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.

Hot on the heels of John Edwards, Ron Paul and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Minshuto politician Suzuki Kan has staked out a claim to be the first Japanese politician in Second Life.

This must be aimed at getting real-world PR. And it’s working very well on that score.

But the in-world space appears to a fairly useless clone of a real-world office. Its basic message appears to be,

“Vote for me! I’ve got an office! With tables and chairs!”

It doesn’t have to be like this; Here are some of the things that, insane-Japanese-electoral-law-that-he’s-probably-already-breaking notwithstanding, political campaigns could be doing to leverage their Second Life spaces:

• Create legible displays related to your political campaigns. (Doh…)
• Track everyone who turns up and invite them to join a group. You can then advertise real-world events and online activism through in-world instant messages to the group. (Teleport here to receive instant-message spam from John Edwards.)
• Give away some kind of free merchandize - a hat, t-shirt or whatever - to help them advertise your cause in Second Life.
• Second Life makes it really easy to donate small amounts of money. Setup a donation box. It doesn’t matter if they only give you a few Linden $’s - once you’ve confirmed that they’re willing to donate, you can follow up and get more money out of them later.
• Create a space for people to chat to each other. (Look how the Ron Paul campaign does this.)
• Give visitors something actively useful to do to participate in something you’re campaigning for. The obvious thing would be to sign an online petition. You can then turn your petition signatures into more cutesy real-world PR. (”2000 Second-Life avatars demanded that the government fix the pension system…”)
• Have somebody there to talk to people who turn up, make them feel welcome and try to turn interested people into active volunteers for your campaign.
• Offer links from the virtual world back to your 2D-web resources - your website, your Mixi community, the place they sign up for your e-mail list, etc.
• Put a box on your website saying that there’s a volunteer online who can talk to you right now. This will give you a lot of the advantages of live chat systems, but with a greater sense of presence. You can have it only display when there’s somebody actually there, so you don’t need to staff your in-world location 24-7.