Living in the Presentation

This is a fantastic example of why learning and working in a virtual world is superior to standard presentations. A friend passed this url to me.

Greg Pfister has been blogging since January 2007.  You can reach him at “The Perils of Parallel“.   He’s an author, engineer, and expert in parallel computing, among other things. He recently took part in a course in SL. As he writes, it was a wonderful chance to compare a learning experience in a virtual world with a learning experience in the atomic world, as he’d taken a course with this organization before. He writes clearly, simply, with humor and makes his point.

About a week after the course, the participants were asked for their feedback. Excerpts from Greg’s post:    (Font and style done by Ahuva)

Everything I wrote above about the sessions is, in fact, direct from memory. I didn’t take any notes during the course. This is unusual for me. I am normally terrible on details, remembering relatively little outside of my notes. So what happened?

Somehow, the experience of walking around inside those places, navigating their geographies, being immersed in it, makes the content easy to bring up from memory.

So I didn’t attend that presentation, I lived in it. No wonder I remember it.

But something much better is possible, something that appears to harnesses our hindbrains directly: Living in a presentation. It cannot be done in two dimensions. You cannot even do it in real life. It’s something virtual worlds are, uniquely, good for.

Thank you, Greg Pfister.  I wish I had been able to convince people that building collaboration tools for use in virtual worlds was important, vital, and worth the funding.  Because I, too, believe that when you are living in the presentation, or living in the EFFORT (the work), it harnesses our brains to best effect.