The Number one affordance virtual worlds offer in the context of teaching and training is the ability to easily access, utilize and if necessary personally experience the insights, opinions and teachings of real experts from a remote location. As someone who has spent extensive time volunteering in lower income communities and schools I have learned that the number one greatest cause of the skill gap in communities is the quality of teachers and mentors. This can also be true when talking about higher level training for people at remote locations. Another important affordance virtual worlds offer to learning is the ability to simulate dangerous or remote environments with real experts supervising helping with the simulations realism at a distance. I believe these are extremely important affordances virtual worlds offer.
My view may be old fashioned, but I feel that the most important resource for learning is still humans who are experts in a subject. Unfortunately these experts tend to overwhelming concentrate in big cities and large and prestigious universities. Virtual worlds allow their knowledge to be distributed much more widely and even for these experts to personal educate students thousands of miles away. Say a small university in Kansas lacks the ability to attract an experienced professor with the ability to teach Farsi. In the past that would be it, the university could not teach Farsi. Today that University could offer an online Farsi course in a virtual world with a native speaker teaching, possibly even while that speaker was still in Iran. I believe that within 10 years, 20 at the outside, most universities will offer courses taught this way, both for cost cutting reasons and because they want to teach a specific subject they cannot attract talent in.
Another important affordance of virtual worlds is the ability to simulate and teach users about environments and tasks they cannot--or cannot without risk--practice on their own. Our army uses virtual worlds, virtual reality and games to help train soldiers in a large variety of tasks, like spotting improvised explosive devices and urban combat without killing civilians. Another example is training which cannot effectively be performed in an environment. Recently I watched a documentary about Mongolia's Navy. Despite in the 14th century having the worlds largest Navy, modern Mongolia is landlocked and has no experience with boats at all including fishing on their small lake. Still about 30 years ago Mongolia, while still part of the USSR, needed a small navy to protect and move their Petroleum shipments from Russia. Due to lack of local expertise in building and manning ships the Soviets were forced to send an entire tug/patrol boat in pieces across the steppes at great expense. They also had send valuable members of their navy to train sailors and bring a Mongolian Navy member to Russia. One can imagine a completely different solution today involving using virtual worlds and teachers to avoid much of the expense of training and sending skilled individuals to assemble the ship.
While there are many other affordances offered by virtual worlds I believe that long term the most important affordances they will offer for education are the ways they actually impact education in the real world. I have read many of my classmates papers but while I think their points are equally valid to mine I felt that mostly taken for granted were the real difficulty in getting experts and skilled teachers to remote places. Expertise is the currency that makes the education world operate and previously universities expended vasts sums of money and effort to create competitive programs and huge research grants to attract experts to their locations. Often those in more remote or less desirable locations either had to give up on attracting top flight talent or expend extra effort/resources than their more geographically fortunate rivals. Virtual worlds will not change this equation but can help sidestep it. Now if the university of Alaska wants a class on finance taught by someone in the industry that person can teach the class while staying in New York (or some other hub) and thus might actually do it. I can come up with many examples but fundamentally there are as many examples as there are innovative educators and institutions to take advantage of them. We are entering a new world and in this world I believe that (in the future) people anywhere can learn about anything from anyone.
Sources
http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1038&context=cob_papers
http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/aera00/47.47/polin/
http://mchel.com/Papers/Dickey_TeachingIN3D.pdf
http://www.army.mil/article/84453/
http://www.army.mil/article/99285/
I also used this documentary I recently watched... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2449636/
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