"Learning in 3D" Reading Group

Chapter 9 ‘Rules for Revolutionaries’ – Summary

Jun 20

peter.vanrosmalenBlog posts 1 Comment

This chapter discusses the perspectives, ideas and the lesson experiences of 4 people actively engaged in 3D learning at a very early stage. The four represent 2 companies operating as consultants and two ‘user’ companies, this means companies who did experiment with and implemented 3D Learning. Their essays have been structured following 8 questions (each of them more or less extensively discussed in one of the previous chapters) reporting their hands-on experience of lessons to be learnt:

1. Overcoming objections
2. Establishing a beachhead
3. Securing sponsorship
4. Making the case
5. Crossing the Chasm
6. Going Mainstream
7. Demonstrating value
8. Double-loop reflection

The four essays vary in their discussion of each of questions. Nevertheless, overall they put forward the same spirit. Yes, 3D learning is of obvious interest. However, the underlying technology is still fairly new and immature (e.g. not connected to central business systems). In other words, they all stress that one has to be careful in preparing a case and do the ‘right’ thing and make the ‘right’ claims. The chapter concludes with 10 rules, derived from the 4 essays, including for instance ‘change the name game’ and ‘pilot early and often’.

Discussion
Having arrived in chapter 9, the stage setting for 3D learning has been completed. The final chapter goes ‘just beyond the horizon’. Chapter 9 puts places the previous chapters in context of the experience of ‘practitioners’ of 3D learning. Therefore, it may be of interest to look back.
In the first chapter the book opens with adopting the view that 3D learning is a matter of “to be or not to be” for companies and by explaining a natural flow from web, web 2.0 to the immersive web escaping ‘flat land’.
The question of this week can concentrate on what we, as self-claimed visionaries, believe to be our biggest challenge after reading the book or do we concentrate on this chapter.

• Do the revolutionaries bring additional insights (or has everything been quite well covered already in the preceding questions).
• Should not we change role (from readers to creators) and start to write our version of the ch9′ essay and describe what we would (hope to be able to) state if we would be asked for this essay.

Some other general questions:

• How does 3D learning compare to (improve upon) project-based learning, problem-based learning; the use of learning using (video-)skype or videoconferencing; network learning to innovate and to co-create knowledge; etc…. ?? So, do we have enough experience in “traditional technology based FLAT learning”? Is 3DL a genuine overall integrator ?
• Web 2.0. It is there. People use it at a very large scale. It does not need “sales” stories. It sells itself. (Yes, it needs guidance, clear objectives, etc. to be used and useful for learning. But it is there. People know it and use it). So why, do we need this careful approach for 3DL in proposing and implementing.
• Is 3DL really, the natural follow-up of web2.0 -as claimed- or an autonomous, promising and specialised technological development (with elements of gaming, virtual reality, simulations) that makes excellent use of the web-evolution?