MMOL

I saw this on a post in my RSS reader this morning and thought that it’s something that may be easier to bring into reality than we think.

Instead of holding one-to-many classes via Webex, the company is building a new product from the ground up. Founder Farbood Nivi calls it MMOL, for Massive Multiplayer Online Learning (a play on the term MMOG). He says studies show that people learn best from each other, not in a teacher-students situation. He, along with technical co-founder Michael Buffington (Price.com, MeasureMap, Stikkit), are going to try to prove this works. Beyond that, they aren’t divulging any details at all.

MMORPGs are basically D&D games that have only a basic framework for an adventure as they discover their virtual world. So this MMOL would be the same thing – a world (real, imagined or “shared” nee virtual), a problem to solve and a motivation to get things done. So basically, I don’t know if Nivi is really doing anything ground breaking here, other than creating a world where “learning” can happen. Second Life is already a world that this can be done, but because people are well trained to accept direction from a teacher as the only way to learn, but if we think about learning more like research – where there isn’t much more than a leader and a direction to move. Learning should be something like this.

If I were to cook up something like this, I would create a world that would bring users around a “mcguffin/weiner” (Hitchcock/Disney respectively), allow them to present resources to each other and work along a series of checkpoints that the mcguffin placer defines. In many ways, it feels to me something much like the Montessori method.