A piece from the Games, Learning, and Society Conference

http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/07/gls—beyond-ga.html

Basically another piece that support, even if only circumstantially, the Web 2.0 learning paradigm.  While conventional wisdom suggested that a tool is a tool Web 1.0 style, prevalent evidence seems to suggest that good tool promotes learning Web 2.0 style.  The tool itself is not the learning tool.  Instead, it merely offer either the medium to learn or the opportunity to collaborate.  Thus promoting learning.

My personal experience with online learning and online gaming supports these observations but with a very big caveat.  Web 2.0 style learning is very dependent on participation.  Meaningful participation online carries basically the same barriers as offline: stronger personalities overwhelms weaker personalities, group think tends to wash out original thinking, and shy people/students often refrain from participation due to fear (insert anything you can think of here, they are all valid).

In addition, the learning opportunities based on these mechanisms carry a certain air of elitism.  There is a very strong tendency for only those who are verse on the subject matter or methodology to participate.  For lack a better way to explain this, I’ll use an example.  Consider the open source community where people from all walks of live (supposedly) collaborate on software development.  I said supposely because the fact is that online collaboration (software in that case) is not as open an affair as it sounds.  Originators tend to only want “people who really know what they are doing” to participate.  This creates a high barrier of entry.  The net effect is many of these so called open source software development projects are elitist projects.

The same effect can be observed in most tool-based “learning opportunities”.  The only real way to combat this is explicitly welcome new comers who are merely interested, even if they don’t have strong background knowledge.  The only real way to ensure true open participation is to level everyone as equals.  Of course, the down side is that truly knowledgeable people might not want to “babysit” less knowledgeable people, making the learning superficial.

At some level, participatory-based learning really only works when the participants are on equal footing with more or less the same knowledge level.