Read this post in Japanese (日本語)

Michio Kanda is a Japanese town office employee planning a world-record-breaking attempt to fly from Japan to North American in a hot air balloon.

Kanda-san is well prepared, with world records for altitude, distance and time in the air under his belt. But when they met to discuss preparations, the ground team was worried about one thing: How would Kanda-san communicate with Air Traffic Control when got to North America?

To help out, we hooked up with Australian Aviation English specialist Mike Smith of Aerospace English who set about creating a customized language course designed to teach Kanda-san the things he would most need to know, in the shortest possible period of time.

We mocked up Kanda-san’s balloon in Second Life and built a simulation, along with the instruments that he would need to control based on instructions from the control tower: A transponder to adjust the the frequency on which he would talk to the tower, and an altimeter on which he would base the his reports to the ground.

Here’s a clip from the lesson, featuring Mike Smith in the control tower and Michio Kanda in the balloon:

There’s an article over at What Japan Thinks on a survey that found that 30% of Japanese people are interested in learning English in Second Life.

(The original Japanese article this is based on is at at japan.internet.com)

Obviously it’s nice to have some statistics that appear support the basic assumptions on which I founded Social Minds - that we can teach effectively in virtual worlds, that people will want to learn in them, that this model will be successful in Japan, and that this market will be very, very big indeed. And this would appear to fit in with what I’ve been finding myself: Japanese people are signing up for Second Life in large numbers, and looking for somewhere to learn.

Having said that, I’m a little bit skeptical of these numbers; I’d be surprised if 30% of Japanese people out there actually knew what Second Life was, let alone whether it would be the kind of environment they could learn in. I suspect that you’d have got a similar result if you’d asked them,

“Would you be interested in learning English in a new way that you haven’t tried before?”

As you can tell from looking at the bookshelf of pretty much any Japanese learner of English, students will try pretty much anything once if it promises a new approach.

But then the approach has to deliver.

The numbers that will really prove our case will be the recommend rates as students start to complete their first courses:

“Would you recommend this course to your friends?”

If we, Avatar English, Language Lab and others involved in virtual-world-based education start producing really high recommendation rates, we can be sure (if we ever doubted it) that this kind of 3-D immersive learning is here to stay.