One of the reasons the term literacy has to be revisited in the realm of ICT-research lately is because of the highly advanced digital technology introduced into children’s, adolescents’ and even adults’ life. The concept of literacy, in this borad sense, is developing exactely because these new technologies have an impact on how learning must be understood.
One field where digital technology has played a major role is in the realm of games. As children we play, and as we play we learn. As we grow, our play becomes more complicated. Now an entire generation is grown up with a totally different set of playing experiences than any before it. The playing has been brought into the digital world, a virtual reality where linearity no longer applies. To act in this virtual reality is not to read the manual, it is to push the buttons on the controller and see what happens. Through trail and error, players build a intellectual model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play. As the players refine this model, they begin to master the game world. This is a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis, and it results in a fundamentally different take on problem-solving than the linear, textbook based approach often advocated in schools. Teachers, on the other hand, without knowledge and experience in this kind of working and learning might not be able to see how this interactive curriculum can contribute to a school context. To borrow words form Will Wright, creator of the hugely popular game The Sims:
“… watching someone play a game is a different experience than actually holding the controller and playing it yourself. Very different. Imagine that all you knew about movies was gleaned through observing the audience in a theatre – but that you had never watched a film. You would conclude that movies induce lethargy and junk-food binges. That may be true, but you’re missing the big picture.”
Knowledge and competence learned in a virtual reality is not something that is considered useless; virtual is not the same as unreal. In the business world, people are hired for their skills, no matter where they learned them. An example of this is Stephen Gillett, senior director of engineering operations at Yahoo! Gillett was employed as a result of his status as “guild master” in the multiplayer game World of Warcraft. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. The master must resolve failures of management without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Gillett says: “I used to worry about not having what I needed to get a job done. Now I think of it like a quest; by being willing to improvise, I can usually find the people and resources I need to accomplish the task”.
Another example of this nonschoolastic approach to dealing with problems is the way Google is recruiting new employees: the company sets up billboard posters with riddles and equations. The ones creative enough to solve the puzzles arrive at an address to a web page that invites them to apply for a job. This way, the borders between the “real” and the “virtual” is becoming blurred. This makes it highly important for teachers to develop competence in creating learning environments where the pupils themselves are in charge of the process, where they can contribute to their own learning in ways that makes them able to draw on their existing knowledge and work forms. And above all, that makes them create new and creative work forms and strategies for problem solving that puts them in charge of the society the rest of us is developing.
Posted by skripht 