Picture this: Mermaids tweaking the finer points of a business plan with jet-propelled business people wearing turbo-charged loafers. Welcome to the phenomenon that is Second Life. Avatar playing in virtual worlds is taking off apace, but can this really be learning or is it just time-wasting gaming? Annie Hayes reports.

What is it?

Second Life is a dimensional virtual space where someone can choose to appear as normal or alternatively and popularly as a flamboyant avatar of themselves. It’s a world where fantasy and fun can at the same time create real-live learning experiences and spaces for knowledge-sharing and collaboration, bringing together industry folk scattered across regions and the globe.

Yet Anne Bartlett-Bragg, managing director of Headshift, Australia - a social-computing consulting outfit based in the UK and now also operating on the other side of the world - tells me that virtual learning is not new: “In the late 90s learning was very much web 1.0 and was driven by a transmission model. What’s happened since then is that social software enables us to bring back the social component of learning - there’s a difference between information and learning.”

Today there is a plethora of virtual learning spaces from collaborative publishing spaces such as weblogs, or blogs, and wikis - which Bartlett-Bragg says have been at the core of the increasingly popular applications in organisations - to podcasts, the newer versions including video or vodcasts which are gaining momentum as a corporate communication method. Social sharing and networking applications are evolving rapidly too, says Bartlett-Bragg and drawing substantial attention in the media, particularly publicly available sites like Facebook.

Who's doing it?

"Second Life is one of the virtual worlds available out there, there’s lots available externally. It’s primarily used for employee orientation, for example in China it’s used very strongly, there’s a programme called Fresh Blue which exists to help new staff learn about culture. Mentoring is another use, staff get to meet very senior executives swimming and flying around a virtual space. It removes some of the barriers to getting together."

Kevin Farrar, academic initiative leader, IBM.

Knowledge-intensive firms such as law firms and Universities are heavily involved in the virtual learning sphere and popularity is growing outside these industries too. Bartlett-Bragg has recently been involved in a project to bring together regionally dispersed female entrepreneurs: “Distance is an issue in Australia. We developed a wiki platform for this group to write their own blogs, give each other feedback and they now even meet once a fortnight at our webinars. They love it!”

And much can be learnt from computing giant, IBM who’ve been a fore-runner on this. Kevin Farrar, academic initiative leader for the firm explains their approach: “Our strategy begins at an early age. We’ve developed PowerUp, a free simulated 3D game for students from primary level. For secondary students we have launched a game built in collaboration with the New York Hall of Fame which is set in a virtual world with an energy focus on solar, wind and water – it’s well received and driving up the number of students interested in science and technology.”

There’s a heavy focus at undergraduate level too, all designed to get the Generation Y up to speed: “Innov8 is a business game in which players take on the role of an outside consultant, it’s set around a call centre scenario and the players teach business process management whilst interviewing characters in the game such as a sales director, business analyst etc. If they want to then go and complement this with lessons from the classroom they can.”

Farrar tells me that IBM staff are actively encouraged to engage with the Universities and many appear as ‘guest lecturers’. It’s a plan that has resulted in an extended offering, the Virtual Innovation Centre, which produces around 800 online training courses.

A further tier is Second Life which is used for internal training. The IBM Centre for Advanced Learning looks into new technologies, runs pilots and virtual worlds – blogs and wikis. “Second Life is one of the virtual worlds available out there, there’s lots available externally. It’s primarily used for employee orientation, for example in China it’s used very strongly, there’s a programme called Fresh Blue which exists to help new staff learn about culture. Mentoring is another use, staff get to meet very senior executives swimming and flying around a virtual space. It removes some of the barriers to getting together,” says Farrar.

Of course it’s an ideal space for those already engaged with technology. IBM’s Academy of Technology brings together technology leaders from around the world. They recently held their first conference in the virtual world using Second Life. A total of 150 people attended, with 20 countries represented. Run behind IBM’s firewall the conference included poster sessions and walk around presentations.

Yet Mark Oehlert, an associate at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton speaking to Workforce Management said: “The importance of this is going to go far beyond IBM. It’ll definitely be a major spur for companies to at least begin looking at virtual worlds.” And many more ‘less-obvious’ companies are picking up the gauntlet. LanguageLabs.com, for example, is a foreign language school that operates in Second Life, says TrainingZone.co.uk’s technology editor John Stokdyk in a View to a Kill: Training in Virtual Worlds. Unlike its physical organisation in Boston, LanguageLabs can accommodate students from multiple geographies and time zones. And technology market analyst Gartner has predicted that by 2011, 80% of all web users will have an online 'second life', it’s a figure that is mind-boggling.

Does it work?

So is it useful? Bartlett-Bragg says that sadly there’s still a lot of people doing elearning badly: “There’s pressure from higher up the food-chain, they just pump it out. And I say 'yes you’ve got it out there but what’s the end result?' It’s incredibly powerful and particularly useful. It needs to be strategically planned.”

Bartlett-Bragg says there’s a big list of things to watch out for including organisational culture: “It won’t happen if staff are not encouraged to collaborate. There’s also the technological infrastructure to consider, it might not support a virtual world and you’ve got to work within firewalls. Added to this is the issues around the learners themselves, if they’re in pressured jobs, they’re conditioned to quick-fixes.”

Farrar admits it’s difficult to measure the returns too. Their investment in grooming the future generation from primary level upwards is a leap of faith but what they’ve found so far is that students are very receptive: “It’s a world they’ve already grown up in and are familiar with – gaming, texting etc,” he says.

Yet at the same time Farrar admits that the intention is not to replace face-to-face interaction - which is often a criticism thrown at the virtual world tsars. Farrar says that what they are doing is simply ‘adding’ another dimension.

What’s the future:

Bartlett-Bragg says that the world of virtual learning is simply pandering to what the learners want: “It’s exciting if we can just embrace it, there’s so much information on the internet there’s the possibility of engaging with people on different levels.” Andrew Unsworth, head of egovernment for Edinburgh City Council, talking at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s recent annual conference, agrees with Bartlett-Bragg and says this type of learning is a direct result of what young learners are now demanding. He said that this group of virtual learners is not defined by age, gender or social demography. The trick according to Unsworth is understanding how to make Web 2.0 applications work within conventional business models and add value.

IBM has come up with yet another ‘value adding’ model, its virtual Forbidden City launched in conjunction with the Palace Museum of China. Participants are invited to create an avatar of themselves and walk around the Forbidden City. To have put so much time, effort and investment into virtual learning, it’s clear that the senior players at IBM are on board and Farrar says it’s been driven by their realisation of its potential. Yet for Farrar there’s still more to be done and he looks forward to a time when all virtual worlds are integrated into a 3D visually, rich environment. And as for the sceptics who dismiss flying and tail swishing avatars as ‘time-wasting gaming’ Farrar says ‘just try it.’

Annie Hayes, MCIPD, is a former editor of our sister site HRZone.co.uk. She now works part-time as contributing editor for both TrainingZone.co.uk and HRZone.co.uk using her wealth of knowledge to write features for both websites