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Simulations and the Future of Learning 107

Posted by timothy from the bigger-dies-smaller-schools dept.
Sarusa writes "Simulations and the Future of Learning chronicles the attempt by one company -- convinced that the business e-Learning establishment has squandered its potential to build a 'leadership simulator' -- to actually create such a thing, and by doing so prove that simulation is a better educational tool than straight linear regurgitation. The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you, 'but it means there's plenty of room for interest here. While not quite comparable to The Soul of a New Machine, as a breathless blurb suggests, it is a highly interesting read." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review.
An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning
author Clark Aldrich
pages 280
publisher Pfeiffer
rating 9 of 10
reviewer Sarusa
ISBN 0787969621
summary The story of the creation of a 'leadership simulator' and an argument for simulation as the future of education.

This isn't really a technical book -- it's a manifesto aimed at the middle- to upper-level manager, and indeed the very first page is an executive summary that attempts to convince you to read this book while swilling martinis instead of playing another round of golf. But don't let that throw you -- it provides enough medium- to low-level meat to keep a geek happy (and after my review of > Shaggy Steed I think I can claim to be a huge nerd). You certainly won't find any code, but it's not a puff piece.

Clark Aldrich had a cushy job at the Gartner Group in charge of e-Learning coverage, but felt that the promise of e-Learning was being distressingly wasted by emphasis on the fast-food mentality of quantity over quality and churning out of tons of linear crud, just because it's so easy to do. The real promise of e-Learning isn't just as an online textbook, but as a simulator. And for life-or-death situations, it's the best way to teach people before letting them take a whack at the real thing. The U.S. military knows this. Airlines know this. Medical colleges know this. 'The organizations that care the most about training use simulations.' So he quit his sweet but corrupt job, and co-founded a company to teach leadership via a simulation: 'Virtual Leader.'

The sheer scope of the company's ambition had me shaking my head, convinced that this was going to end in brilliant failure. Especially as they decide one piece at a time that they need to write everything, including the graphics engine, from scratch. But finally, over time and budget, harsh reality sets in and they start distilling their huge collection of data on the nebulous concept of Leadership down to something workable. The meeting is the crucible where everything gets done in the world of the manager.

Virtual Leader places you in progressively higher-powered meetings and tracks their 'Three-to-One' model of leadership: good leadership is getting positive Work done in the short and long term, and levels of Power, Ideas, and Tension affect this. It's your task to try to ferret out good ideas and get them agreed to while heading off bad ideas. Of course, in later meetings you won't be the most powerful person in the room, so you have to carefully nudge things where they need to go by making alliances and building and spending your personal influence. At the end you're ranked on how you did on several metrics. And, of course, all this has to be simple enough for a computerphobe to use.

Simulations follows the project stage-by-stage from concept to finished product: what went wrong, what went right, what hard decisions and tradeoffs had to be made. Perhaps most fascinating is the dialogue system. It's not a script; the characters are all actually responding in real time to simulation variables from a library of 2500 voiced phrases. Thus it sounds slightly stilted and unnatural, but you can tell what's going on. And it isn't as mind-numbingly dull as the repeated generic approval/disapproval phrases they started with.

The book is a fast and easy read -- you could easily finish it in a night. The section on their failed dealings with supposed Leadership Gurus is extremely funny. And he dishes out the dirt on the e-Learning industry pretty well. What keeps Simulations from New Machine stature is the lack of any connection with members of the team -- there's no personal tension or pathos. The real star is the simulation itself. After all, his goal for the book isn't to provide you with human drama, but to sell the corporate world on simulations and demonstrate the process of building one from scratch.

And in the end, Aldrich makes a strong argument that simulations are the real future of learning. I had fun reading this book: it didn't take too much time, and I learned a few things (including some guilty glances into the minds of mid-level managers). Two polygonal thumbs up. You can see movies of the product in action at simulearn.net, though unfortunately there's no demo -- they want you to cough up for the seminars. Or you could just read the book!

You can purchase Simulations and the Future of Learning from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Simulations and the Future of Learning

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  • Does anyone remember Super-Learning (Score:5, Interesting)

    by teutonic_leech ( 596265 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:18PM (#10377211)
    There was some movement in that area back in the 1980s and early 1990s. Basically, they played Barock music while feeding people foreign language words. This really seemed to speed up retention by several factors. Anyway, I think that the current learning methods are completely antiquated and new techniques are desparetely needed. Top that with a disfunctional school system here in the U.S. and articles like this sound a bit like Science Fiction.

  • Thinking? (Score:2, Informative)

    by miikrr ( 799637 )
    Whatever happened to the school system based on easily managable work force? [slashdot.org]
    • Well if you look at most education systems in the world today. They are designed to turn out followers and not leaders.
    • I assume it was rhetorical, but I will respond anyway - allow me to assure you that it is alive and well in the US today. The public school system is designed to churn out people who do what they are told, because that's the #1 rule of school. Don't stick out, or you'll get hammered down. The only exception is the smart kids who behave the way smart kids are "supposed to" behave; they wear their preppy clothing and they get good test grades and never ever say a cross word to teacher. Our school system teach

  • In a lot of ways I couldn't agree more (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stuffduff ( 681819 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:20PM (#10377228) Journal
    I am pretty much appauled by the state of most e-learning software these days. Systems like Blackboard may be great for an instructor with a liner interpretation of the sum of all the textbooks they've ever studied, but it is clerical in nature. It is not designed and built to stimulate learning and transforming information into knowledge. Sounds like a good read. I loved the Soul of a New Machine.

  • Simulation works (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:20PM (#10377232) Homepage Journal
    For lots of things. Like driving F1 cars, conquering the universe, dating, and shooting demons with a shotgun. I feel confident I am prepared for any of these things.

  • Fieldwork (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JoshuaDFranklin ( 147726 ) * <joshuadfranklin@NOSPAM.yahoo@com> on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:22PM (#10377247) Homepage
    That's why my grad program [washington.edu] now has fieldwork as part of the requirements. We go out and do "professional-level work" at real places.

    I bet that's a cheaper way to go than simulating real places, too.

  • Leadership vs Management (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gr8_phk ( 621180 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:22PM (#10377257)
    No one in my company knows the difference. Simply teaching that would be a big help.
    • What *is* the difference? In your view, I mean? I'm still a student; I'm guessing that this is the sort of thing that's useful to know before going out into the big bad world.
      • In the simplest possible terms, Management is reactionary and Leadership is proactive.

        A manager keeps the sheep in line doing what the upper manager or the customer (or the market or the investors) asked them to do. One big problem is that the customer generally doesn't know what they want. Customers have problems they want solved - they don't know what a good solution looks like although they may have some suggestions. If they have solid specifications your really doing contract work not product developme

  • Chris Crawford... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by th1ckasabr1ck ( 752151 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:25PM (#10377293)
    ... the legendary game designer suggests that the future of learning is through playing. This is an exerpt from his game development "retirement" speach, and I think he makes a good point:

    "If you really want to understand this concept, just watch two kittens at play. One kitten wanders off, following a bug. The other crouches low and folds his ears back, and creeps up on the other kitten until he's close enough, then he pounces on the kitten. The two kittens bite and claw and kick, and they roll around on the floor. We all laugh and say that kittens are so much fun, that they have nothing better to do all day than play - but we would be wrong.

    These kittens are not wasting their time in idle entertainment. They are engaged in serious business. They are learning the skills of adult cathood. They are learning how to hunt. For what does an adult cat do when he sees prey? He crouches low, folds his ears back, and creeps up on the prey until he's close enough, then he pounces on the prey and bites and claws and kicks.

    We don't see kittens lined up in neat rows as an old geezer of a cat stands a chalkboard lecturing about mouse anatomy and approach angles and attack vectors. That's not how they do it! They learn by doing, by playing."

    • Yes, but who keeps whom as a pet?
    • Humans learn by doing and playing as well. After that old geezer talks for a while, he lets the kids try what it was he was talking about. Those who are intrigued by the subject (unlike cats humans have numerous options that might or might not engage them) will also practice it in their spare time. They'll seek out situations in which they can use it, and people whom they can emulate.

    • ... the legendary game designer suggests that the future of learning is through playing.

      I think he is right. If you can make (supposedly) boring things interesting via computers, you will have been successful. Great teachers have been able to do this without software, but not all teachers are great.
    • We don't see kittens lined up in neat rows as an old geezer of a cat stands a chalkboard lecturing about mouse anatomy and approach angles and attack vectors. That's not how they do it! They learn by doing, by playing.

      And the point he seems to miss is that, if cats could learn by thinking they would be the dominant species in the planet.

      If this would be good or bad, is opinable.

      Cheers,

  • Everything I know... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I learned from Sim Ant. Social structure, the distinction of color, the need for food, and the fact that for some certain types of ants, y'aint never EVER gonna score.

    Oh, and spiders suck.

  • Learning and "Engagement" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Schezar ( 249629 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:27PM (#10377314) Homepage Journal
    This seems like a good idea. I submit to you that I have a great working knowledge of Fricana, a fictional world in which Quest for Glory, a game I played when I was in middle school, took place. I can tell you all the politics and geography and history and so forth related to this world, and were it real I could probably find my way around it farily easily.

    Avid Everquest/SWG/Realm/etc.. players know loads about their respective worlds. Hell, I'd wager some of them have a greater understanding of these virtual civilizations than they do of the real world in which they live!

    The key is engagement. Listening to a professor lecture is largely one-way communication, and all interaction occurrs at a meta level. I'm not participating in the French Revolution, I'm asking someone about it and listening to their answers. Watching a documentary is entirely one-way, and again it doesn't engage me directly.

    Playing a game wherein I manage the affairs of a noble in France on the eve of the revolution, or a general under Napolean during the European Wars, I am directly engaged. My concerns are no longer retaining information for information's sake, but instead using information to achieve a direct goal.

    Engagement forces you to learn, for otherwise you cannot be successful therein. It strips away the layers of abstraction and awakens the deeply-rooted survival mechanisms of the human mind. We're keyed to learn quickly when need be, but if that need is not immediate, it takes much greater discipline to put forth the effort.
    • I agree whole-heartedly with one exception. Simulations, especially those involving the soft-sciences, are bound by the assumptions of the designer. If the designer is in fact "GOD"--as in your example-- there is no problem. If the designer is trying to mimic reality, however, there may be some problems in depicting all the factors and interactions involved. Nonetheless, simulation and gaming have the potential to be a powerful educational tool.

  • Simulated Leadership? (Score:4, Funny)

    by sheepab ( 461960 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:29PM (#10377343) Homepage
    Heh, yeah, does that go with simulated productivity? Cause I'm REAL good at that....
  • I made a leadership simulator once. It replayed some situations in order to judge your response.

    Some example situations are:

    Hey, that's a great idea! It doesn't sound very good when you explain it though. So I'll present it at the meeting like I thought of it.

    Here are four things I need you to do. Each one of them is your first priority.

    Even though you have extensive education in your field and I'm barely qualified to be a manager, I'll be making some changes to your project to see if I can improv
    • If you come up with a spare $60,000/year, let me know. If all I have to do is put up with management's stupidity, and not do any work, that's fine. The problem is when you have to work AND deal with management.
    • Why would terrorists want Bush gone? He turned down the taliban's offer to turn over Osama. He turned world opinion against the US. He's overextended our military. He's turned Iraq into a terrorist playground and shooting gallery (and we're the ducks). He called our actions in the middle east a "crusade". He frames the war on terror in religious terms.

      Terrorists love Bush. He's their best gaurantee they'll get more recruits forever and have ever more reasons to hate america and attack us.

      So, I'll ask

  • Oy vey (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RCulpepper ( 99864 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:34PM (#10377388)
    The reason there are so many more readers of management books than there are good managers is that a huge part of being a good manager is understanding and empathizing with people, whether those people are above or below you hierarchically. These simulations may teach good business strategy, but they certainly cannot teach good interpersonal relations, which for the forseeable future is going to be a humans-only endeavor.

    Ultimately I think this is like writing classes --you can teach someone to write grammatically, but it is a much tougher thing to teach him to write well, and an impossible thing to teach him to be creative or inspired. Either you've got the spark or you don't.
    • Either you've got the spark or you don't.

      And if American management is our measure of leadership, we probably don't even have a hundred points of light, much less a thousand.

      Max

    • Re:Oy vey (Score:3, Interesting)

      by code_rage ( 130128 )
      I agree at least 90%. If you reach your 20s and don't have the ethical framework and basic understanding of human nature to become a leader, this won't get you there and no artifact will.

      Leadership is about taking a stand in the face of risk. You can read about it ("Profiles in Courage"), you can watch movies about it ("To Kill a Mockingbird"), and you can observe it in the actions of those around you. But you only learn what it means when you have a stake in the outcome.

      The reviewer mentions that Aldrich

  • Ob. quote: those who can't do, teach.

    Wait a sec, leadership? How does that work? Teacher!

  • I have 418 Slashdot "fans" (Score:4, Funny)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @03:36PM (#10377411) Journal
    The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you

    I have 437 Slashdot "fans" -- now that's completely simulated leadership -- and purely generated by my chutzpah in publicly posting my ill-informed rants for others to rate.

    (If it was real leadership, they'd send me money or women, right? Or, ok, it's Slashdot, mobos and Star wars figurines. ;) )
  • It is a damn shame that we need "simulated job experience".

    How about getting a real honest job and learning skills and a trade?

    Managers would do good to give some people who seems promising, but lack the "required skills" a chance.

    I interview people for positions and I like to see then try. As for claimed skills, I do routinely test them. I once gave a person who claimed to type 90 wpm a typing test. Turns out he was a little rusty, since he only scored 3 and 6 wpm in his two tries.

    Maybe he needs som
  • In the real world, you get to look stuff up most of the time. Maybe it's just my experience, but most of the exams I've had in college have tested my memory more than my understanding. A friend of mine used to get pissed because there was a guy in his biology classes who would memorize everything before an exam and then ace it, but outside of the exams he didn't know much at all about biology. He just crammed, got the B/A and got mostly Bs in his bio classes it seems.
  • I don't like the pointy-hair look.
  • Leadership is best learned by leading.

    Simulation is better than nothing, better than books or lectures -- but not as good as doing. Why not the real thing?

    Many groups offer leadership opportunities.

    One group with an emphasis on learning leadership by leading: the Boy Scouts.

    Simulation is great when the real thing is expensive or lethal. Leading needn't be either.
  • I for one welcome our new simulated leaders...

  • Decision Point DEC LaserDisc (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jpellino ( 202698 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @04:10PM (#10377716)
    We did some work with DEC in the late 80s when they were trying not to laugh at our PDP11/35 and get us to buy some newer stuff. One of their showcases was a laserdisc / computer system that did training simulations. The corporate one was called "Decision Point", where you had to train as an exec and make decisions and reap the rewards or suffer the consequences. Full motion video, great camera work and angles, in one clip you were at a meeting and the camera turned to the guy next to you who would lean in an give you some gossip, etc. You would be walking thru the hall when some other worker would confront you and bother you about that raise she'd talked to you about weeks ago - you would at each point have four choices - decide yes, decide no, get more information, or put off the decision. The twenty minutes later, the raise decision would come back to bite you, or something like that. Great production values. And I remember people going thru this and getting flop sweat after a certain amount of that - I took that as a sign of realism...

    I remember my ed tech grad students hearing the Oregon Trail sounds when we did SW evals, and their eyes opening wide from memories of the apple II days and recounting in excruciating detail what they had to do when to get the supplies, survive, etc...

    When it's good it works - when it's bad, it's not even worth ignoring.
  • if you can build a simulator to train your ceo, then couldn't you just build somthign to just do his job too?

    honestly all that intuition is just "random guesses' any way, start off with a random choice picker, and then build a retartedly basic neral net.

  • The promise of e-Learning (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mr_Ust ( 61641 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @04:31PM (#10377997)
    This is very timely. I was just reading a report yesterday which seeks to answer why e-Learning never got off the ground. The report has quite a bit of meat to it and is in PDF format...

    http://www.thelearningalliance.info/WeatherStation .html [thelearningalliance.info]

    • The Learning Alliance is specific to higher education, so when that report says "e-learning," they are speaking about attempts to replace college classrooms with synchronous and asynchronous teaching. For example: web conferencing software for a classroom, email lists for professors' office hours, and instant messaging instead of study sessions in the hallway.

      I suspect companies like the University of Phoenix would also argue against The Learning Alliance's report, but I haven't really studied how the pri

      • Having read beyond the three "most troubling assumptions" on page iii of the "Thwarted Innovation" article, I see that it does touch on corporate as well as educational e-learning. Perhaps their initial detractors were right when they said, "The ink will be hardly dry on your report when it will be out of date!" It seems that they are still writing in 1999-2000, when the promise of e-learning was in line with the promise of e- everything else -- i.e., grandiose and starry-eyed as a result of the Internet bu

  • And, of course, all this has to be simple ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by foobsr ( 693224 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @04:44PM (#10378136) Homepage Journal
    ... enough for a computerphobe to use.

    So people who suffer from "computerphobia" should be eligible for "leadership role playing" in today's world without having some therapy beforehand?

    CC.
  • It's a classic: go to a different culture and stay there for at least one year.

    In this age of anti-political correctness and anti-multicul, I dare to hold a plea for the "foreign culture experience". It teaches you who you really are, what you're really good at, and it opens you up to your hidden qualities. It may boost self-confidence for the long term.

    I don't believe in simulation when it comes to learning "life skills" (like leadership). Simulation is good for learning how to drive a car - for simple,

  • The Logic of Failure (Score:3, Interesting)

    by RonBurk ( 543988 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @07:31PM (#10379461) Homepage Journal
    For some lessons learned from management simulations (years ago) that you can use right this minute, try reading "The Logic of Failure", by Dietrich Dorner. The simulations discussed included trying to keep meat from spoiling in a freezer with a simulated broken part (but you didn't know what part it was), as well as much more complex simulations in which you have to manage a small African ecosystem.

    These simulations clearly expose general situations that humans are stunningly bad at unless they are trained to recognize them and behave against their natural inclination.

    For example, the freezer simulation showed that humans have great trouble grasping any situation in which there is a delayed response to their actions (the temperature of the freezer responds to your changing the thermostat, but only after the fact, and it may overshoot). How does that apply to your world? I bet if your company has 100 people and needs to reduce the headcount to 90 people, they would lay off 10 people. The problem? The delayed effect that layoffs have in causing people who aren't layed off to look for work elsewhere. If you want to get rid of 10% of your people, you probably better only lay off perhaps 7% or 8%.

    In recent years, I watched a local company go through no fewer than seven layoffs. Every single layoff was followed within a matter of weeks by hirebacks, as additional people departed in response to the layoffs and the company had to hire to fill essential positions. After seven iterations, the managers still had not grasped they were overcontrolling a system that had a response delay built into it.

    It's hard to believe that such incompetence persists in the software business, where managers receive a level of thorough and professional training that... oh.

  • Actually, there is already a John F Kerry swift boat simulator. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3698186.stm [bbc.co.uk]

    But I think they should come out with the W version. You could dodge the draft, find various beurocratic tricks to avoid active duty and then convince daddy to ensure you still have an honorable discharge several months after you have already left the state.
  • of course no one's going to read this now, but maybe someone will benefit. In my opinion as an engineer, there is one obviously better teaching method that's actually been used in classrooms in the US - Precision Teaching. They have a lot of data that demonstrates that tracking how well you're learning inherently causes you to learn more, and that doing something faster improves retention and the ability to learn the next-step skills.

    Nothing I've seen yet is as AMBITIOUS as the book mentioned, but th

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