Is gaming the future of education?
By Joel Foreman
New York Law School's third annual State of Play conference supports the idea that videogame technology will one day be the foundation of an educational system that will make the current model look like mule and plow farming before the invention of the steam engine.
Panel discussions at this year's conference illuminated the complexities of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game space (MMOG), where netizens are organizing at ever higher levels of social, economic, and political achievement. As a by-product of their shared activities, netizens are constantly creating and re-creating advanced learning communities that hum with almost hive-like efficiency as each builds on their own skills to win the game.
There are two factors that must be considered to appreciate the proliferation of advanced learning communities found in these MMOGs. First is the technical complexity and the cost of the MMOG. For example, Linden Lab's Second Life, one of the virtual worlds represented at State of Play, requires fourteen hundred central processing units to manage its two million monthly player transactions. Such a system can have build and operational costs in excess of $10 million, a figure cited by Eve lead game designer Kjartan Emilsson. Investment in the PG13 rated There, which is still seeking profitability, may exceed $50 million. The impressive scale of these ventures is driven by the prospect of success similar to that experienced with the release of World of Warcraft, which this year became the first North American MMOG to surpass the million subscriber mark.
The second factor to consider is what may be the major surprise of the MMOG. Ted Castronova, author of the recently published Synthetic Worlds, became one of the first to draw attention to the very real economies developing in the MMOG. Mr. Castronova was at State of Play to discuss the rise of "in-world stock exchanges" and the related problems of regulation. This sort of unanticipated high-level economic behavior emerged from the simple distribution of MMOG play money for tasks or quests performed in the real world.
Some players learned early in the development of the MMOG that they could sell their accumulated play money or rare digital objects on Ebay for real dollars. Today, one can convert virtual money into real currency at web sites like IGE and Sony's Station Exchange, or buy and sell, say, Second Life property at Anshechung.com.
"Managing an online economy is not a trivial feat," says There, CEO Mike Wilson. The economy of digital objects produced by gamer/developers has raised the kind of intellectual property and censorhsip issues and created the kind of law enforcement problems one might expect from a rapidly growing and innovative colony. Hiro Pendragon (aka Ron Blechner) is one of these gamer/developers who is learning his way into an online career. A sponsor of the first Second Life Community Convention, digital products such as a customized Samurai sword that changes colors, earn him about $200 each month.
The activity of such "cyberworkers" aggregates into large scale virtual organizations, exemplified by the "alliance" structure in the space simulating MMOG Eve. Kjartan Emilsson says that Eve, unlike many other MMOGs, clusters its CPUs so they act as a single server, or shard, that can simultaneously accommodate the entire user community. In contrast, most MMOGs divide their populations into 3,500 person groups that are segregated in different, though similar, shards. Eve's social architecture, which initially supported guilds or corporations of up to one hundred players, unexpectedly evolved into multi-corporation "alliances" with thousands of players working to achieve common goals in meaningful multi-session activities. "Alliance" leaders, supported by boards of directors, manage diverse corporations, each specializing in part of a supply chain, such as mining, transportation, mineral refining, and weapons manufacture, and often waging war to take over a competitor's territory or disrupt its supply chain.
Now what, you may ask, does all this have to do with an improved educational system? Consider that constructivist educators, especially those in distance learning, claim that advanced learning communities will be activity-based and focused on meaningful problems. These communities also will decentralize the role of the teacher, and will motivate groups of students to self-organize into interdisciplinary, collaborative teams.
This is not a theoretical model for the distant future of education. Millions of people are engaging voluntarily at this advanced level right now in MMOG virtual worlds like those noted above. They are collectively learning their way into an unpredictable cyberspace future, a future in which a significant portion of the global economy may have migrated to a virtual environment. At the same time they are creating a model of a high performance collaborative learning system could eventually replace the bricks and mortar of the nineteenth century model that Americans currently pay $500 plus billion per year to maintain.
Joel Foreman is an associate professor of English at George Mason University
). THX được thành lập vào năm 1983, có trụ sở chính tại San Rafael, California, USA. Giám đốc là hiện tại là Joseph Lias (gia nhập THX đầu năm 2004). Mục tiêu của THX luôn là người tiên phong trong công nghệ giải trí bằng cách đưa ra những sáng tạo vô song. THX cung cấp các công nghệ và dịch vụ cho thị trường tiêu dùng cũng như chuyên nghiệp. Khách hàng là những hãng phim, giải trí gia đình, giải trí xe hơi, trò chơi, thiết bị thu âm chuyên nghiệp.
