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

Does anyone remember Super-Learning

[teutonic_leech]

There was some movement in that area back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Basically, they played Barock music while feeding people foreign language words. This really seemed to speed up retention by several factors. Anyway, I think that the current learning methods are completely antiquated and new techniques are desparetely needed. Top that with a disfunctional school system here in the U.S. and articles like this sound a bit like Science Fiction.

Re:Does anyone remember Super-Learning

[drinkypoo]

That's one thing that's always bothered me, people just making up spellings for words they can't spell. Personally I'm of the opinion that you should never use, in text or in conversation, any word you can't spell properly. The worst part is that people who see someone else botch a word won't necessarily know it's botched and they wind up saying "Oh, so that's how you spell that!"

Granted, the slashdot editorship is setting a bad example for us...

In a lot of ways I couldn't agree more

[stuffduff]

I am pretty much appauled by the state of most e-learning software these days. Systems like Blackboard may be great for an instructor with a liner interpretation of the sum of all the textbooks they've ever studied, but it is clerical in nature. It is not designed and built to stimulate learning and transforming information into knowledge. Sounds like a good read. I loved the Soul of a New Machine.

Fieldwork

[JoshuaDFranklin]

That's why my grad program now has fieldwork as part of the requirements. We go out and do "professional-level work" at real places.

I bet that's a cheaper way to go than simulating real places, too.

Chris Crawford...

[th1ckasabr1ck]

... the legendary game designer suggests that the future of learning is through playing. This is an exerpt from his game development "retirement" speach, and I think he makes a good point:

"If you really want to understand this concept, just watch two kittens at play. One kitten wanders off, following a bug. The other crouches low and folds his ears back, and creeps up on the other kitten until he's close enough, then he pounces on the kitten. The two kittens bite and claw and kick, and they roll around on the floor. We all laugh and say that kittens are so much fun, that they have nothing better to do all day than play - but we would be wrong.

These kittens are not wasting their time in idle entertainment. They are engaged in serious business. They are learning the skills of adult cathood. They are learning how to hunt. For what does an adult cat do when he sees prey? He crouches low, folds his ears back, and creeps up on the prey until he's close enough, then he pounces on the prey and bites and claws and kicks.

We don't see kittens lined up in neat rows as an old geezer of a cat stands a chalkboard lecturing about mouse anatomy and approach angles and attack vectors. That's not how they do it! They learn by doing, by playing."

Oy vey

[RCulpepper]

The reason there are so many more readers of management books than there are good managers is that a huge part of being a good manager is understanding and empathizing with people, whether those people are above or below you hierarchically. These simulations may teach good business strategy, but they certainly cannot teach good interpersonal relations, which for the forseeable future is going to be a humans-only endeavor.

Ultimately I think this is like writing classes --you can teach someone to write grammatically, but it is a much tougher thing to teach him to write well, and an impossible thing to teach him to be creative or inspired. Either you've got the spark or you don't.

Re:Oy vey

[code_rage]

I agree at least 90%. If you reach your 20s and don't have the ethical framework and basic understanding of human nature to become a leader, this won't get you there and no artifact will.

Leadership is about taking a stand in the face of risk. You can read about it ("Profiles in Courage"), you can watch movies about it ("To Kill a Mockingbird"), and you can observe it in the actions of those around you. But you only learn what it means when you have a stake in the outcome.

The reviewer mentions that Aldrich says the military teaches leadership in simulations. I wonder if this means war games or computer sims. In the case of war games, there is something real at stake even though people are only simulating death and wounds: one's evaluations are at stake, which probably has a big effect on one's career. Does Capt So-and-so accept responsibility for his decisions, or does he blame the weather, equipment failures, or worst of all, his men? How the commander behaves after the fact speaks volumes about his leadership, perhaps is almost as important as during the action. (I'm speculating here -- any military types care to comment?)

Can this sort of thing be taught in a simulator? Can those who have some leadership skills be improved this way? Or even identified this way? I doubt it.

Decision Point DEC LaserDisc

[jpellino]

We did some work with DEC in the late 80s when they were trying not to laugh at our PDP11/35 and get us to buy some newer stuff. One of their showcases was a laserdisc / computer system that did training simulations. The corporate one was called "Decision Point", where you had to train as an exec and make decisions and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. Full motion video, great camera work and angles, in one clip you were at a meeting and the camera turned to the guy next to you who would lean in an give you some gossip, etc. You would be walking thru the hall when some other worker would confront you and bother you about that raise she'd talked to you about weeks ago - you would at each point have four choices - decide yes, decide no, get more information, or put off the decision. The twenty minutes later, the raise decision would come back to bite you, or something like that. Great production values. And I remember people going thru this and getting flop sweat after a certain amount of that - I took that as a sign of realism...

I remember my ed tech grad students hearing the Oregon Trail sounds when we did SW evals, and their eyes opening wide from memories of the apple II days and recounting in excruciating detail what they had to do when to get the supplies, survive, etc...

When it's good it works - when it's bad, it's not even worth ignoring.

The Logic of Failure

[RonBurk]

For some lessons learned from management simulations (years ago) that you can use right this minute, try reading "The Logic of Failure", by Dietrich Dorner. The simulations discussed included trying to keep meat from spoiling in a freezer with a simulated broken part (but you didn't know what part it was), as well as much more complex simulations in which you have to manage a small African ecosystem.

These simulations clearly expose general situations that humans are stunningly bad at unless they are trained to recognize them and behave against their natural inclination.

For example, the freezer simulation showed that humans have great trouble grasping any situation in which there is a delayed response to their actions (the temperature of the freezer responds to your changing the thermostat, but only after the fact, and it may overshoot). How does that apply to your world? I bet if your company has 100 people and needs to reduce the headcount to 90 people, they would lay off 10 people. The problem? The delayed effect that layoffs have in causing people who aren't layed off to look for work elsewhere. If you want to get rid of 10% of your people, you probably better only lay off perhaps 7% or 8%.

In recent years, I watched a local company go through no fewer than seven layoffs. Every single layoff was followed within a matter of weeks by hirebacks, as additional people departed in response to the layoffs and the company had to hire to fill essential positions. After seven iterations, the managers still had not grasped they were overcontrolling a system that had a response delay built into it.

It's hard to believe that such incompetence persists in the software business, where managers receive a level of thorough and professional training that... oh.