OER ACHIEVEMENTS, CHALLENGES, AND NEW OPPORTUNITIES
from standard sources of authority. They are inherently collaborative learners who want to learn by doing. This process of doing plays out across nearly all the disciplines. They build, they remix, they mod, they blog, they converse, they share hints, stories, writings—all facilitated by digital communication in both physical and virtual worlds.
It is easy to dismiss the more subtle aspects of their activities. Take games, especially massively multiplayer games. What is being learned here? First of all, notice that playing a game such as the popular World of Warcraft (WoW) requires a player to find, join, or form a guild of like-minded players. The social skills to build and maintain guilds are non-trivial, and success depends on developing this skill. Players also develop dispositions that increase their situational awareness to make sense out of what is happening around them. Most learning here happens experientially, often from their making decisions and having to live with and reflect on the consequences.
Let’s briefly consider two games that aim at getting kids more engaged in civic affairs. The first is the PeaceMaker[1] at CMU that presents a crisis between Israel and Palestine and gets teams to play both sides in terms of what Israel and Palestine should do. Depending on the move, each team gets to experience the likely reactions by the various constituents they represent, letting one experience how fast a situation can become critical. What emerges from playing this game is a skill in understanding opposing positions.
Another game of this genre is under development at the University of Southern California by Doug Thomas and Chris Swain: the Redistricting Game.[2] As Thomas describes it, “The purpose of the game is to provoke engagement around issues of political redistricting, reapportionment, and gerrymandering. The potential of this game is not in educating people about the ways in which redistricting works, though it does do that. The true potential is in what happens around the table when people play it. When players engage with the game and each other, they enter into a grounded discussion that forces them to think critically about the choices they make and well as engage in critical reflection about the processes in which they are engaged.”
The NSF is now investing in projects to explore online multiplayer, role-playing games in an immersive 3-D environments. One example is WolfQuest,[3] in which players join a wild wolf pack and venture into the wilderness. Playing alone or in teams in multiplayer missions, they join a wolf pack and hunt, fight, and socialize, all while doing their best to survive. The WolfQuest experience goes beyond the game with an active online community where you can discuss
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