Learning as Play

Week 2 entry: Learning as play

The context of this post is the readings from our ETEC 697 “Educational Technology in Informal Learning Environments” class.

The bibliography for this week:

Csikzentmihalyi, M., & Hermanson, K. (1995). Intrinsic motivation in museums: What makes visitors want to learn? Museum news, 74(3), 35-37 and 59-62.

Falk, J., & Dierking, L. (1992). The Museum Experience. Washington, D.C.: Whalesback Books.

McLellan, H. (2000). Experience design. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 3(1), 59-69.

Pine, J., & Gilmore, J. (1998). Welcome to the experience economy. Harvard Business Review, 76(4), 97-105.

With this topic I’m interested in exploring within these readings is the notion of formal and informal environments, distinguishing characteristics, and how schools manage to beat the life out of learning. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a teacher for 27 years, and I think there are times when we truly engage students by the process we take them through a traditional schools, but truthfully, this is more the exception than the rule, and certainly not the purpose of education as we know it. Think about what we’ve learned in the readings that we have. One of the primary tenets of Csikzentmihalyi is that real powerful learning stems from intrinsically driven behaviors. Even in the article, he makes the case that if a learner starts any activity with the intent of needing to do it for some external factor (a grade, a requirement, a non-optional activity) it immediately changes their motivation, their attention and their ownership of the learning.

What distinguishes intrinsic learning, and the design that must occur around it, is that the learner comes to us because they have an interest, and at least believe, even if it’s not true, that they are driving the experience. Here is where the potential overlap with formal and informal learning environments have something to learn from each other. The significance of design implies that although the learner may believe that they are in charge of the experience, that truthfully behind the scene and instructional designer has thought through purposefully how to engage, and take into account the perspective of the learner, so that they feel as though the experience was initiated and driven by them.

In my physics class, we practiced a pedagogical approach called modeling. In it, I was always the shaper of the experience, always new the path we needed to take to have an experience that was worth doing, and yet, with good design and purposeful intent, my students felt more than not that they were driving experience. They felt that they made the decisions about their research, about the results, and what the meaning was. It often felt that though I was pulling the strings, it was an original experience for them, because they built it on their actions.

Csikzentmihalyi makes the case that a “flow” experience arises when we are so immersed in an experience that we reach a higher level of engagement, where we are immersed powerfully, sensory affected, in time slows down to enable the experience to unfold powerfully. In his latest book “The Element”, Sir Ken Robinson talks about Csikzentmihalyi’s flow as happening when a learner is engaged because they are in their environment. Traditional school is full of poor matches of students, adult mentors, and experiences that do not feel intrinsic, nor have any sense of flow whatsoever. One of the things that I’ve been impressed with recently is the power of homeschooling as an alternative model for schools to consider. Think of a learning environment that is always adjusting to our interests, abilities, schedule, strengths and weaknesses, so that we feel engaged, involved, connected.

So what does this have to do with the readings, how does that tie in? Well whether it’s Falk’s description of the interactive experience model that takes into account personal, social, and physical context or it is Pine and Gilmore’s matrix that plots out a “sweet spot” between immersion and absorption, passive and active participation,

ine and gilmore's matrix

ine and gilmore's matrix


or McClellan, who talks about these ideas applied into virtual interfaces, the goal and understanding of human experiences the same. We learn best when we have activated motivation, when we have taken into account the abilities and interests of the learner, and when we unfold an experience that tells a story and creates a sense of ownership in the experience.
This is where traditional school fails us horribly. This is not to say that some schools have found new and exciting ways to accomplish this, but the traditional structures on school: textbooks that are nothing more than unengaging tomes full of uninteresting factoids, schedules that separate out learning into small periods of time that are domain & topic specific, and activities that are at best poor seconds of the real learning that could happen.
To close, maybe the best thing to do would be to reconsider how we treat learning. Our new principal for the high school at Mid-Pacific Institute once taught at the Museum School in New York City. In that school, the learning was based around visits and experiences of the many multifaceted museums that exist in New York. Certainly there were still problems within that school — probably more than anything the inherent tension between the public’s expectation of what schools should be like, and what motivated and drove students to do higher, more authentic, quality work. But any model that takes us closer to learning as play gets us a little closer to the way our brains are wired, and real learning can happen.
Shouldn’t we do this for the sake of our children?