My Comps

skubwa — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:19:54 +0000

Not formatted, but hey, what do you want? This serves as a basis for the next phase: getting problems statements moving.

OUTLINE

I. Five trends

a. Education

i. Elementary education for all people by 2015

ii. Rising role of education for women
iii. Ease of integrating technology into teacher development

b.    Culture
i.    Growing understanding of the need to integrate intercultural training into school and business curricula
ii.    Rise of East Asian cultural influence, especially China, India and Japan
iii.    Rise of specialized cities that transcend cultural boundaries and specialize

c.    Chaotic systems
i.    Growing incidence of global warming related disasters including Katrina, Sri Lanka tsunami, Myanmar earthquake
ii.    Growing understanding of the need to integrate emergency response coordination and integration on a national and global scale
iii.    Growing understanding of the need to use current technology to help coordinate triage, disaster response time, training of disaster response personnel and collaboration between national and international agencies including more sophisticated policy development

d.    Communication systems
i.    Ease of infrastructure development with advent of technologies like the 100 dollar computer
ii.    Rise of Web 2.0 technologies that use social relationships to build communities of practice around particular areas of interest, including examples from blogs, wikis and mashups
iii.    Spread of cellular phone use and sophistication of phones that lead to ubiquitous computing and “viral videos” that have deep and wide cultural, social, political and economic implications.

e.    Supranational systems
i.    The rise of “second world” countries such as China, Japan, India, Russia, Korea, Malaysia, Brazil
ii.    The impact of globalization on multinational corporations, the international economy, and global culture including the recent recession that is having a global impact
iii.    Understanding of forming international policy in regard to common manmade and natural disasters like 9/11 and global warming.

II.    Focus on Supranational trend
a.    Rise of the “second world”
i.    Influence of China
ii.    Influence of India
iii.    Influence of Japan
iv.    Influence of Russia and other countries

b.    Impact on multinational corporations
i.    Increasing understanding of the interconnectedness of economies
ii.    Increasing understanding of the nature flexibility, just in time development
iii.    Need to develop leadership succession systems that do not necessarily follow cultural norms of the host culture

c.    Policy formation that deals with the growing multilateralism of multinational corporations
i.    Formation of distributed networks of learners and training
ii.    Legal issues that arise from copyright, international law breaking, a foreign national doing the wrong thing in their host country
iii.    Economic accountability in the public and private sectors

III.    Connecting Supranational with Management and specifically trends that impact Human Resource Development initiatives around the world
a.    Second world
i.    HRD initiatives that focus on using technology, virtual teams, multiuser virtual environments for training and development
ii.    Diversity training, less reliance on declarative knowledge, more reliance on the role of the manager to be more interactive, holographic and engaging with subordinates
b.    Multinational corporations and human resource development
i.    The impact of transformational leadership on the culture of a multinational corporation
ii.    Designation of training regimens that support and reinforce the culture of the corporation (Google)
iii.    The impact of organizational change, change resistance, and the need to address grievances that arise, usually from cultural differences in multinational workforces
c.    Policy formation of HRD
i.    Bottom-up transitions for decision making, including just-in-time management (NUCOR)
ii.    Use of social networks to hire and retain workers
iii.    Speed of communications impact on the revision of policies that impact a corporation

IV. Research in the impact of HRD on International Corporations

a.    Social Software and virtual teams
i.    Wikis as constructivist tools
ii.    Blogs as community builders
iii.    Mashups linking physical information with information design
b.    Discussion boards in Learning Management Systems
i.    Guided discussions for critical thinking and deeper writing
ii.    Instructor presence in Vygotskyan terms
iii.    Group work and project based discussions

c.    Multi-user virtual environments – 3D wikis
i.    Linking the flatness of LMS with presence in MUVEs
ii.    Identity construction that transcends culture

V. Implications of research on HRD in International Corporations

THE EXAM

“I hear babies cry
I watched her grow:
she’ll learn much more
than I’ll ever know.
And I think to myself-
what a wonderful world!”
– As sung by Louis Armstrong and others.

Introduction

Last week, my 13 year old daughter called me on the phone: “daddy…do you have time to talk?”
I was at work, so I told her I didn’t really have the time, but she ignored me, as is her wont.
“I’ve decided I’m going to be an actress, because there was a survey they gave us at school and it showed acting might be a good career for me, so what schools are good to go to? Is there any place in Chicago that’s good, because I think I want to go to school there.”
“Northwestern University actually has a pretty good drama school, but it’s very hard to get into,” I said.
“OK, thanks daddy.”
Two days later, she called me on the phone again.
“Daddy, I did some research and now I know which classes I need to take in high school to get into Northwestern, so I’ve planned everything out.”
Sure enough, when I arrived home that day, I sat down with her and she showed me the print out she had. She had accessed the State of Florida’s website at http://www.facts.org. The print out indeed showed every single course she would take, the semester she would take it, the credits she would be getting. It also referenced why each course would be important to take and how that would contribute to her successful overall educational goals.
I’ve been working with her the past few days, encouraging her to contact people at Northwestern to let them know of her plans, and to help her get into the school by advising her about further steps she would need to take in order to gain admission.
What fascinates me about the entire process my daughter went through is difficult to express in a sentence or two, but it is certainly a clear indication of where we, as a planet, are heading. Technology, above all else, is enabling us to do things unimaginable even 20 years ago. Technology underlies and enables other trends to move us as a species towards heights of connectedness, collaboration, distributed cognition and cooperation that are truly unprecedented. My daughter, at age 13, with my help, and the help of hundreds of people who have conceptualized, designed and created the facts.org website, is already demonstrating skills that will help her succeed as a global leader, through her journey to find out how to get into Northwestern University.
With this in mind, it is worth a deeper exploration of the impact of technology that underlies five trends that I have been investigating for the purposes of writing today. In the first section, I will detail the five trends that fall roughly within the areas of education, communication, culture, chaotic events and supranational connections. In section two, I will look at technology’s impact on the supranational systems trend. Section three will focus specifically on the supranational system, especially in regards to globalization and the myriad facets and challenges that globalization bodes. I will make a connection between globalization and its impact on Human Resource Development (HRD). In section four, I will look at research that surrounds the connections, especially in the area of training using discussion boards and virtual environments and, finally, in section five, I will discuss the implications for further research into two particular current technologies that will have an impact on the future of virtual education. It is without a doubt that all five of these trends contributed in some way to my daughter being able to carry out her research and come to her conclusions in an efficient and detailed way that was clearly impossible when I was her age.

Section One – The Five trends

Education underlies all cultures and societies. Futurists have noted three important trends within education that will have a significant impact on all of the trends discussed below.
The first of these is the prediction that by 2015, it is conceivable that every man, woman and child on earth will have some kind of access to formalized elementary education. This means that basic reading, writing and math skills will be a part of the repertoire of the over 6 billion people on earth. This also means that the potential for people to move on to secondary and tertiary education is raised. The implications of this are obvious. A much larger and more educated workforce means a larger pool of potential workers at all levels of society. There may be a glut of educated workers who will know how to work within the system to get their basic necessities.
Second, there is a greater acceptance among cultures and societies of the import of educating girls and women. This will impact the nature of the future workforce, and will influence the structural and administrative processes of multinational corporations as will be detailed below. Women will begin moving into greater positions of responsibility in all professional areas, and their working styles will have a deep and wide impact on organizational culture and development.
Lastly, there is the issue of technology integration in formalized education across the planet. Administrators and faculty development officers are gaining an understanding of the need to design and develop technology integration strategies and hardware refreshment regimens that take into consideration the pace of technological change. Institutions of higher learning, especially, are seeing how technology is forcing them to change organizational decision making at an ever more rapid pace.
Cultural trends are also an important area to understand as they contribute to our understanding of human psychology, society and patterns of behavior.
First among cultural trends is the resurgence of Asia onto the world stage. These second tier (also referred to as “second world”) countries, not quite fully developed, but whose economies are now growing at a blistering pace relative to their history, will have a significant impact across the globe. China, India, Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, among a host of countries in East and South Asia carry with them cultures and histories that are very different from heretofore dominant cultural patterns from the Western countries of Europe and the United States.
Second is the subsequent growing understanding of organizations to the need to integrate intercultural training, also known as cross-cultural training or diversity training, into their day-to-day operations. Schools at all levels and corporate HRD officials are recognizing the importance in understanding culture’s impact on the individual’s worldview and how that shapes their belief systems and consequent behavior in a particular working context.
The third facet of culture that is a combination of cultural, political and economic factors is the rise not just of countries, but of cities that carry with them specializations not found within other cities nationally or internationally. San Jose, California, in the United States, Copenhagen, in Denmark, and Bangalore, in India are three cities that are now highly specialized in the technology, including the design and manufacture of cell phone and computers and accessories. These three cities, as one example, are building a common distributed culture of high technology. Advances in one city will surely be shared or copied quickly by the other two cities, as they develop a cultural community around their common interest in advancing technology. Though located in three different countries, the people working in the technology industry in these three cities will begin to share experiences and world views that are closely aligned with each other.
The third major trend is the impact of chaotic systems and what lessons we are learning from globally experienced disasters.
First among these trends is the growing understanding of the impact of global warming on natural disasters, and the rise of religious fundamentalism that fuels manmade disasters.
September 11, 2001 was of course an international watershed day that reminded the world of the perils of manmade disasters and possible future terror attacks around the globe. Subsequent attacks in London, Madrid and Bali, among others, reinforced this notion.
The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that greatly impacted Sri Lanka and Indonesia was the first major indication that international relief efforts needed to be more coordinated. This was borne out further by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and in the Myanmar earthquake of 2008. Both of these events prompted international responses that also brought into question political policies of the affected governments.
The next important trend that grew out of these disasters is the acceptance of the coordination of both governmental and non-governmental agencies in responding to disasters, whether manmade or natural. The debacle of the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina and the ineffectiveness of the Federal Emergency Management Administration was important. The Myanmar government’s initial refusal to accept any type of international help after their earthquake also brought out this issue.
Third is the subsequent growing understanding of the need to use current technology to help coordinate triaging in times of disaster, disaster response time, training of disaster response personnel and collaboration between national and international governmental and non-governmental agencies. The ease of technological linkages also points to the need to revise the policies of emergency response and coordination.
The fourth major trend to look at is the impact of communication systems and the development of the technologies that underlie them.
The first major facet of the trend in this area concerns the advancing ease at which communications infrastructures can be built. Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in Kenya, the village I was in had one telephone for its inhabitants. I remember using that phone to get the bad news that my grandmother had passed away. Today, however, that same remote Kenyan village, with an investment of perhaps 5,000 dollars, can have a satellite-based communications hub installed somewhere nearby. Wireless computers, such as the one developed and branded as the “100 dollar laptop”, which are designed specifically to work with self-generated energy, can connect those villagers via the Internet. The news of my grandmother’s death might have coincided with pictures from her funeral, or the creation of a memorial that I or my relatives might have made with today’s technology. I could have shown pictures of my grandmother to the villagers I lived and worked with. Needless to say, that village, and all villages around the world can now participate in international events with an ease unheard of twenty-five years ago.
Related to the ease of computer communications is the trend of cell phone usage and sophistication. By 2015, China will account for more cell phones than any other country. The phones will actually be media enhanced computers with built-in video and still photo capabilities at high resolution and with high speed uploading and downloading of information. Other second tier countries around the world will also share in the growing market of cell phone usage which will further speed connectivity among people and cultures.
Third will be the software that controls these computers and phones. “Web 2.0” will become even more ubiquitous, as social networking through these devices becomes even more well-developed. One example of this type of social software is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia driven by Wiki technology, which allows anyone to create or edit an entry. Wikipedia currently has several million articles in English. By 2015, over 100 languages will be represented with several million more articles written and cross-translated. Wikipedia has been trending toward more academically reliable articles, but it has also exposed the bias that is found in most culture wars. People will write patently false claims in some articles, and the self-policing of the wiki is constantly in question. Nevertheless, Wikipedia as a world-wide collaborative document of the collective knowledge of humankind is important to note. Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn and other websites that take advantage of social networks will continue to grow and help connect people on personal, cultural, social and economic levels and will certainly impact many aspects of organizations.
The last important trend is supranational systems, which easily encompass all of the other trends. At the risk of sounding repetitious, there are three particular significant factors that surround the globalization of resources, events, cultures, and organizations.
First and foremost, again, is the rise of “second tier” countries such as China, India, Russia, South Korea and Brazil. These countries are gaining on the developed countries in terms of rapidly growing economies, rapidly developing educational systems that are taking global culture into consideration, and infrastructural improvements in technology that are placing them as rivals to the developed world.
Next to consider are the multinational corporations that exist in these countries, the impact of the current economic malaise on the international community and the spread of the cultural worldviews of these entities that impact how the organizations themselves work. Organizational culture does, at times, transcend local culture, and this will more than likely continue to the favor of the organization over the local culture.
Finally, there is a growing understanding that formal policies and laws of countries and multinational corporations need to take into consideration national and supranational interests, and boards of governors are faced with decisions that will certainly affect individuals well beyond the communities in which they are physically located. Indeed there is the growing realization that the old cliché “think globally, act locally” has merit and must be implemented in whatever formal organization moves to adapt new policies.

Section Two – Supranational Trends in Focus

This section contains the environmental scan concerning the impact of supranational trends. It will focus on the rise of the Asian nations, looking specifically at China, India, Japan and Russia. It will look at three important notions facing multinational corporations situated around the world. It will conclude with three caveats in policy formation that deals with growing multilateralism that is found within multinational corporations.
What impact will the rise of some nations have? It is important to start first and foremost with mainland China. China has over 8,000 years of history. Its influence on East Asia, especially the histories of Korea and Japan is also obvious. China’s political history is very young, with the Communists coming into power only in 1949, and the country opening up to the West in the early 1970s. The 1.4 billion Chinese constitute 1/5 of the world’s population, and its people can be found in almost every country on Earth. China’s rise economically is the most important trend driven by its cultural and political history. The Chinese economy is booming, and the impact of its manufacturing development is well known. Economically, China now has deep investments in the West, especially the United States. Educational institutions around the world are redesigning curricula to add in understandings of the Chinese language and their cultural influences. China’s influence, however, is potentially hobbled by a complex writing system, a largely monolingual population, and a politically undemocratic infrastructure that is rife with corruption and inflexible in ideology.
India is the other major important country. With 5,000 years of history, 13 (more or less) national languages and close to 1 billion people, the economy is booming. The educational system, based on the British system is on the rise. Technological leaps are obvious everywhere as Indians have valued and invested heavily in math and science education. Politically, India has an advantage as the world’s largest democracy, despite a historical spate of political assassinations. India is situated to be a world leader in the coming century.
Of slightly lesser importance are Japan, Russia and Brazil. Japan, has the second largest economy in the world and has a strong influence on the direction that China will take. Japan has enormous design, cultural and artistic influence throughout the world. Their 1,500 year old culture is one of the more complex to understand, and their worldview is shaped both by the feudal system that existed between the 17th and 19th centuries, and by the impact of World War II and the post-war reconstruction of the country with the aid of the United States and European allies. Russia, the former superpower, enjoys a huge landmass with a wealth of natural resources. They have also recently begun to gain ground economically, and are now a creditor nation to the US and other economically disadvantaged countries. Brazil has enormous influence on the Hispanic cultures and economies of Central and South America and has become a world leader in energy self-sufficiency. Preservation of the land mass and the Amazon rainforest is a priority for the survival of all species on earth.

With the understanding of the rise of these important countries comes the complimentary importance of understanding the international impact on multinational corporations.
What dominates the headlines of today in the United States is the impact of the “perfect storm” of the mortgage crisis, bank failures, stock market crash and the political bailouts of related financial institutions by the US government. There are three major areas that are coming into focus as a result of this economic turmoil.
First, there is the increasing understanding that the economy is a globally interconnected entity. As of this writing, banks are beginning to fail in Europe. Iceland has had to borrow money from Russia to keep its banking system afloat. Japanese security companies are worried and the Japanese market lost 9% of its value just yesterday. The money market is now a 24-hour entity, and what happens in one market absolutely affects the other.
Second, corporations are beginning to understand that to stay competitive, even in economically turbulent times today, the organization must develop flexibility and the ability to change rapidly. Organizations must do things “just-in-time”, much as the Japanese car makers have developed their just-in-time auto manufacturing systems that keep inventory at a minimum and productivity flexible in tune with demand.
Third, because of the growing connectedness of international events, monetary systems, business systems and leadership succession systems must be developed within organizations that will not necessarily follow the cultural norms of the host culture, as the organization itself may have to make rapid adjustments in terms of its workforce makeup and location.

Following the understanding of what is the fundamentally changing the nature of multinational organizations comes the need to look at the impact of policy that drives an organization. There are three important things to consider.
First, policies must be developed that help to form, nurture and sustain a viable system of distributed learning networks that exploit social software technologies and train leaders with curriculum that includes intercultural training, language training, leadership training and technology training.
Next is a deeper and broader exploration of legal issues that arise from copyright, intellectual property rights, transgression of host country laws, and Internet related crimes that originate in one country but impact an individual or entity physically based in another country. This is a critical, but wholly unexplored, area of policy which has a potential for catastrophic failure if improperly addressed.
Last is the formation of policies that ensure economic accountability within and throughout organizations that are in both the public and private sector, and that may interact with multinational corporations. There must be safeguards built into both public and private sector entities that are mandated by law, in order to prevent a reoccurrence of the failures of Enron, the rescue of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Merril Lynch and other similar organizations.

Section Three – Supranational Systems & HRD

What do these supranational system trends have to do with HRD within an organization? What impact will HRD policy have on bridging the gaps in culture, language, working styles, learning styles, employee technological literacy, the working relationships of Internet-based teams of workers, and compliance with possibly conflicting laws in two or more different countries that have different social, economic, cultural, political and legal systems? This section will briefly attempt to answer these questions.
In regards to dealing with the impact of the rise of the “second world” countries, HRD Managers have two important issues to deal with.
The first of these issues involves HRD initiatives that focus on using technology, implementing virtual team building and creating communities of practice around a particular skill set of interest that is common to workers within an organization. It also involves the implementation of multi-user virtual environments that will promote more interactive educational opportunities for workers.
Second, these virtual environments must necessarily focus on issues of diversity (or intercultural awareness), flexible decision making skill development, and leadership training to manage culturally and physically distributed teams. Not only has the “death of distance” been declared by scholars and the writers of the Economist magazine, but the implications of working with colleagues who are at a distance has become an important part of the emerging body of literature that addresses this issue.
Multinationals must also understand the impact of three factors that will help position their HRD priorities both situated within the organization and situated within the national boundaries of which their organizational culture operates.
The first of these is the actual impact that the transformational leaders of the organization have. It is no accident that the CEO of NUCOR, the American steel giant, had a lasting impact on the organizational culture of the company, which affected everything from the way problems arose at the plant production level, to the way new employees were initiated into the company.
NUCOR’s organizational culture has a structure that challenges traditional ways of decision making, as it carries a strong reliance on bottom-up processing of problems and highly decentralized decision making, as well as a very low income disparity between workers on the factory floor and high level executives. The profit sharing plan fosters this egalitarian spirit. All of this is done without specific formalized training. Yet, this raises the issue of how organizations might use formalized training to create regimens that support and reinforce the culture of the corporation. This second factor impacts companies such as Google, whose culture is extremely open-ended and informal, yet employs many technologies that foster collaborative processes in the design and implementation of browser-based software.
Finally, there is the consideration of training workers to deal with organizational change, its corresponding change resistance and the need to address grievances that arise, usually from cultural differences in multinational workforces. Nissan Motors, a Japanese company, was nevertheless saved by a French CEO, who was able to bring in a fresh perspective to the heretofore Japanese only decision makers and stakeholders. It took a concerted effort to re-engineer the thinking of managers at most levels at Nissan and to accept ideas that were “non-Japanese” and Nissan is all the better for it.
The last major issue that HRD managers face is how to form new company policies that will ensure that all workers are fairly treated, are brought into the organizational culture, and know how to contribute to the betterment of the overall health of the organization in which they are joining. There are three things to look at that might help in forming new policy.
First, there might be some success in using bottom-up transitioning when dealing with problems. This might also include flexibility training for managers, who must understand not only basic management concepts, but must carry culturally sensitive decision-making into the equation.
The use of social networking software technologies will no doubt be reshaped to aid in the further inclusion of new employees into the organizational culture of which they are joining. The company newsletter is being replaced by the company blog. The company yearly convention, especially in the case of a multinational, may see a large virtual presence at the physical event via any of the online learning management systems or multi-user communication systems that are currently used.
Finally, technologies can and will increase the speed at which companies will be able to disseminate new policies out to their workers. Wiki technology promises a flatter, more democratic platform in which to formulate and revise training policy and work flow policy.

Taken together, the impact of globalization and the issues that surround it on HRD managers and directors raises many issues about how to go about finding the best practices in the profession, both in terms of corporate education and how multinationals might influence the formation of curricula in higher educational institutions around the world. It is hoped that the collaborations between and among organizations and higher educational institutions will produce workers with the technological skill sets, intercultural world view and intrapersonal ability to adapt to any work situation.

Section Four – Current Research

Indeed, the challenges to HRD administrators and their counterparts in higher education are myriad and complex. Existing technologies that help to address all of the issues raised in the previous three sections are the focus of this section.
Kay (2006) has led the way in exploring how higher education in particular is researching the implementation of technology training programs that help both faculty and students use technology better. His survey of 65 studies can easily be applied to the field of HRD. His findings were that effective implementation is really about an eclectic mix of training styles, including mentoring, site visits, classroom-based teaching and teaching with formal online systems.
This section will look at other specific research that is going on in three technological areas that Kay has not looked at: these include the use of social software and virtual team construction, the use of discussion boards in formal learning management systems (LMSs), and the use of the three-dimensional toolsets available in multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs)
Social Software is better known in its current incarnation as “Web 2.0”. Prensky (2006, 2007) notes that Web 2.0 social software, such as myspace and facebook, and even cell phone texting, are the tools of the “digital natives” or people under 30. These “natives” have never lived in a world without personal computers, the Internet, or ubiquitous cell phones. Prensky has noted that the digital natives more than likely think and process information in a very different way. Implications for research are discussed below, but this is obviously a challenge for the “digital immigrants” or those who have had to learn how to use these technologies in a more formal environment. The immigrants, who tend to be the HRD managers and directors, or the Deans and Provosts of higher educational institutions might be adherents to Vygotsky’s (1927, 1990) social constructionist theories which advocate project-based and community-based learning experiences. But how will the constructivist immigrants work the natives? It’s an interesting challenge that is still being researched by the likes of Papert (1980, 1992, 1997) who has used computer programming to teach math concepts to children, and Bruckman (2005) and Turkle (1990) who have looked carefully at identity construction in online environments.
Wikis (as in Wikipedia discussed above), are one of the purer forms of social software. Documents can be approached as Constructivist tools, but there is little research at present that looks at some of the impact of wikis on learning or development.
Blogs, which are like public diaries around a particular area of interest, are usually written by a limited set of writers. However, the entries themselves can be commented upon by the community that surrounds a particular blog. Blogs very much align with Lave and Wenger’s (1990) concept of “communities of practice” where informal learning takes place around a particular skill set or set of interests. Research in blogging effectiveness is also in its infancy, but will very much follow the vein of community building that may be necessary in both higher education and corporate environments.
More has been done in virtual teams, though. Most of the current studies use populations of college undergraduates and do some sort of project-based work with students, designating a team leader, coaching the leader to be more interactive with team members, or less interactive. Findings show that the attitude of the natives is always skewed more to the positive side in terms of attitude, impact of the teamwork, and likability of the instructor. In the few studies that have used employees in an organization working on a virtual team at a distance from each other, the usual deficiencies included the unalterable problem of time zone differences hindering synchronous communication and the lack of better presence of the team leader, who usually did not scaffold his or her expectations about the scope, sequence, feedback mechanisms or flow of the particular project.
There is a growing body of research on the utilization of LMSs, lead mostly by Dede (2004, 2005, 2006), Goodyear (2007) and a handful of Australian educators. Most educators are familiar with Blackboard, WebCT, Angel, Moodle, eCollege or Desire2Learn. These systems all share similarities in their mechanistic view of education with drop boxes, grade books and discussion boards a common feature that links them all. The discussion board has become the focus of much of this research, for this is where the community of practice and the learning communities are built, theoretically, through the written exchange of ideas. Sokolik (2005, 2006) has looked specifically at instructor presence. Findings show that instructors who challenge students tend to get more detailed and academically sound responses. Students who use the subject line in their postings to indicate an argument, a rebuttal or a clarification response also tend to enjoy higher levels of academic rigor and achievement. Research on the use of groups within LMSs is still lacking.
Finally, there is the brand new field of research in MUVEs. These environments are avatar-based, so Bruckman and others, who have done previous research in MOOs and other synchronous communication systems, have fertile territory. As of this writing, many LMSs are working with SecondLife (SL), probably the most popular MUVE, to develop and test tools that connect the two different technologies. There is currently a blogging tool in Moodle, whereby a person in SL can make a blog entry that gets posted in their Moodle blog tool. Other LMS systems will no doubt employ this similar tool shortly, and other tools are in development that will integrate and replicate the more popular features of social-networking and web 2.0 software. Again, research here, though lacking, is a wide open space, especially to help HRD managers and directors find the best practices in bringing these available tools into their training regimens.
One other interesting aspect of MUVE is the avatar. The avatar is a physical representation of the person at the keyboard. In SL, you can change the appearance of your avatar to anything that is in your imagination. You can decide skin color, body shape, hair style and clothing. Indeed, you can choose to have an avatar that is not even humanoid. Turkle also has fertile territory to explore avatar construction and representation. Again, there is still little research in this area, but there are many implications discussed in the final section.
All in all, online learning, learning at a distance, elearning, virtual learning…all of these terms are trying to describe a field that is really in its infancy, but a field that will have great importance in addressing the five trends described in section one, and most especially the supranational systems challenges noted in section two. The final section, section five, will briefly discuss two areas of potential research that could be carried out based on current research in educational technology that supports the development of interculturally and technologically aware workers. This research would also, of course, benefit HRD managers and directors who must deal with the increasing multipolarities of their culturally, socially, economically and physically distributed employees.

Section five – Research Implications

Virtual teams will be formed, visions imparted, workflow assigned, outcomes enshrined, accountability tracked. The work will be done, assessments will ensue, debriefing sessions will occur and closure will come. Then the process will start all over again. Teams will last from 24 hours to 24 months, depending on the size and scope of the project and the team. What will most certainly happen is that the entire team will not be physically located together. Indeed, they will consist of a diversity of people with a diversity of languages in a diversity of locations and a diversity of world views. How will all of this come about in an efficient and effective way? How will virtual leaders lead? Where will accountability happen? How can we ensure that team members fully understand their positions within the group and have the ability to complete the projects?
The technologies described in section four all have the ability to, at the very least, address any or all of these questions. However, the two technologies that currently exist that are of interest to me are discussion boards in LMSs and the design and use of future collaborative tools in MUVEs and in particular in SecondLife.
Discussion boards (DBs) are what I call “the heartbeat of the online class”. DBs are the place where community it built; where the instructor is able to establish presence, and maintain fair and free discourse inside the community of learners; where students can go to safely exchange their ideas, learn, laugh, and share the experiences of others. They are vital. At present, most DBs are in written form, but technologies like Wimba and Skype already enable audio and video-based discussions, both synchronously and asynchronously. Discussions can be structured in any way, and configured to use in pairs, small groups or whole class activities. Discussions can last, like the projects mentioned above for 24 hours only, or for the duration of a formal course, or can be open-ended places in a community of workers within an organization. All of these variables mean fertile territory for researchers looking for ways in which DBs might foster project work, training in intercultural understanding, language learning, counseling or a myriad of HRD activities that help to develop workers who function better within the system of which they are a part. I am most particularly interested in looking at the impact of video on reinforcing concepts that have heretofore been delivered in written form. Learning styles transcend culture. Technology can enable and assist in enhancing an individual’s learning style. The DB feature in current LMSs is increasingly understood as a vital tool that will help learners learn better.
MUVEs have the potential to be even more interactive than DBs in LMSs. MUVEs enable people to move in three dimensions, so presence is not an important factor that hinders interaction. The ability to construct different looking avatar shapes, sizes and colors means there can be more drama, more simulation, and more role playing. SecondLife already contains important communication systems that allow voice and text chats in public, in groups and one-to-one for private conversations. SL additionally contains scriptable objects that can collect, aggregate and disseminate information via email, interface with LMSs or posting “in world” either for public or private consumption. The 3D environment can recreate anything in reality, but physics-defying fantasy spaces can also be constructed. There are a plethora of projects that can be researched in SL that look into the nature of interactive learning, team learning and project-based work.
Conclusion

I have always been in the frontier of the intersection between technology and education. It’s a great place to be.
Being able to collaborate with my daughter, seeing her take a small piece of information that she got from me and using the power of her resourcefulness was amazing. However, there was also the foresight of the developers of facts.org, the State of Florida educational system, countless developers, designers and educators, working no doubt with people in industry, with people in human resources most especially, that contributed to the databases that exist in facts.org that helped my daughter plan out her education for the next eight years…all at the age of 13.
The website was most likely put together by an international team, and a mix of public and private resources. The teams that formed and dissolved in the creation of the use of the site; the conceptualization of the information that was there; the implementation of the navigational system that enabled my daughter to find what she needed intuitively; the simple design of each page, each link, each button:…all of these are miracles when looked through the lenses of someone who was 13 when Richard Nixon was resigning as president: just a couple years after opening China up to the world, just a few years before Japan started its industrial rise, just a few years before Ronald Reagan would fund the people who eventually crashed planes into the World Trade Center.
It’s impossible to know how technology will change the world, but it is possible to see where the trends are leading us, and it is possible to see how the trends converge into a point where we can be both thrilled and scared at the same time. The future IS uncertain, but the future belongs to my daughter, the actress, the potential leader of a social network of like-minded people from all walks of life, the girl who already has the skill sets needed to lead and can demonstrate them with a simple integration activity from the old digital immigrant who spends too much time trying to figure out what’s going to happen next.
It is, indeed, a wonderful world!

Posted in Final Papers, Notes, Research, Short Papers

Larry Davies

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