In fact, Edward Castronova, in his book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games predicts in the future battles may occur between virtual armies for virtual territory and that countries must begin to train "soldiers" how to fight as avatars. And interactive role-play games like America's Army certainly blend the 3D-cyber world and physical world training-type activities. In the future, experts predict that wars will be fought both in physical places, like Afghanistan and Iraq and in cyberspace such as the recent attacks that have allegedly originated in China on NATO and the European Union computers searching for secret intelligence material.

Here are three "lessons learned" in from an actual 3D virtual world implementation. And for tips on piloting a virtual world implementation see blog entries Diffusions of Innovations and Implementing New Learning Technology? As clients mature in their use of and experience with Virtual Immersvie Environments, you can move them from less sophisticated platforms to more elaborate ones. Choose the Right Pilot Group . Lessons Lesson 1 :Understand the client’s learning needs, participant volume requirements, technology access and security requirements, and

Education is Leadership In Learning Online with Games, Simulations and Virtual Worlds , I outline different levels of interactivity with students, from the talking-head in Level 0 to environments that use sims and microcosms in Level 4 to environments where students decide their own curricula, grading, and processes in Level 7. I then map the different levels of interactivity to a leadership spectrum, with "directive" at Level 0 (the leadership style of ordering people what to do using formal and other forms of coercive power) compared to "participative" and "collaborative" at Level 7