Experiential learning is based on practice. People practice what they’ve been taught by themselves or others. They practice what they invent or clone from precedents. In every case they learn something by doing it, usually over and over until they get it right.
Make way for an exciting new paradigm. Learning by doing now has a partner called learning by being.
The idea is simple. Instead of just training people by giving them tasks to perform, we also give them environments to inhabit. The environments are interactive, multidimensional and multi-sensory.
Once in such an environment, people can learn in bolder better ways through immersion. Immersive learning is the process of seeing and understanding not as a role player, but as a participant.
Immersive learning is not new. You could say it started with baptism and communion, but it's actually older than that.
The planetarium is an example that began in antiquity and still thrives. Occupying the center of a virtual universe, people engage with the physics of energy and matter. They learn by becoming one with the stars.
Dr. Stan Cohen, a gastroenterologist with the Children’s Center for Digestive Health Care in Atlanta, uses an immersive technology much smaller than a Zeiss (“we make it visible”) projector. Weighing less than four grams, the PillCam SB is a vitamin-sized capsule with a miniature video camera inside. A patient swallows the capsule. The capsule takes flash photography as it travels the length of the GI tract, two shots per second for about eight hours, producing more than 50,000 detailed color images.
The images are transmitted from the capsule inside the patient to a storage device on the patient’s belt. Software transforms the data into a virtual world. Dr. Cohen can then explore that world on a “fantastic voyage” of computer-assisted investigation, detection and diagnosis.
This is immersive learning in the service of children’s health and it’s incredibly powerful.
Becker Multimedia is creating powerful immersive learning for a real world producer of fantastic voyages. Our assignment is to orient new employees of a cruise line before they ever set foot on a ship. By the time they arrive, they'll have already seen and understood the ship from the inside out, engaging as participants in an amazingly complex and challenging business environment.
Our immersive learning strategy uses a new robotic camera mount called GigaPan Epic. Weighing less than four pounds, the robot is small enough to stand on a tripod and set up in the smallest spaces imagined by ship designers (the shower in your stateroom).
A photographer tells the robot what to shoot, then presses go. One GigaPan setup may include up to a 360 degree panoramic range-of-motion and a -60/+90 degree tilt range-of-motion.
In other words, the robot can shoot everything you can see if you stand in the same place.
Only the robot sees more than you can. Because the camera is shooting high resolution close ups, details that appear in the resulting photographs are astonishing. (Remember Cortázar's Blow Up, filmed by Antonioni? This is Blow Up on steroids.)
It’s no exaggeration to say that the human eye cannot perceive what the GigaPan system records, because our eyes don’t have zoom capabilities and our brains lack the robot’s capacity to pay attention.
The robot takes pictures without human assistance. Humans are the sherpas of a GigaPan shoot, High resolution digital close ups are then downloaded to computer and processed by stitcher software. The output of stitching is a detailed panoramic photo that viewers can pan and zoom, seeing things in their totality and also in the finest detail.
Check out President Obama to get the general idea.
In the course of one week with three GigaPan robots and six sherpas, Becker photographed the entire interior of the largest cruise ship in the world, taking about 50,000 stills stitched into 150 panoramas. It is now possible to see that ship as though you were actually standing in it.
There's more.
Seeing is the largest part of understanding, but we go beyond seeing. Visitors to the virtual ship navigate completely around various rooms and spaces, zooming into close ups with gorgeous detail. On top of that, they click hot spots programmed onto the photographs. The hot spots support changes of perspective and interactive storytelling.
The interactive panos are published within a larger e-learning Flash application, accessible to new hires and employees everywhere in the world.
So imagine you’re a chef who’s been hired to work in a state-of-the-art kitchen on board a state-of-the-art ship. Immersive learning helps you explore that kitchen and closely inspect its fixtures, equipment and processes. It lets you ask questions, as though you’re on a tour and want the tour guide to explain things. On top of that the guide (the kitchen itself) asks you questions from time to time and scores your answers, making sure that you’re truly present in this virtual moment.
Eventually when you board the ship and start cooking, you may experience déjà vu. Because in virtual reality, you’ve been there before.
As learning pros ponder one of life’s persistent questions, how to use virtual worlds for training and education, immersion should be near the top of our design priorities. In many occupations and industries, there’s just no substitute for learning by truly being there. Once you are, anything and everything is possible.
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