Open Content and Open Learning

I've been listening to a podcast about the new economics of gaming on my walk to work over the last two days. It is powerful stuff. I've found myself two or three times, stopped, listening, trying to absorb it all. The Economics of Open Content Symposium was hosted at MIT at the end of January and much of the content has been posted online. 

The lecture I've been listening to is on the Economics of Gaming by Henry Jenkins and  David Edery. I've been amazed how much this lecture has driven me to further push my ideas of knowledge building and the creation of new knowledge. Jenkins and Edery speak about studies examining how and why people play MMOG's (Massive Multi - Player Online Games). If you're not familiar with these games, you need to be. These games pull thousands of players together into a single virtual space. Huge potential for explorations of social interaction, but also to be used as an educational platform. Imagine running a virtual school in The Sims or Second Life or allowing kids to produce content in The Movies or some other virtual world such as SimCity. Importantly, many of these games remain popular mainly because of user generated content. These games ship with tools allowing the people who purchase them to create their own virtual worlds, their own stuff. The game makers have not locked them down, but instead, many of them take the exact opposite tact, depending on the community that grows around the game to create new content to keep the games interesting and demanding. This will often drive games into spaces where the original designers never intended.

What struck me most powerfully in this podcast was the comparisons that can very easily be made between what happens in these games and what needs to be happening in classrooms. Jenkins and Edery talk about the ecology of the games and how the complex interactions between different groups of people in the community sustains the activity of each other. They discuss how in these ecological and dynamic spaces, a balance needs to be struck allowing all people to flourish without any one taking over. The user base has to be enfranchised so that they create content that is for the good of all of the people involved.

This sounds a great deal like the discussions we've had about the power of networks in classrooms. We want to be there; the gamers already are. Game designers get their users so engaged with their content that the users feel a stake in the success of the outcome. We have trouble getting kids to do their homework. 

In this podcast, the speakers also discuss how games (and knowledge) are based on either one of two models. The first is prohibitionist, where the intellectual property (or knowledge, or content) is locked down because the creators are afraid that new users will depreciate the value of the content through using it. The other model of knowledge is collaborative and based upon the idea that through empowering the audience and user community, the knowledge will grow through the creation of new relationships and interactions, appreciating the value of the intellectual property. It is no secret which model of knowledge is often emphasized in classrooms. When information was a scarce resource, it needed to be protected and kept alive. Now it needs to be fanned and farmed. It can never be captured, absorbed, nor fully surrounded. It is only through the power of collaborative networks of learners will we ever get close to understanding some of what is out there. As it is used, considered, and revised, knowledge grows is power and in scope. It can never be consumed through use. A book read once or five times is never used up, it increases in value through further use. But most often, schools operate on the idea of information scarcity instead of a much more organic model which understands information in our society for the behemoth it truly is.

Interestingly, these two men also state that through interviews with the CEO's, designers, and users of video games, they have found that for a game to be very successful, the secret is often not to make the game better, but instead, to make the community which surrounds the game better. Empower them. Give them responsibility and the power to personalize their experience. A community needs to be nurtured and grown. It cannot be created, it must create itself over time. It can be fed and helped along, but for a true community to emerge takes time, understanding, and knowledge of models of growth.

More time spent considering the artificiality of what we do.

 

 

 

technorati tags: networks, learning, knowledge

Comments

[Tom Hoffman]

Here's what we need: an economic model for writing, distributing, and implementing games and simulations in classrooms. Everyone is talking about gaming, and I think the benefits are obvious and have been obvious since kids were playing Oregon Trail All we need to do is figure out the economic model, and nobody wants to do it, because the numbers don't add up to do this any way other than open source from soup to nuts, and people aren't ready for it. So everyone is going to go on talking and nothing will happen.