A client approached me recently with a query about Facebook. Their mandate is to deliver adult skills training to learners through a multitude of access points to provide learning opportunities for all. They have developed Immersive Learning Sims for workplace training that have proven effective in enahancing the employment prospects of these individuals. Their research has shown, not surprisingly that a whole cohort of this target group aged 18 – 28 spent a great deal of time on Facebook. So their question was whether Facebook and other social networks could be a delivery platform for their immersive sims.
Social Functionality
I saw this first as a technical question – we can deliver browser based 3D games and Sims; Facebook has an API so there should be some way of achieving this. However, digging into the API and looking into the phenomenon that is Social Games gave a different perspective. It was clear that the motivation and behaviours of users in social networks differed from other online communities and were radically different from those in our clients usual deployment environments.
Posted by thinkingworlds 
