XplanaZine

A recent article on scenario-based learning brought to light again how well students respond to “experiences” in the learning process.
Experiences take the material being learned — science, language, business — and provide personalized context for that material. By making learning personal, these experiences help students go beyond memorizing facts for short-term memory storage. Learning through experience leads to the internalization of knowledge and is a prelude to actual understanding.
One of the most interesting trends in experiential computing outside the education compound is gaming — in particular, multi-player online role playing games. These games provide rich environmental scenarios for experiences, they reinforce the experience with rich narrative, and they connect large groups of distant users intent on sharing this new experience.
And that is precisely the best kind of experience and the best kind of learning — user/student-driven. In fact, multi-player online gaming is driven by users in its creation and marketing as well — it is a powerful grass roots activity. The popularity is bottom up and comes not only from usage, but word-of-mouth advertising over the Web.
A key force pushing the possible “experience” envelope of online gaming is the proliferation of mobile online gaming. Tim O’Reilly, founder and president of O’Reilly and Associates Inc., and organizer of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference declared this week that online gaming is one of the four “killer apps” that has the potential to transform the technological landscape in the near future. Mobile gaming, already a lucrative industry, is predicted by Strategy Analytics to grow from $1 billion in 2003 to $7 billion in 2008. Mobile gaming provides the same connectivity as traditional online gaming but provides the added feature of extending the gaming experience to wherever the user goes.In other words, mobile gaming begins to look a lot like the Holy Grail of learning — it provides a scenario for the practical use and internalization of knowledge, and it allows students/users to extend the scenario way beyond the classroom, out into their personal lives and spaces.

We have already begun to suspect that games may possess more effective models for teaching than our traditional classrooms. The question that remains is how can mainstream education take advantage of the lessons and technology pioneered by the gaming industry? How can we incorporate online experiential gaming/learning into our curriculum?
Well, the good news is that the news isn’t all bad. First, the educational community has available to it all of the same technology that drives the online gaming market. There is no secret guild that prohibits teachers and students from acquiring the blueprints or specific technology necessary for creating extended and effective experiences for student learning. It is also important to point out that experiential and mobile gaming platforms can be created in many ways — most of them much less expensive than the popular commercial products.
Second, it’s a fact that educators have been about the business of scenario and experience-based learning much longer than any other group. For centuries, teachers have been asking their students to “pretend” that they are in a given situation or place in order to make a concept clear and practical. This means that teachers already possess a rich foundation for creating the narratives necessary for online experiential learning.
Third, like the gaming industry, education is a strong grass-roots community. Teachers, and parents, and students constantly form small communities that grow into larger ones for the purpose of influencing opinion and changing learning environments. This grass-roots foundation is very similar to that of the gaming industry and would be effective at creating and spreading the value of online experiential learning scenarios.
Finally, education can enter into online experiential learning successfully because it has no lack of partners. One of the perceived barriers to such innovations is the lack of money. The reality is that, if the education community can imagine and articulate the vision, there are many who will build it for them. Publishers, students, and teachers alike have the ability and the resources necessary to make such learning a reality.
Online experiential learning has been defined and pioneered by the gaming industry. We know that it is one of the most effective teaching environments available. We know that if we build them, students will use them. So, the only thing left to do is to get to work. Would someone please hand me a paint brush?