No interest in, no time for the blue-collar market
The Chronicle of Higher Education held a chat about the University of New Orleans presence in Second life and published the transcript.
"Our hope is to attract students who are taking Internet courses, but miss the 'presence' and the sense of community found in a regular classroom," said Merrill L. Johnson, a university administrator.
I've attended lectures in Second Life, but it's always struck me as a waste of the benefits to sit around and listen and watch. I think the real promise for training in Second Life-type environments is to teach activities requiring physical activity and interacting with objects. OSHA requires training in lockout/tagout procedures, for example. It's a system for shutting down machinery and notifying others to prevent accidents. Training is often accomplished with video, but that's passive. Think how much more effective it would be to get virtually hands-on and watch the effect of not following the procedure.
I suppose there's not much interest among web developers to build things for a blue-collar crowd.
Filed Under: CorporateT&DSubmitted by amyloo on Tue, 10/16/2007 - 07:20.
True enough, Mike. That last lecture I did attend, my neighbor had to instruct me in how to sit down!
But I think there lingers some social prejudice and misunderstanding about this group of workers. I've heard people swear that certain types of employees don't go near computers and must have paper newsletters, but more and more I think most everybody can get to a computer even if they're not office jockeys. And who knows, it could be that line worker goes home and leads raids in WOW putting my SL flying skills to shame, whitecollar and supposedly tech savvy though I am.
Tue, 10/16/2007 - 15:31
I think you've hit on a great point here. This is exactly the type of training that fits best with SL. However, the other side of that same coin we have to think about how those blue-collar workers will interact inside an environment like SL. There is at least some learning curve to reaching a point where you are able to focus on the learning and not things like moving around within SL, etc.
I'd love to see what, if anything, is being done along these "blue collar" lines in SL or elsewhere. Anyone???
Thanks,
Mike
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