Today’s email contained my regular dose of news from Futurelab, an excellent UK group that is worth checking out around education and technology. As I poked around, I found a link to a very interesting article on the Blog of John Seely Brown, entitled “Why Virtual Worlds Can Matter“. Definately worth a read for those interested in the Parallel World. An excerpt to wet your appetite:
To that end, we believe that these games are, at base, learning environments. The kind of learning, as we explore throughout this paper is radically different from what we traditionally think of as the accumulation of facts or acquisition of knowledge. Virtual worlds require us to think about knowing, rather than knowledge, what Cook and Brown have called “knowledge in action.” The problems players face inside virtual worlds, the things that require players to put knowledge into action, are not simply game design problems. While games like World of Warcraft do present real challenges that need to be solved, much like puzzles, the real challenge that these games present is the problem of collective action and knowledge in action. They involve the experience of acting together to overcome obstacles, managing skills, talents and relationships and they create contexts in which social awareness, reflection and joint coordinated action become an essential part of the game experience.