Gaming through life

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.

The question of land and fish

The other day I noticed a postcard in my office that read: “Land is a mystery to fish. By the time fish finds out about land, it’s too late”. The card was a business promotion, I don’t know for what, but still the quote caught my mind. I found the thought intriguing: is there something around us that we are not aware of, something that is crucial to us, but that we have not taken notice of?

I think there is, on several levels. I’m not going to investigate all of them here, of course, but concentrate on a cultural aspect. Some might be familiar with the concept of “tacit knowledge”, but even if not, all of us have made use of the knowledge itself. In every culture it is a tacit dimension, a dimension we are introduced to as children (if we are natives in that particular culture). Because of this knowledge, you know when you are greeted by another person; you recognise what a greeting looks like. Without this knowledge, all the members of a culture would have to explain every single action, and in practise that would be impossible to handle. This becomes particularly evident when we travel; arriving at an unfamiliar place we might observe strange activities and actions that the natives to not even seem to think about. We learn how to act and function in a culture not because (at least not exclusively because) we have been thought explicitly how to do things, but because of our very existence in that culture. We learn it by way of doing it. The things we cannot articulate is (of course) impossible to talk about; it has to be shown implicitly. This is also why we don’t question our practises; we might not even be aware of them ourselves. We have to get a person from another culture to ask us: “Why are you doing this?” This is actually quite interesting; to get someone to fundamentally challenge our ways of acting can be very rewarding.

This is one of the places where the much hyped term “literacy”¹ comes in. To be literate in our world it is not sufficient to be able to read and write mere text, with the term “literacy” we are concerned with being able to “read” and “write” an environment, to “unconsciously see” what is going on. And as our world has become fundamentally artificial, in order to understand what is going on we have to be able to make use and see the relevance of the different technological tools offered to us, and know how it is put to work in subjects that concern us. Technology has become one of the main building blocks of our society. And now (as an educator and interested in schooling) to the point: if we as a society agree that knowledge about technology is important in order to function in this society, why do we not let our pupils and students get more acquainted with it? Unlike fish when it comes in contact with land, we become more apt to the task, better prepared and more experienced when we meet new things in organised environments. Getting experienced with different sides of our culture is not lethal to us; not getting experienced with it might be (at least socially).

I came across jet another quote illustrating this: ”Figuratively speaking, it is as difficult for those who have become fully literate within a world dominated by print to see how their own literacy has been shaped – indeed limited – by the technology used to produce and disseminate printed materials as it is for a fish to think about the water in which it swims” (taken from Reinking ed. 1998).

Perhaps we have difficulties identifying what is most important in our society, depriving the next generation a head start managing it?

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Notes:

¹ This is a concept I will return to again on this blog, and hopefully in a more elaborate form.