'accidental' and 'incidental' learning: why it is important in a game
How can we link accidental learning to learning outcomes (not a test, right?)
I added this reading to my weekly report because I came across it while browsing the Internet, and found it very useful for my dissertation. The article is in the format of a blog entry; however it is very professional and references other articles which might be useful to me. I plan to read these for next week’s class and report.
The author discusses MMOGs and how learning occurs in games. He calls it ‘accidental learning’ or ‘incidental learning’ because of the way that learning happens in games. Games yield creative thinking from presenting the gamer with problems that need to be overcome, often involving the dynamic allocation of resources. The author quotes an article in Wired magazine, entitled “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!”:
Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.
Other articles I have read cite the value of trial and error while learning in everyday life. Traditional learning penalizes failure, while it can be a valuable learning experience (learning from one’s mistakes). The author continues to discuss the value of MMOGs:
Educational institutions are becoming progressively marginalized as it becomes apparent that learning is a life-long undertaking and that the success of all of our institutions hinges on the ability to support learning activity. …the most valuable learning is certainly not at the level of compartmentalized skills; it is much more about developing and evolving appropriate dispositions and the ability to integrate in new ways, as suggested by the notion of conceptual blending.
The irony, and the tragedy, is that MMOGs may promote this kind of learning far better than our educational institutions. These institutions may be so broken that it may be much more productive to design and deploy new institutional frameworks and practices to foster this different form of learning rather than trying to implant it into existing institutions.
First, the author mentions above the value of conceptual bleeding- which is discussed in depth in one of the articles he mentions. Briefly, it has to do with the ability of game players to extract knowledge from the virtual world presented in the game to the world they are live in. This has to do with their ability to generalize knowledge across domains, which relates to the type of instruction supported in a game. While traditional learning supports ‘compartmentalization’ and standardized tests, gaming supports a different style of learning: something experienced in a virtual environment, often accidentally, where cognitive processes on the part of the gamer might resemble those in the real world with a similar task.
- accidental (incidental) learning: that which occurs in games- learning as a byproduct of playing
see paper (circled) and quotes above