Member Dick Davies of the panel Future of e-Learning on Virtual Worlds London is a Director with Ambient Performance, the service partner in Europe for the American company Forterra, “the worlds leading private virtual world developers”. I guess Dick will talk on Monday about the integration of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning, into virtual worlds.
Ambient Performance specializes in mobile solutions, web 2.0 collaborative technologies, and Virtual Worlds. On the site of the Serious Games Institute I found a fascinating presentation by CEO Ron Edwards of Ambient Performance about Augmented Reality and 3D Mobile Applications.
More specifically about learning applications, in a military context, here is a video about an update by Forterra which enables embedding SCORM compliant e-Learning in-world. Content can be accessed by participants directly or assigned by instructors as well as attached to objects for contextualised learning.
SCORM is a specification of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, which comes out of the Office of the United States Secretary of Defense. Wikipedia explains:
The ADL Initiative was established in 1997 to standardize and modernize training and education management and delivery. The Department of Defense (DoD) Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OUSD P&R) oversees the ADL Initiative. The vision of the ADL Initiative is to provide access to the highest-quality learning and performance aiding that can be tailored to individual needs and delivered cost-effectively, at the right time and in the right place. The ADL Initiative developed SCORM and the ADL Registry. ADL uses structured and collaborative methods to convene multi-national groups from industry, academia, and government who develop the learning standards, tools, and content.
This is maybe one of the issues to focus on here: it is very nice to work with a company such as Forterra, which is developing impressive products for realistic training in virtual environments, but the company is linked in various ways to the US intelligence services and military. Does this facilitate doing business elsewhere in the world, or does it make international expansion more difficult?
More in general: we notice how the military try to innovate learning and training in order to deal with the new challenges and with the new generation of potential recruits. Can the methods and formats which are developed in this context be used without further ado by educators in other sectors, or is there a risk that practices are introduced which do not correspond with other values which are traditionally advocated by educators?
Roland Legrand
