Learning and the Role of Reality
As I thought about game based learning and 70:20:10, I came to see that one escapes from reality and one dives deeply into it. Both have very important roles to play in learning. Game based learning escapes from the constraints and consequences of reality, allowing the learner to fail in a safe environment, explore non-traditional options, practice memory retrieval, and make multiple connections to concepts. If a learner has the opportunity to succeed in a game or simulation, they build confidence which can be translated into proficiency in a real life setting. The ‘real-life’ learning opportunities as presented in 70:20:10 bring the gift of lived experience and the chance to learn from doing, feedback, and mistakes. The consequences are real and therefore provide motivation to improve and get the skills or job tasks right. There is also a very good opportunity to build on skills, starting from easier to more complex tasks, with the support of a more experienced team. On the job learning is a type of social learning, and the immersive experience ‘teaches’ the new employee all kinds of intangible things about the culture, expectations, communication styles, leadership styles, and personalities within the environment. These are integral to the workplace fabric and could never be taught in a classroom setting.
Game based learning on on-the-job learning present opportunities for retrieval practice (digging into your brain for information) and consolidation (making meaning out of information and experience by putting it into context of past experience). Both of these practices help lock new experiences and information into long-term memory. Creating long-term memories make it possible to create mental models that are important for being able to make inferences and predictions about how something is likely to happen. Check out ‘Making it Stick’ for a more in depth look at the science of learning. I am fascinated by the potential for pairing the ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ experiences for learning skills and material, but also taking it to the next level of creating those mental models that help us make more informed choices.
Humans have come a long, long way in our evolution. The sheer amount of things that we have learned to do is astounding. From inventing tools to inventing concepts like money, we have shown an incredible capacity to remember and recombine expereinces. I recently read ‘Sapiens’ and found myself thinking a lot about the role of learning and what is next for human kind in terms of learning and imagination. We quickly need to adjust our mental models if we want to find solutions for living in the face of climate change, for example.
Will Wright looks to the future and how games can help create new mental models in the face of some really big, real, global problems. Now that humans have more awareness of how we learn, hopefully we can use this awareness to combine our lived experience (like 70:20:10) and imaginations (game play) in a way that will create new, proactive mental models, not just reactive ones.
Learning at Work 