"Understanding the Grey Area Between Learning and Playing."
Digital Media 101 - BNMI - November 20 & 21 2006
Once again, I had the pleasurable opportunity to present with my friend and colleague Michael Magee on the topic of gaming and learning. Mike is a wonderfully knowledgeable person who has a laid back manner when presenting. In contrast, I tend to be the more excitable and try to stir things up. As a result, the two of us play off of each other's energy. My banter tends to be more phenomenon based and Mike extends my examples with academic relations. Or Mike will talk about a reference from his research and I extend it with an example of it from an experience. Between the two of us, we engage the audience, challenge them and provide them with a field of reference to follow up on.
I appreciated a blog article written by someone attending our presentation comparing our piece to Steve Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You." I love it! The whole point of this experiential stuff is to give people a point of reference to talk about. From there we can internalize our understanding, rehearse/practice the idea until it reaches the level of automaticity, and we achieve mastery.
My understanding of Constructivist Educational Theory is that we learn by playing at something while aware that we are playing at it. The scaffolding that supports us while we learn continually reminds us of this. Once we have mastered the thing, we lose the scaffolds, and actually play. Vygotsky's point that language is key to our learning means if we are really going to learn something, then we not only need to talk about it, but we must want to talk about it. Watch a child play. Ask yourself, are they carrying on an inner story as they play? Is this not the "self-talk" that Vygotsky talks about?
