While this commentary (below) is directed at the externally-oriented marketing uses of social media, it's not too hard to imagine a similar (calm) rant about the use of interconnectivity for people to exchange information and 'talk' about issues that are important to their work (what we call "social learning").

I’ve been attending the CLO Fall Symposium this week, and it’s been a great experience.  I wrote it up as a blog post over at eLearn Mag.  There is supposed to be more linkage between Learnlets and their mag real soon.  Stay tuned!

In a recent post, Jane Bozart goes to task on ‘best practices’, which I want to elaborate on.  In the post, she talks about how best practices are contextualized, so that they may work well here, but not there.  She’s got a cute and apt metaphor with marriage, and she’s absolutely right.

However, I want to go further.  Let me set the stage: years ago as a grad student, our lab was approached with the task of developing an expert system for a particular task.  It certainly was something we could have done.  Eventually, we asked what the description was for the ideal performance, and were told that the best source was the person who’d been doing it the longest.  Now, people are fabulous pattern matchers, and performing something for a long time with some reflection on improvement likely could get you some really good performance. However, there are some barriers: experts no longer have access to their own performance; without an external frame of reference, they can get trapped into local maxima; and other phenomena of our cognitive architecture interfere with optimal performance (e.g. set effects, functional fixedness).  I’ve riffed on this often; it’s compiled and they tell stories about what they do that have little correlation to what they actually do. We didn’t end up taking up the opportunity.  So it may be the best out there, but is it the best that can be?

And that’s the problem.  Why are we only looking at what the best is that anyone’s doing?  Why not abstract across that and other performances, looking for emergent principles, and trying to infer what would on principle be the best?  That is, if it hasn’t already been documented in theory and is available (academics do that sort of thing as a career, and in between the obfuscation there are often good thoughts and answers).  The same with benchmarking: it’s relatively the best, not absolutely the best.

I’ve largely made a career out of trying to find the principled best approaches, interpreting cognitive science research and looking broadly across relevant fields (including HCI/UI, software engineering, entertainment, and others) to find emergent principles that can guide design of solutions.  And, reliably, I find that there are idea, concepts, models, etc that can guide efforts as broadly dispersed as virtual worlds, mobile, adaptive systems, content models, organizational implementation, and more.  Models emerge that serve as checklists, principles, frameworks for design that allow us to examine tradeoffs and make the principled best solution.  I regularly capture these models and share them (e.g. my models page, and more recent ones regularly appear in this blog).

I’m not saying it’s easy, but you look across our field and recognize there are those who are doing good work in either translating research into practice or finding emergent patterns that resonate with theoretical principles.  It’s time to stop looking at what other organizations are doing in their context as a guide, and start drawing upon what’s known and customizing it to  your context, and then having a cycle of continual tuning. With the increasing pressures to be competitive, I’d suggest that just being good enough isn’t.  Being the best you can be is the only sustainable advantage.

Let’s see: copy your best competitor, and keep equal; or shoot for the principled best that can be in the category, and have an unassailable position of leadership?  The answer seems obvious to me.  How about you?

Two days ago I attended the 3D Teaching, Learning, & Collaboration conference, organized by Tony O’Driscoll.  I’ve previously posted my thoughts on virtual worlds, but I had a wee bit of a revelation that I want to get clear in my head, and it ties into several things that went on at the conference.

First, let me say that the day of the conference I got to attend was great, with lots of the really involved folks there, and every evidence (including the tweet stream) that the second day was every bit as good.  Tony talked about his new book with Karl Kapp, Chuck Hamilton spoke on lessons learned through IBM’s invovlement in Virtual Worlds, Koreen Olbrish chaired a panel with a number of great case studies, to name just a few of the great opportunities.

Chuck listed 10 ‘affordances‘ of virtual worlds, expanding a list Tony had previously started.  There was some debate about whether affordance is a good term, since not everyone knows it, but I maintain that for people who need it, it’s the right term and that we can use some term like ‘inherent capability’ for those who don’t.  I had some quibbles with Chuck’s list, as it seemed that several confounded some issues, and I hope to talk with him more about it.

Tony also presented, in particular, some principles about designing learning for virtual worlds (see slide 17 here).  Interestingly, they aren’t specific to virtual worlds, and mirror the principles for designing engaging learning experiences that come from the alignment of educational practice and engaging experiences I talk about in my book.  Glad to see folks honing in on principles for creating meaningful virtual world experiences!

The revelation for me, however, was linking the social informal learning with virtual worlds.  Virtual worlds can be used for both formal and informal learning, they’re platforms for social action.  I’ve had the formal and informal separated in my mind, but needn’t.  I’ve been quite active in social learning to meet informal learning needs with  my togetherLearn colleagues, but have always written off virtual worlds as still having too much technical and learning overhead to be worth it unless you have a long-term intention where those overheads get amortized.

What’s clear is that, increasingly, organizations are creating and leveraging those long term relationships.  ProtonMedia even announced integration of both Sharepoint and their own social media system with their virtual world platform, so either can be accessed in world or from the desktop. There were a suite of examples across both formal and informal learning where organizations were seeing real, measurable, value.

The underlying opportunities of virtual presence are clear, it’s just not been clear that it’s significantly better than a non-immersive social networking system.  Certainly if what your people need to formally learn, or informally network on is inherently 3D, but the contextualization is having some benefits.

Some issues remain. At lunch I was talking to some gents who have a system that streams your face via webcam onto your avatar, so your real expressions are represented.  That’s counter to some of the possibilities I see to represent yourself in virtual worlds as you prefer to be seen, not as how nature commands, but there are some trust issues (and parental safety concerns as well).

Still, as technical barriers are surpassed, and audiences become more familiar with and comfortable in virtual worlds, the segue between formal and social networking can be accomplished in world making a virtual business office increasingly viable.  It may be time to dust off my avatar and get traveling.