Session 2, Day 2
Session 2 Day 2
MMOGs & Learning
The Play of Imagination_— Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown
Rethinking Online Communities of Practice_— Constance Steinkuehler
Lisa Galarneau, Respondent
Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown
The Play of Imagination
How is it that learning happens in MMOS?
Central Themes
- Re-imagining Dewey
- Distinction between “learning about” and “leaning to be”
- Imagination as transfer
o Their point of transfer is not a piece of knowledge, but the imagination
- Conceptual blendings as innovation
Re-imagining Dewey
- Education in transition
- Need to “break frames” for innovation
- Focus on practice (communities and networks of practice)
o Process by which members create and share meaning
ß And how people create that in to practice
o Means by which members learn to read others and form highly specialized ways of communication
ß Whay you learn is not only about the world, but how to read yourself and other’s actions within it
- Follow “Play of Imagination” and “Play as medium of realization”
o A way to make the things that are happening in your mind, in the virtual and put them in to practice
- Limits of dewey
o Extremely resource intensive
ß This is mitigated by virtual worlds
ß The technology in the worlds is doing a lot for us
Learning to Be
- productive inquiry
o the idea that you end up finding what you need to do what you want to do
- it’s the practices by which people both negotiate the world nad make meaning in it
- for example, a quest. This is also a process of enculturation
o noobie quests become tools to become enculturated in the world
o these teach you not just about the world, but how to be a player in the world
Explicit and tacit knowledge
- “Group forming at MO”
o Explicitly, this is telling you that people want to forma group at a mining outpost
- Explicit information
Also, what else it tells you
- who is forming the group, for what purpose
- how long it will take, character advancement
- how large the group will be
- and you know all of this just by that single LFG
o all of this comes from experience, and is often not articulated in the minds of the player
o this is not learning about, this is in the realm of learning to be
How does it transfer?
- play of imagination
- Notions of Colatteral Learning (Jugedde?)
- Classic example, teaching science in a developing nation
o They also know at the same time is that the rainbow is also the python crossing the rifver
o These young people are very good at using the correct interpretation in appropriate times
o And they hold both conflicting interpretations iin their head at the same time
o So, at some level i’m a player and an avatar
ß If you need a sword, you can’t say because you’re a prof at USC, you have to choose your relationship to the situation
So what gets transferred is disposition. Two things happen, points of divergence, where imagination can happen, and points of convergence. These happen by triggers where both are required to be there, and this facilitates
Learning by analogy – game knowledge = rl knowledge
Learning by metaphor – we put the infor in totally different domains
The question is not one of fidelity between virtual and physical world
Mark Turner’s concept of consptual blending
- the alignment of non-conflicting frames
o a talking donkey (shreck)
o We know donkeys don’t talk, and yet we don’t have a problem with it
ß The frames don’t conflice in any maeaningful way
Provides ability to deal in “Vivid Specifics
Only ruequres conformity to it’s own logic (e.g. avatar in WoW)
As I player I can both be 100% me and my player
I am a player playing a characer is the sense of Rping that occurs, it allows you to have both identities
AFK breaks the boundry between game and RL, as does Bio break
Virtual worlds as blended spaces
- Conceptual blending as imaginativethinking
- Mmogs as key tool for integrating metaphor and reflection in to new systems of education
- MMOGs as “blended spaces” which are able to account for their own blends, they change and develop over time
People often don’t know what they know, or they don’t think of their knowledge as knowledge, and it takes some pushing to get them to reflect
What does this do for ecuation
- MMOGs provide some clues for future pedagogical practice
- Ability to account for flexibility and flux
- Practical domains fo ruse
o Riche ways of identifying with the Other
o Ability to teach via experience (eg Ethics and Modern Prometheus)
o Quest Atlantis as a “blended space” between games and school, it allows them to flip back and forth between game and school, school and RL, virtual and real
Constance Steinkuehler
Rethinking Online Communities of Practice
Themes and issues coming up this year
- the new third place
o cheers
o the new place to go for informal sociability
o the function it serves is as building social capital
ß bonding – the social capital you get from your spouse or best friend or mom, the ones you lean on heavily, relationships of support
ß they will be there for you no matter what
ß bridging - the people who expose you to diversity,
• this notion is both terribly hard to find and desperately important
- Intelectual practices are far far bigger
o Collaborative rpoblem solving, cross functioning teams
ß Core group takes project fom planning to follow-up
ß Dindivicuals from different functional areas
ß Redundancy / overlap
ß Semi-perminant
o Scientific reasoning
ß How are people developing and expcting different mind-frams
- Constellation of literacy practices
o Fan fiction
o Creating their own narratives
o There’s a disposition where in writing a story as a way to hit on a girl.
ß This is NOT NORMAL HS behavior
ß This writing isn’t seen as writing, it’s seen as a continuation of playing the game
o But what about quality?
ß When you compare it to things like National Reading Standards, they exceed them
- How do we connect this up to schools?
- How does WoW payoff in the classroom?
o Here’s the irony
o Classrooms are supposed to transfer to the real world, not have the world transfer to the classroom
- Games as push technology
o Not just hardware, but social norms and practices
ß We like that you can write well
ß Or build a mathematical argument and discuss it with people
- What are the gateway/ barriers to getting in to gaming?
- If it’s going to be a gateway drug, what does it get people hooked on;
o IT?
o Writing?
o Physics?
- Colonialization
o Sometimes using the text of kids just makes them feel colonized
ß The Christian Rock problem
ß Gaming is about transgression, in many ways
• So how do you make it be “valuable” while not robbing it of what makes it fun in the first place?
Social Learning, MMOS and Transfer in Informal Learning
Play is a way of building competency in the world nad confidence in our selves, content is often irrelevant
Dimitri Williams - people develop a sense that they can impact the world and facilitate change through games
There’s an unwitting grassroots movment whre people are developeing these competencies, but that we aren’t acknowledging.
Lisa Galarneau, Respondent
No Child Left Behind is pushing out the potential for Play, what is a playful cirriculum? It’s a pedagogical approach, play of imagination (not just art good, math bad). How can you have imagination be the bridging action?
Triggers, density of triggers as the marker of a good learning environment
- AHA moments
- Transformative moments
- Treating organization as a guild = bad, IMAGINING an organization as a guild = good.
You can’t build triggers in…oh really?
Social context, etc, is usually the thing that helps spark the realization that RL and GL have something to do with eachother
Reflexivity, learning happens not throught the experience, but in the AHA moment when you look back and see how something is related, the “reverse reflecion”
What is the worth of social capital online?
Thinking about interface tools, is this why people are able to do this? Is it really just giving us a better social UI?
What is the role of the instructor in WoW? There is no one master, in one and the same moment, two people can tech eachother things, and learn what they know whle teaching it.