis instead of playing another round of golf. But don't let that throw you -- it provides enough medium- to low-level meat to keep a geek happy (and after my review of > Shaggy Steed I think I can claim to be a huge nerd). You certainly won't find any code, but it's not a puff piece.
Clark Aldrich had a cushy job at the Gartner Group in charge of e-Learning coverage, but felt that the promise of e-Learning was being distressingly wasted by emphasis on the fast-food mentality of quantity over quality and churning out of tons of linear crud, just because it's so easy to do. The real promise of e-Learning isn't just as an online textbook, but as a simulator. And for life-or-death situations, it's the best way to teach people before letting them take a whack at the real thing. The U.S. military knows this. Airlines know this. Medical colleges know this. 'The organizations that care the most about training use simulations.' So he quit his sweet but corrupt job, and co-founded a company to teach leadership via a simulation: 'Virtual Leader.'
The sheer scope of the company's ambition had me shaking my head, convinced that this was going to end in brilliant failure. Especially as they decide one piece at a time that they need to write everything, including the graphics engine, from scratch. But finally, over time and budget, harsh reality sets in and they start distilling their huge collection of data on the nebulous concept of Leadership down to something workable. The meeting is the crucible where everything gets done in the world of the manager.
Virtual Leader places you in progressively higher-powered meetings and tracks their 'Three-to-One' model of leadership: good leadership is getting positive Work done in the short and long term, and levels of Power, Ideas, and Tension affect this. It's your task to try to ferret out good ideas and get them agreed to while heading off bad ideas. Of course, in later meetings you won't be the most powerful person in the room, so you have to carefully nudge things where they need to go by making alliances and building and spending your personal influence. At the end you're ranked on how you did on several metrics. And, of course, all this has to be simple enough for a computerphobe to use.
Simulations follows the project stage-by-stage from concept to finished product: what went wrong, what went right, what hard decisions and tradeoffs had to be made. Perhaps most fascinating is the dialogue system. It's not a script; the characters are all actually responding in real time to simulation variables from a library of 2500 voiced phrases. Thus it sounds slightly stilted and unnatural, but you can tell what's going on. And it isn't as mind-numbingly dull as the repeated generic approval/disapproval phrases they started with.
The book is a fast and easy read -- you could easily finish it in a night. The section on their failed dealings with supposed Leadership Gurus is extremely funny. And he dishes out the dirt on the e-Learning industry pretty well. What keeps Simulations from New Machine stature is the lack of any connection with members of the team -- there's no personal tension or pathos. The real star is the simulation itself. After all, his goal for the book isn't to provide you with human drama, but to sell the corporate world on simulations and demonstrate the process of building one from scratch.
And in the end, Aldrich makes a strong argument that simulations are the real future of learning. I had fun reading this book: it didn't take too much time, and I learned a few things (including some guilty glances into the minds of mid-level managers). Two polygonal thumbs up. You can see movies of the product in action at simulearn.net, though unfortunately there's no demo -- they want you to cough up for the seminars. Or you could just read the book!
You can purchase Simulations and the Future of Learning from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
For lots of things. Like driving F1 cars, conquering the universe, dating, and shooting demons with a shotgun. I feel confident I am prepared for any of these things.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I am pretty much appauled by the state of most e-learning software these days.
Me too.
Free XBox, PS2
I learned from Sim Ant. Social structure, the distinction of color, the need for food, and the fact that for some certain types of ants, y'aint never EVER gonna score.
Oh, and spiders suck.
Heh, yeah, does that go with simulated productivity? Cause I'm REAL good at that....
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
I made a leadership simulator once. It replayed some situations in order to judge your response.
Some example situations are:
Hey, that's a great idea! It doesn't sound very good when you explain it though. So I'll present it at the meeting like I thought of it.
Here are four things I need you to do. Each one of them is your first priority.
Even though you have extensive education in your field and I'm barely qualified to be a manager, I'll be making some changes to your project to see if I can improve it. Let me know what you think.
This meeting is for you to review your superiors. Tell is what you think of us... honestly.
To my knowledge, no one has even succesfully completed my simulator. I'm not even sure if I could get someone to sit through this if I paid them $60,000 a year.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Sorry, I was seized by the FP bug at the time. The mere thought of using the spell checker hadn't even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
> The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you, 'but it
> means there's plenty of room for interest here.
Of course. Wouldn't it be much easier to replace Bush with a small shell script written against requirements provided by Karl Rove, David Frum, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and the tape backup made of Ronald Reagan's brain in 1982?
The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you
;) )
I have 437 Slashdot "fans" -- now that's completely simulated leadership -- and purely generated by my chutzpah in publicly posting my ill-informed rants for others to rate.
(If it was real leadership, they'd send me money or women, right? Or, ok, it's Slashdot, mobos and Star wars figurines.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Btw, it's 'Uebermensch' - not Ubermensch. If you guys are giving me a hard time for misspelling 'Baroque' then have the curtesy to properly spell my language as well ;-)
... enough for a computerphobe to use.
So people who suffer from "computerphobia" should be eligible for "leadership role playing" in today's world without having some therapy beforehand?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
How exactly is a simulation going to improve your dating skills? Which simulation are you using? And, more importantly, what do you do when your wife catches you running a dating simulator?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney