A little thought came to me as I was teleported into Sheila Weber's virtual conference in Second Life without even the knowledge to sit on a chair. How can we be immersive if we do not have the knowledge or skill to be immersive?  Being able to engage in an immersive way requires an investment in learning how to behave in ways that will lead to immersion.

Incidentally the only reason I was able to teleport into Sheila's conference was because Nick Noakes invited me. Nick's point about the need for friends, mentors and coaches to enable those first steps to be taken in order to gain basic competence in the way of the world and confidence to make one's own way was a particularly strong theme in my immersive experience story Becoming a different me .

Knowing how to be immersive in one world does not mean we can be immersive in another. Although it probably means that we understand that to work with some levels of complexity we need to be able to engage immersively with the challenge. The real power of immersive experience is that it is only through such experiences that we can find our way through complexity and having done it once we can draw on this selfknowledge to inform our actions when we encounter future complexity.

Being able to immerse ourselves in something also requires an appreciation of the immersive potential of the world in which that something resides.  I think it was a good lesson for me to be reminded what a learner must feel when they encounter a new learning environment.

My two stories seem to connect at a fundamental level so I offer a proposition that being able to engage at an immersive level in anything that involves social practice requires a formal or informal apprenticeship to develop the necessary capability, knowledge, wisdom and dispositions to be able to do this. As David Boud pointed out - we bring our life experience to every new experience we encounter so we bring our prior experiences of being in immersive

situations and it is this experiential self-knowledge that perhaps both prompts and guides us in our new opportunity for immersion whether it is self-created or put upon us.

 Dropped these on the page for you to have a look at norman. I was prompted by Nicks comment to have a look at the Ken Robinson vid, and then had a quick look about and came across the others. Ben