Virtual, Not Virtual Worlds
Ted’s Blog
The natural inclination people have when applying a new technology to an old problem is to try to recreate or simulate the old experience. We certainly saw this years ago with the application of internetworking technologies to learning—the result was ‘eLearning.’ Because people previously had to attend ‘training courses’ in-person, eLearning tried to simulate that experience by creating online courses, making people register for those courses in learning management systems, taking tests, etc. That was all fine and dandy—but the much larger opportunity was and is that the web (and more recently web 2.0) unleashes the ability of people throughout the extended enterprise to collaboratively share their knowledge. The uber opportunity that the modern web opens up for learning is to enable everyone to have access to whatever anyone else knows, whenever and however they need to know it (what we at Altus call Collaborative Knowledge Sharing)—not simply to take training courses online. This same ‘paradigm transfer’ problem is happening with corporate meetings, events, and conferences. The current economic downturn has forced companies to drastically reduce their costs, and the first thing to go has been travel—specifically, travel for internal meetings and attendance at in-person trainings and conferences. Since the no-travel mandate limits in-person attendance, companies are naturally thinking that they should conduct these meetings, conferences, and trainings ‘virtually.’ But that’s where the technology train jumps off the tracks—instead of simply thinking that such meetings need to be online vs. in-person, they leap to the conclusion that virtual means virtual worlds. If people can’t be present in person, the reasoning goes, then we need to simulate the in-person experience online via a virtual world environment. This leads to the thinking that participants have to represent their presence in the online meeting with an avatar and move through the conference center to find the room in which an interesting presentation is taking place, find a seat, sit down, and look at the screen in the ‘auditorium.’ The tendency to leap to the virtual world conclusion, although natural, is mistaken. The reason that people have to physically move around in an in-person meeting is because they have to transport their physical bodies. But, when online we can go from one presentation to another presentation with two licks of the mouse—so, why recreate the most unpleasant aspects of inperson meetings online when we are completely free of that physical imperative? The illogic of transferring the physical presence paradigm to the online experience is that hundreds of millions of people already watch video and network socially with each other every day online—and they don’t use avatars to do it. Think Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. ad finitum—none of the most popular social media tools in use today use virtual world technology, so why would we want to impose that awkward paradigm on business people who are attending knowledge sharing events online? Why not stream video like YouTube (live and on demand) and let people interact with the existing tools that they are already familiar with (without having to create yet one more personal profile)? While companies are working furiously with virtual world vendors to try to simulate the physical meeting experience online, the real game-changing strategy will be to create a seamless environment for people who want to see video live and on demand, interact with each other using familiar tools, and collaboratively share their knowledge by taking full advantage of what today’s technologies are fully capable of. That’s why God invented mashups—take the best of the best applications, mash them with up as web services, and apply them in ways that truly enhance the user experience. Making my avatar go up and down the escalators to get to presentations held on different floors of the virtual Moscone Center is not the way to enhance my learning and networking experience.