Anything Can Be Learned
I have argued for years now that anyone can learn anything, and practice makes perfect. While I believe that certain people are naturally gifted to learn a certain skills easier and faster, I don’t believe that it would be impossible for people to reach high levels of performance in any skill with the right amount of determination.
A few days ago at work we were discussing whether or not we needed another team member on our team. My company has an IS department of over 300 people, and my team is a mere 4 members. We handle all corporate communication technology, e-Learning, public affairs technology and learning technology. A pretty daunting task for our humble team.
My coworker argued that we needed another teammate with a background in graphic design, and that the he (or she) could learn the technical skills as needed along the way. He felt that artistic and creative ability was something you either had or didn’t, while programming and computer skills are learned. My coworker looked across the aisle at the anime posters in my cube and said he could never learn how to do that. I explained to him that it was a skill like any other. I look at some web applications and would have no idea how it works, yet he could easily look at it and probably break it up in his head how it was put together. Its the same thing when it comes to drawing and art! I can look at a person or object and break it up into simple shapes which are easier to draw and fill in details after.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at these two examples from my own life. Take the drawing I did in 2001 on the left. Now I thought that was pretty good, and was happy with it. Four years later and about a dozen sketch books filled with absolutely terrible drawings, I’m creating illustrations like the one on the right.
As another example, take my first cartoon sophomore year of college and compare it to my last cartoon senior year.
You won’t become a better illustrator, programmer, musician, mathematician or anything through osmosis. To be an illustrator you need to study anatomy, shapes, depth, perspective and practice, practice, practice. Look at your finished drawings and make notes about what looks right, and more importantly, what looks wrong. To be a better programmer you need to do the same thing, except with your code.
My point is, its about practice and actually trying to learn, not just going through the motions, not just doing. There is a difference.
No CommentsVideo Games & Just In Time Learning
A hot topic at work right now is Just In Time Learning. Applications and training materials that can be used by clients to learn about a topic on their own time, right before needing it. Putting an application online isn’t enough, because clients don’t want to require an internet connection to access it. The topic got me thinking about a report I did in college on video games. In it, I discussed the benefits video games have on human development, learning and briefly touched on whether or not I believe they cause violent behavior in users. (Which I don’t)
If you are not an avid gamer, or perhaps even if you are, you may not realize the amount of learning that one does while interacting with the game. Games have come a long way since pong. The mere fact that instruction manuals and game guides can be hundreds of pages long is evidence that the user will need to learn a great deal to complete the game. This begs the question, why is it so a player will pick up and continue through a challenging and often frustrating game despite the excessive amounts of learning it may take to complete? What makes this type of learning so different from the learning we experience in other areas of life?
The difference isn’t simply that games are fun, its that games give the player information when the player needs it… just in time. In James Paul Gee’s book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he uses the game System Shock 2 to describe how it guides the player through learning what tools he or she can use to solve problems within the game environment.
Lets take a look at a more recent game such as, 3d Realms’ Prey. Prey is a first person shooter (fps), in that you assume the perspective a young man and battle the forces of evil through his eyes. Your screen consists of little more than a weapon, a life bar and an ammo count. Ammo is limited, and the player must learn how to conserve ammo and defeat enemies without necessarily using guns. To teach this, Prey starts the player out with a simple plummers wrench. Guns don’t become avialable until about a half hour into the game. Had the game designers given the player a gun from the get go, the user may waste valuable ammo on easy enemies, then be near empty when a tough opponent comes along. Forcing the user to learn how to properly wield the wrench before giving them the gun directs the learners skills in a logical flow and the user gets to apply the knoweldge of the wrench immediately upon learning it.
I think Michael Allen says it best in his Guide to e-Learning, “The smaller the seperation in time between the learning episode and the application of the learning, the greater likelihood that the learner will transfer skills to that situation.”
I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best mathematician on the planet. Perhaps I would be better if the math teachers in my life had better described actual applications of the many formulas, algorithms and equations they were trying to cram into my head. Even if I did learn it in the end, the practical application of the learning didn’t occur years later. I can specifically remember sitting in trigonmotry class, argueing with the teacher that I will “never, ever, ever, use this crap. Well, I was wrong. Within the first week of my job that I was trying to calculate the geomotry of two points on screen and compare their angle to that of the mouse… I wish I could say that all those formulas came racing back, like riding a bike, unfortunately I found myself desperately searching for the proper fomulas.
The problem wasn’t that I hadn’t learned trigonomotry (I did get a B- after-all), but that the real-world application of it was never made apparent. This is where video games have it right, and traditional learning falls behind! You get the learning just-in-time.
3 CommentsWhat I Learned from Oregon Trail
As a relative rookie to the e-Learning scene (about a year and a half professionally with a small amount of research done in college), and trying to write my first post on the subject, I was struggling for a topic. Maybe this is a sign that I should keep this blog about Flash and leave it at that. Pushing forward, I thought back to my first experiences with e-Learning… Math Blasters back in 4th grade… sitting infront of a tiny 8 color computer screen, trying to click (blast) the correct number to simple math equations. It was always a treat to get to use the computer lab.
A more prominent memory of e-Learning has to be the ever popular Oregon Trail. While the game was fun, I question its actual effectiveness as a learning tool. Here is what I learned from Oregon Trail.
- Buffalo are fun to shoot , and in the true spirit of the American West, they are even more fun to shoot in excess. “You have shot 3,000 pounds of Buffalo meat. You can carry 150 pounds.”
- Dysentery is deadly. I never learned what this was from playing (it happens to be diarrhea) but just knew that poor little Jimmy often died of it.
- If you’re traveling to Oregon, be a doctor or a lawyer because you’ll be rich! Did anyone ever pick the farmer or school teacher? (It should be noted that being a doctor did not help with poor Jimmy’s dysentery)
- Never ford a river. Lets just face it… fording a river is a bad idea!
So did I learn anything useful from Oregon Trail? Perhaps the most important thing I learned was everything leading up to the actual game. The teachers didn’t use Oregon Trail as a learning tool in its self, but as a motivation tool for other learning! We were eager to complete our work and do well on tests if the reward meant extra time to play Oregon Trail. Grades were obviously important to students, but I feel they can be a negative reinforcer because students are all too often punished for having bad grades, and not rewarded enough for getting good grades. Using a computer game as a reward was a positive reinforcer to learn the objectives of the day.
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