News Story

Shell Learning Centre, Rijswijk, The Netherlands

Peter Scott, Monday 7 Nov 2005

Just come back from a great visit to the Shell Learning Centre Rijswijk, near the Hague in the Netherlands. The Shell EP Learning team were kind enough to invite me, a team from Corous and a team from a local company to us, Logicom, to see their new centre and to talk about our work.

I must say that I thought that their old home in Noordwijkerhout was sweet; but their new home at the heart of the Shell EPiCentre Rijswijk, near the Hague is huge! Shell are clearly making a big committment to learning in this place.

The Corous team, Pete Howard and Olga Meglinskaia, have been working with the Shell EP Learning team for some while on a series of learning “nuggets” and were here to talk about how that work might be extended. The Logicom folks, Majid Al-Kader and Jo Pumphrey were presenting their game models for engineers. Majid gave a demo of their Real World Environments technology and discussed the potential implementation of a RWE scenario within Shell. The current RWE model is of a British Gas engineer running though a set of heating maintenence scenarios based on a house in Milton Keynes. And I was talking about the universe of the Prolearn Network of Excellence and how that might help Shell Learning. I spoke about – Podcasting, Live streaming, Meeting Maps and Knowledge Work models, amongst many other things.

After the event, Gerry Nicholson showed us the work of the Knowledge Innovation and Design (KID) Team part of the EP Learning & Leadership Development Organisation, in the Netherlands. Much of that work revolves around designing learning events which are distributed via the Shell Open University. The very cool 3d immersive environment that they use the i-zone is about to be replaced by an even bigger immersive space that they are to call the i-dome. As the latter is not yet up and running, Ben Evans gave us a tour of the old i-zone. On went the 3d specs and we were walked into the earth, in and around models made from the field in various parts of the world. Once you are able to build huge, complex and colourful models of the rock under your drill then adding 3d animation and motion can really make the features come to life! Clearly you cannot convey this in 2d snaps here (it certainly doesn&#39t come out in the attached image) but once you can move around in the model it is clear that the data you can take away is just as important as the data you can add – to help to see features and their impact.