John Seely Brown: Learning through Virtual Worlds

John Seely Brown

• Social learning - current, or for the future? The best market right now is for homeschool. People are desperate for tools for Home school. People are fed up with the things universities AREN'T doing. Do ask, "How do I help a student?" and to actually mean it is rare among universities.
• We're moving towards a more social world right now
• Global education- some homeschoolers go travel the world every year. You come back a changed person.
• Changes for Institutions today- after-school programs, e-portfolios, undergraduate education: more traveling students/faculty

World of Warcraft

• Virtual spaces
• Social spaces (facebook)
• joint collective agency- Building something together (not just talking together, like in facebook), doing joint work. A shared practice with a tacit knowledge component to it

MMOGs develop long-term relationships through networks and communities of practice, which develop over long periods of time.

"To see the value of games don't just look at the core of the game but pay close attention to the 'social life' on the edge of the game...a knowledge economy. "

You have to build guilds, bring groups of people from guild together to build raid teams. So much of this game is changing so fast that you have to change the structures to facilitate how you learn.

Montra: "If I ain't learnin', it's not fun."

Blizzard, designer of world of warcraft.

10,000 new entries made in one night- new ideas, new videos, new ways to play certain things, new ways to manipulate spells, etc.

Layering of Information Management

• Intra-guild communication
• Guild-to-Guild communication
• Dissemination and "bragging rights"

Dashboards - What are the tools kids create for themselves in order to accelerate their ability to learn?

• 360 Review- Leaders of the raid get evaluated exactly like everybody else and rendered immediately public to everybody else.
• Gamers want to be measured- they want to know that they are learning. They want to be in charge of crafting how they are measured.
• Game designers think it's all because of graphics, when the kids don't even notice the graphics; they play for the personally-constructed dashboards!
• EXPONENTIAL LEARNING

Networks of imagination - a suspended belief that they are ONE! When in joint activity/shared practice, feel more unified. *Huh... is this good or bad?

Networks of Practice + Communities of Interest --> ACTION = Networked Imagination.

Gamer "Dispositional stance"- You have to discover the resources you need before you can do the things you need to do. *Isn't that what Heavenly Father lets us do? He lets us find those things. They often assume full leadership, even finding the resources you need.

Google- Made that the corporate stance- take 20% of time to work on your own projects that could belong to Google. If you can convince other people to join your effort (they can try you out for a little bit), then it is the responsibility of your boss to facilitate the poacher. This has directed Google to being a talent-driven company.

Currently researching how students start to craft their own outcomes. "How do I let students craft the tools they want to play the game?"

What's the key to doing cooler stuff? "Obsessable"- ability to get obsessed with it.