Learning Journey - Part 1

This month, I have read so many articles for school, on my own, and for reflections such as this, and throughout these readings I have discovered so much about gaming and myself as a gamer. As an avid video gamer, I have always embraced new forms of gameplay and immersed myself in virtual worlds for my own enjoyment. What I failed to be cognizant of before is that not only was I having fun while gaming, I was also learning. Learning the video game? Obviously. Learning valuable real-world skills while also learning about myself as a learner? Surprisingly, yes. The more obvious learning experiences that I’ve always been involved with while gaming have been about learning the game itself. Any game that has been worth my time playing has taken much time to learn in order for me to achieve any levels of mastery in game. This was a no-brainer for me as I read articles stating similar modes of thinking. What wasn’t as obvious were the statements that pointed out that my skills in game were translating to out of game experiences. How I interact with others during play has been a vital part in how I interact with others in my day to day life. I have learned to be a communal problem solver as a result of gaming, relying on collective knowledge from people in room and out of room to build up my own thinking. In thinking further about my experiences with gaming, I also realized that my perseverance and high tolerance for failure have been a direct result of playing difficult games with friends and on my own. These traits alone have been of great benefit to my learning style throughout the years, helping me to push myself to greater levels of work and understanding, and it was through the readings of the past month that I have been able to see this relationship more directly.

Though gaming plays a vital role in the learning process, the act of gamification is not always the best way to go when integrating it into education. Before my activities in this course, I thought that any kind of gamification of classroom activities directly translated into increased engagement and increased learning. Incorporating games into my curriculum has always been important to me, and I take a lot of time to craft meaningful experiences for my kids. Because of this, I never really considered the flip side to this which is throwing in elements of gaming for the sake of making it seem like gaming. Gamification is not the same as game based-learning. Gamification does not always promote the core practices of “good games” which in turn does not always lead to “good learning.” Instead it can produce an environment that feels forced which can have the opposite effect on engagement and learning. Another preconception that I had about gaming was that video gaming in particular can have an isolating effect on learning. However, in reading one of the articles about gaming in-room versus out-of-room, it can be seen in case studies that gamers are still connected to the outside stimulus from the game, engaging with the people around them to help them learn and master elements of the game.

One aspect of play and gaming that I haven’t had to rely on a whole lot in my adult life is social networking. I am tech savvy by most people’s standards, but I have refused to engage with things like Twitter, Instagram, and the like due to time constraints in my own life and substitutions of other (and in my mind, more useful) uses of my learning time. I have often wondered how can social media be an avenue for learning? Through this course I have been able to explore other social avenues such as Hypothes.is. This particular format has allowed me to glean much deeper understandings of the relationships between games and learning. Reading heavy texts has always been the least effective thing I’ve done for my learning as I often get lost in the complex language of most academic articles. Those texts were read in isolation and that is where Hypothes.is has changed this for me. I’ve noticed that many of my peers will read the article in its entirety and then engage with the annotations. I am the opposite in that I will read the annotations and annotate for myself as I read. This process of reading annotations and creating my own has helped me to decode some of the tougher parts of these articles which has helped to advance my learning in this course and elevated social media to a higher level of importance in my learning.

As I continue my learning journey, I am still wondering about how video gaming in particular can be incorporated into a classroom curriculum without feeling like it has been forced? I’m also wondering what types of games will produce specific kinds of learning outcomes and how to harness those within the classroom?