Gadgets, games and gizmos for learning (part 1)

Karl Kapp, like Mark Prensky, has faith in the power of video games to transform education. He sees the rapture of his children when they immerse themselves in a game and he wants to tap into the power when building learning tools. He's also willing to argue that gameplay contributes to the rewiring of the next generations learning circuitry.

Although I firmly believe that organizations can learn from the success of video games, I don't agree with Kapp that we need to recast eLearning because gamers have radically different learning style. Like Ruth Clark, I think we should be paying attention to the principles of multimedia design when creating designing eLearning rather than adapt to the learner's apparent inclinations. I also think we should keep in mind the importance theories of "play" and "flow" when creating learning.

Even though as a non-gamer, I may not see video games as significant as Kapp, I appreciate his passion and his willingness to really think about how discussions of gaming can improve education.

Kapp begins his discussion by exploring frame games and simulations. He uses Gagne's knowledge hierarchy to categorize learning objectives and he offers suggestions for appropriate games. For example, he suggests using a word search to teach declarative knowledge and a more complex game like Jeopardy for concepts and rules. Higher-order knowledge requires the greater complexity provided by simulations. As was the case with frame games, he offers a neat, useful categorization of simulation types.

In the fourth chapter, Kapp shifts his focus to the gadgets that gamers (and I would even venture to say a large percentage of men of all ages) adore such as ipods and cell phones. He smartly recognizes how useful such tools can be for sharing those chunks of knowledge that people want to be able to access at their fingertips.

Continuing to use gamers' preferred learning techniques as his guide, Kapp discusses the value of cheat codes, search engines and Web 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs. Although I think gamers' learning preferences belong to a much wider audience, Kapp drives home an important point for those of us in Corporate Learning and Development: Provide people with the right tools so that they can access the just the right information(nothing more) at just the right time (when they need to use it).

Chapter 8 contains one of my favorite slogans of the book: Don't educate, automate. Make a system as foolproof as possible using technology and you won't have to invest millions in technology to fix problems and/or train people. Written before Wii took off, he devotes part of the chapter to the improvement of the human-computer interface for learning. I was especially interested in the guidelines he sets forth for creating the illusion of conversation between human and machine: 1) Maintain pacing, 2) Create illusion of awareness and 3) Maintain illusion of awareness.