The Future of Work: 3-D Learning

A couple of weeks ago I was flying back from Europe. As we were settling in after boarding, my seatmate pulled the new Kindle 2 from Amazon and asked, “Got one of these?” As I pointed to my dog-eared copy of “Three Cups of Tea,” he bragged about the four books he had downloaded for his travel.

A few days later, I was reading the Sunday edition of The New York Times (“Is This the Future of the Digital Book") and saw the article on Vook. There was a big color picture of founder Bradley Inman. The caption described how he is building a “platform for e-books that will combine text, video, and social networking.”

I was immediately drawn back to my book. In the future, I will be able to see the grandeur of K2 and the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the bridge built to help build the first school, the villagers and the climbers, and the relative closeness or distance between the village and the current battles between the U.S. military and the Taliban.

In the not-so-distant future, you can imagine textbooks will be delivered via Kindles and similar devices. Eighth graders struggling with abstract math concepts can see how algebra and geometry fit into the real world. Likewise, history, science, and foreign language studies will come alive. New games will be created to make learning fun.

And how long will it be before you can read our research on a Kindle? It may not be long before you can read our case study on a company’s supply chain transformation, and be able to click on the video interviews with supply chain executive and the CIO. We can take you from the manufacturing plans to the distribution centers to the retailer’s shelves, allowing you a much better view of the overall process and the challenges involved. If you can imagine it, we can deliver it. Think about how this changes the learning process.

What do you think?