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” Kids start out learning by playing, and then we start teaching them—and they stop learning.” Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan
I finally got around to reading JC Herz’s Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn from Multiplayer Online Worlds. (Interesting how you feel like you have to apologize for talking about an article that’s already two years old.) Herz writes:
“In terms of the speed and volume of learning—the rate at which information is assimilated into knowledge and knowledge is synthesized into new forms—the networked ecosystem of online gaming is vastly more multidimensional than the 19th-century paradigm of classroom instruction. This is primarily because games fully leverage technology to facilitate ‘edge’ activities—the interaction that happens through and around games as players critique, rebuild, and add onto them, teaching each other in the process. Players learn through active engagement not only with the software but with each other.
“In universities, it is widely accepted that much learning occurs outside the classroom. But universities have no coherent strategy for leveraging that edge activity online. There are online syllabi and course catalogs, threaded discussions that graft section discussions onto threaded message boards, and e-mail between students (and sometimes even between students and teachers). But these activities are not integrated in a constructive way; they don’t comprise the kind of socially contextualized learning to which young people weaned on PlayStations are increasingly accustomed.”
And then she adds, provocatively,
“It’s not a question of whether such learning will happen, since the current generation of students is notoriously good at ‘getting around’ institutions that fail to address their needs. The question is whether the university will assume leadership in the innovation process, or whether the standard applications and conventions will be rigged together and disseminated by undergraduates, possibly not reflecting the institution’s pedagogical agenda. Perhaps it would be better if students evolve their own best practices in cyberspace, with no regard to disciplinary boundaries or departmental turf, in the cool shade of institutional ignorance. There is, in fact, a good case to be made for this scenario.”Herz was also a contributor to the National Research Council’s imminently readable Beyond Productivity: Information, Technology, Innovation, and Creativity, which is still only a year old.
Way back in 1998, SunSITE brought together campus content creators, technologists and faculty to discuss the feasibility of repurposing instructional materials and resources for the K-12 market, using interactive online games as a model, and we spent several meetings brainstorming with refugees from Cyberflix, a Knoxville-based company that achieved some success in game development before eventually disaggregating. Several ideas were kicked around, such as Clicking Appalachia, which would explore 300 years of change from the vantage point of a local East Tennessee community; We Did It First, an exploration of Native American technology, utilizing artifacts and images from UT’s McClung Museum; and Ecodynamics, a game in which students try to manage the resources of a rain forest while increasing the well-being of the region's indigenous peoples. The meetings were exciting enough, but nothing came from all that combined energy. While I would like to think that we were simply ahead of our time, there was then and remains still a lack of time and incentive that would allow faculty and staff to pursue such work. (Heavy sigh.)
Herz’s article is included in a bibliography compiled by EDUCAUSE’s National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, which has chosen Games, Simulations, and Learning as one of its key themes for 2004. (Diana Oblinger, VP for EDUCAUSE, prepared a somewhat broader bibliography for her presentation at NWACC’s conference Digital Expectations: New Tools, New Rules in June.) While all of the material listed in the bibliography is worth reading, the most comprehensive in my opinion was Wendy Rickard’s and Oblinger’s Unlocking the Potential of Gaming Technology (from September 2003, and the source of the opening quote) and Oblinger’s The Next Generation of Educational Engagement, published in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education just this past May. In the JIME article Oblinger writes: “Games inspire players to seek out data and information in order to be successful rather than starting with facts and figures and then figuring out how they may be relevant.”
Posted by Chris Hodge at July 20, 2004 02:40 PM | Links to this post