New Innovate Online – MMORPGs or MMOGs as they are called now it seems.

Michael Young, P. G. Schrader, and Dongping Zheng have an article in the new Innovate that uses ecological psychology to explain how these massive online games can be used for learning. This idea (grossly and perhaps erroneously simplified) suggests that experience is the greatest teacher and most learning occurs in-situ. I believe this to be the case as when I look around at the various professionals that I know they really didn’t do as well in the traditional classroom, but then they got into the environment of their chosen field and there they blossomed. When an individual is acting in any given environment, they make choices based on emergent factors in that environment and these goals are achieved based on what the individual has already done and how well the learner can adapt the “boundary constraints” of their own learning. Basically they can push themselves to learn or do things better as they they go along.

This “pushing” is the same in a game environment as it is in a profession (I would think) and this is the key element, the active engagement in the content is what makes the environment productive.