Doing all the talking

Well…not just talking, honestly.

I am speaking at three upcoming, high profile events in th enext couple of months all of which have a quite different feel to them. Details below…if you are in the vicinity do pop along and say hi.

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Monday 6th October, London
VIRTUAL WORLDS FORUM
http://virtualworldsforum.com/conference/programme/

How do we get serious? – The Practicalities of using Serious Games in an enterprise environment

1. What do we mean when we say ‘serious games’?
2. What organizations are doing in 2008 and why they are doing it.
3. Keeping it real for learning & development.
4. The investment outlay – the real internal and external costs of a project.
5. Sensible timescales & stages – implementing a project to guarantee success.
6. Processes & approaches that work (and that don’t work)
7. Deployment issues – hosting, bandwidth, costs, internal promotion and support.

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7th October, BAFTA, London
Learning & Development in Broadcast
http://www.ldbc08.co.uk/

This event is aimed at senior L&D people within the broadcast sector and I have been asked to help illustrate what is going on in other industries with particular reference to innovative approaches to L&D.

I shall be attempting to:

• explain what serious games and immersive learning simulations are, how they are used, why etc with quick examples (PXL & other companies).
• Illustrate the challenges we/clients face e.g. Lack of awareness of the medium (embryonic still), resistance to medium (and the term ‘game’) in traditional corporate and L&D, need to help clients understand design, development and deployment issues (different to eLearning), cost/business models, IP issues (background vs foreground IP) and measurement (learning and organizational impact for decision-making and ROI). Blending learning games/sims with traditional instructor-lead training, eLearning, OTJ training and coaching.
• Describe the required team skills (internal & external); Illustrate breadth of skills required e.g. creative, software engineering, instructional design, game design, simulation modeling, subject matter expertise, testing/QA. Explain nature of each and how teams function.
• Walk through an examples (talk thru); Illustrate how different industry sectors, behavioral and functional training needs have been tackled with games and/or simulation approaches with PXL and other vendor examples. Briefly illustrate range of technical approaches and where they are/are not appropriate. Focus on examples aimed at adult vocational learning, especially where end user audience are graduates/professionals rather than military or school examples as these are not relevant to conference audience.

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DevLearn 2008 Conference

Thursday November 13, San Jose, CA
DevLearn
http://www.elearningguild.com/content.cfm?selection=doc.918

514: Best Practice Guide for Implementing Immersive Simulations

Organizations that require training, but with tight budgets are no longer able to fund classroom training, are starting to discover the benefits of a more efficient training method. Immersive Learning Simulations are cost effective and efficient, and they provide high quality learning results, benefiting not just the user but the organization.

In this session, participants will gain an understanding of the key functions to look for when implementing an immersive learning simulation. You’ll learn how to simplify the processes of deployment, the do’s and don’ts for implementing, and how to provide motivational experiences. You’ll follow a step-by-step best practice guide to implementing an immersive learning simulation that will take you through the inception of your idea, the justification of your concept with supporting documentation and theories, to the design and implementation stages. You’ll go through key areas, such as calculating the return on investment using real-life case studies based on your customers, integrating a LMS system, and why to use 3-D environments instead of 2-D environments.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to implement an Immersive Learning Simulation
• How to identify an approach to training that suits your organization
• The costing and time scales for simulations
• Different technological approaches to learning simulations, either virtual worlds or bespoke solutions
• What game genres engage different target audiences

Audience:
Intermediate Designers, Project managers, Managers, Directors, VPs, CLOs, and Executives.

Serious Virtual Worlds 08

The SVW 08 event is confirmed for 11th and 12th September in Coventry, UK. Details below or visit http://www.seriousvirtualworlds.net/index.php

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Keynote Speakers Confirmed:

Christian Renaud, Claus Nehmzov, Bruce Damer and David Wortley

Feedback from last years event included;

‘Extremely informative!’, ‘Exceptional speakers!’, ‘A flawless event!’

We have created this years conference to be our finest yet!

Building on the real success of first Serious Virtual Worlds conference in 2007 this is your invitation to be a part of the newly emerging professional community for the serious uses of virtual worlds. Serious Virtual Worlds’08 is the only event focussing on the serious uses of these environments.

SVW’08 will address the live issue of how virtual worlds will cross boundaries both between the real world and virtual worlds and between virtual worlds. As people spend increasing time in virtual worlds how will they interoperate between these virtual and real spaces? SVW’08 is the only international event that takes these leading edge issues and addresses them in a compact 2 day event.