Lucia Panese, imaginary CEO, will present MIRROR – Reflective Learning At Work Serious Games at the Learntec Conference next week.
The game is an integral part of the MIRROR Project, 4-year FP7 research project that aims to engage employees to reflect on their past work performances and personal learning experiences to promote tacit knowledge sharing through collaboration and reflection techniques.
MIRROR focuses on
development of an easy-to-use set of applications. Now in its third year, the
project released the Reflective
Learning at Work – MIRROR Model, Apps and Serious Games Report in November
2012 conveying its findings and testbeds on how MIRROR Apps and Serious
Games can facilitate reflection at work.
Reflection At Work From A Scientific Perspective
Reflection can be seen as a return to experience through which the experience is re-evaluated in order to promote continuous learning.
Reflecting includes addressing emotional
aspects, e.g. when a situation at work has made an employee angry, confused or
pleased, specific behaviors during the work, or ideas generated during the
experience. The outcome of the reflection may be new knowledge as well as
readiness to behave differently in a similar situation next time.
Reflection might be triggered by a perceived
mismatch between what was expected and what actually happened in a particular
situation, or might be triggered explicitly through debriefings and reflection
sessions integrated into work practices. Reflection might be individual or
collaborative. Employees, for example, might share with others their
experiences and try to collaboratively make sense of challenges they have
encountered. A learner can observe others (e.g. peers or experts) acting in
similar situations and vicariously relate to their experience. A learner’s
recall and reflection can benefit from the use of data gathered from the events
in question; for example video recordings of the learner’s actions.
Reflection at work from a business perspective
Competitive businesses always try to find out how to learn from experience as a whole. Ideally the experience of one worker should be shared with all co-workers in order to avoid making the same mistakes again and to improve performance when dealing with, for example, customer care or resolving conflict situations.
The ability to do so immediately results in
being able to create a virtuous circle such that both effectiveness and
customer satisfaction on the one hand and cooperation and motivation of
employees on the other can be continuously improved.
In reality employees are often unaware of what
is going on in a specific situation and most of the time they do not stop to
analyze and reflect about the dynamics of given situations and the range of
possible outcomes arising from making alternative choices or behaving differently.
If this could be done in one way or another it would mean experience could be
capitalized as a single resource, and potentially, should reflection enable the
resource to be shared with colleagues, to spread this richness to the team and
eventually to the whole organization.
From a business perspective, this is what
MIRROR is about.
In order to try to apply these concepts to a
simple example, and be able to appreciate the consequences of different
behaviors, play the MIRROR Serious
Game
