Emerging Technologies Consulting

Two business professors write this morning in Inside Higher Ed about attending the Game Developers Conference.  They went with the idea of learning something new and seeing what game development could teach them about higher education.  They came away with several lessons, one of which had to do with the way games create possibility spaces, spaces where new thinking can happen, where players have some control the path they take.  I wrote about this on my class blog, as something we were trying to do in the class:

One of the things they suggest is that higher ed can and should create possibility spaces for students and move away from older curriculum, changing with the needs of their students (as gaming companies do).  It occurred to me that that’s what we’ve tried to do in this class–the whole class is really envisioned as a possibility space.  We’re not always successful, perhaps, but it’s also up to each student to create possibility spaces for themselves, using the content and discussions from this course and others to open up new ideas and opportunities.

They describe the world of gaming as follows and contemplate the possibility (a possibility space for higher ed itself!) of higher ed incorporating some of the values of game design:

The world of game design is about play, experiencing and creating empathy, collaboration, and future thinking. It emphasizes purpose and value, and recognizes the constant need to adapt and embrace new technology. Imagine the world today if we replaced the words “game design” in the first sentence of this paragraph with the words “higher education.” We definitely think the time has come to embrace the reality of virtual worlds!

A few years ago, I read, along with my colleagues, in a book club at work, James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. People focused on the content of games like Grand Theft Auto instead of the real point of the book, using games as a metaphor for learning.  Gee asks, “Why are games so engaging and how can we make learning equally engaging?”  His conclusion is similar to the authors of the IHE article, learning needs to be fun, collaborative, and more open ended.  I find this happens with a lot of technological tools used for education.  People get hung up on some (not even all) of the bad content–the poorly written blog, the mistakes in Wikipedia–and don’t think about the possibilities these tools or these ways of working offer.  Instead of thinking of the online spaces as possibility spaces, they think of them as dangerous places to visit at your own risk.  We need to get away from this idea that all online things are bad or good and think in more nuanced ways.  Possibility allows for that nuanced thinking.  Anything is possible, good or bad.  It’s all in what you do with the opportunity you’re given.