What is the Value of Our (Informal) Learning?
I am supposed to be writing about the evaluation or assessment of informal learning or its impact on learners, but instead I'm just saddened. I opened up the course text to read the final chapter and found this intro:
When we think about what a new educational environment might look like in the twenty-first century, we can imagine a number of things. Imagine an environment that is constantly changing. Imagine an environment where the participants are building, creating, and participating in a massive network of dozens of databases, hundreds of wiki and websites, and thousands of message forums, literally creating a large-scale knowledge economy. Imagine an environment where participants are constantly measuring and evaluating their own performance, even if that requires them to build new tools to do it. Imagine an environment where user interface dashboards are individually and personally constructed by users to help them make sense of the world and their own performance in it. Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews not to determine rewards but to continually enhance performance. Imagine an environment where learning happens on a continuous basis because the participants are internally motivated to find, share, and filter new information on a near-constant basis.
Finding an environment like that sounds difficult, but it isn't. It already exists, and in one of the most unlikely places: a new generation of games. Massively multiplayer online games--such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online, Star War Galaxies, and Lord of the Rings Online, to name a few...
I do not argue with this postulation, that such a dynamic learning world exists in mmos, but it breaks my heart.
Why can't we create the same collectives, the same camaraderie, the same self-initiated research and skill development around things that matter?
The text says educators dismiss games as frivolous or time-wasting, but I ask, how are they making the world a better place? It sounds like a beauty pageant answer, asking for everyone to be the change (I was given the Chinese name 世宁 "World Peace"...), but have we looked beyond our flashing computer screens to see the needs across the street and around the globe? My generation is investing hours upon hours to join together in guilds and hone our digital skills to advance through raids, only to pick up an item dropped by a monster that will help us with the next challenge. What if we came together to build houses for Habitat for Humanity? What if we volunteered at a soup kitchen, read books to kids at inner-city libraries, coached a youth sports team, built community gardens, or cared for orphans and widows? There is so much crying out for attention, yearning for help, desperate for someone to bring hope, and yet we devote our time and energy into these mmos. I am sad to hear that the model for informal learning is a world that I find increasingly offensive.
To learn is not noble. To be changed by learning and to be the change through learning, that is worth pursuing.
Homelessness, world hunger, immunizations, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, genocide, endangered species, global warming--my heart aches that the same passion for learning would be channeled into the real world problems (collective problems that they are, Thomas and Brown, Chapter 5) that assault humankind. Am I tainted in my perspective because I am not a gamer? Two different times today with two different people, I have lamented that my peers that are too busy playing life on a screen to play life in real life. To walk the Great Wall, to dive with the fish of the Philippines, to feed the poor, hug the brokenhearted, and build into the soul and spirit of their fellow humans.
Above all these thoughts, I hear Solomon's words: vanity, vanity, all is vanity. For if I do not love, I am nothing.
