Simulations and the Future of Learning

Sarusa writes "Simulations and the Future of Learning chronicles the attempt by one company -- convinced that the business e-Learning establishment has squandered its potential to build a 'leadership simulator' -- to actually create such a thing, and by doing so prove that simulation is a better educational tool than straight linear regurgitation. The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you, 'but it means there's plenty of room for interest here. While not quite comparable to The Soul of a New Machine, as a breathless blurb suggests, it is a highly interesting read." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning author Clark Aldrich pages 280 publisher Pfeiffer rating 9 of 10 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 0787969621 summary The story of the creation of a 'leadership simulator' and an argument for simulation as the future of education.

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.

Comments

Leadership vs Management

[gr8_phk]

No one in my company knows the difference. Simply teaching that would be a big help.

Learning and "Engagement"

[Schezar]

This seems like a good idea. I submit to you that I have a great working knowledge of Fricana, a fictional world in which Quest for Glory, a game I played when I was in middle school, took place. I can tell you all the politics and geography and history and so forth related to this world, and were it real I could probably find my way around it farily easily.

Avid Everquest/SWG/Realm/etc.. players know loads about their respective worlds. Hell, I'd wager some of them have a greater understanding of these virtual civilizations than they do of the real world in which they live!

The key is engagement. Listening to a professor lecture is largely one-way communication, and all interaction occurrs at a meta level. I'm not participating in the French Revolution, I'm asking someone about it and listening to their answers. Watching a documentary is entirely one-way, and again it doesn't engage me directly.

Playing a game wherein I manage the affairs of a noble in France on the eve of the revolution, or a general under Napolean during the European Wars, I am directly engaged. My concerns are no longer retaining information for information's sake, but instead using information to achieve a direct goal.

Engagement forces you to learn, for otherwise you cannot be successful therein. It strips away the layers of abstraction and awakens the deeply-rooted survival mechanisms of the human mind. We're keyed to learn quickly when need be, but if that need is not immediate, it takes much greater discipline to put forth the effort.

Learning by Outline...

[SkippyTPE]

I'm currently on a committee tasked with evaluating synchronous distance learning software and with very few exceptions, they all seem to have the same failings as Blackboard, but promote them as features.

I've been floored by how many of the products are based on the PowerPoint model (if not on PowerPoint itself). This sort of reductive epistemology may be OK for conducting corporate training seminars, but I can't imagine teaching Shakespeare by bullet-pointing Hamlet.

We as a society have seemed to accept over the last few years that "learning" means being able to recite a Cliff's Notes version of a given set of facts. If this is how we are going to continue to define education, then perhaps we don't need better tools. If not, I'm not sure this guy has a better solution, but at least he appears to be trying something different.