Philadelphia ASTD Meeting Lot of Fun

Last night I presented at the Greater Philadelphia Chapter of ASTD and ran into a bunch of old friends and made some new ones. The planning for the meeting started some time ago and the innovative learning in 3D folks practiced what we preached and had our planning meetings in 3D virtual spaces. One such meeting is shown below.

Meeting to prepare for our presentation.

The topic of the night was “Unleasing the business value of 3D immersive environments for enterprise learning and collaboration.” The meeting was well attended by a large number of ASTD members, some wanted see what the hype was about, some had plans to work with clients in 3D virtual worlds and some were just curious.

Greater Philadelphia ASTD members learn about 3D collaboration and learning in virtual worlds.

I was presenting with my co-author Tony O’Driscoll, CEO of ProtonMedia, Ron Burns, and President of WTRI, Lia DiBello. Tony and Lia presented virtually in ProtoSphere and in Second Life.

Ron Burns takes a tour through ProtoSphere.

The entire event was pulled together by Wainwright Ballard who had been working for sometime to pull off a virtual event and he was very successful. Of course with bleeding edge technology so gliches are bound to occur but they were cleverly overcome and “the show went on.”

Tony and I started the discussion by talking about research indicated the effectiveness of virtual immersive environments for learning and highlighting a couple of case studies and lessons learned from our book.. See ASTD Philadelphia Presentation Resources for slides and links to the research.

Then Ron spoke about ProtoSphere and how they are socializing data through 3D and the social networking aspects of the ProtoSphere Platform.

Lia presented a fascinating example of how her organization build a virtual factory using an interface with an ERP software program to mimic the supply and demand elements of a factory. She indicated that the group she worked with ran the factory and discovered performance improvement innovations that they had overlooked for years. An interesting approach.

Lia DiBello provides a tour through a factory created in Second Life.

All-in-all, it was a fantastic event. The best part was seeing former students, talking to people who have visited Bloomsburg and discussing virtual immersive environments with the vibrant Philadelphia area learning professional group.

At the end of the presentation, I wanted to get a picture with all current and former students who were in attendance but it was getting late and a number of them had to leave but I did manage to coral a few.

Nathan Eckel, Karl Kapp, Jay Kellett and Anthony Derose

*A shout out to Anthony Reisinger a Kaplan-EduNeering Instructional Designer/Project Manager for taking this picture of Bloomsburg folks and for doing a great job with the ASTD chapter’s recruitment efforts…keep up the great work.

Enjoyed it, thanks for the opportunity to present.