Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.25.06 | (This is part II—after an earlier post on “Games are Good for Learning”.)

Deep learning requires that people don’t just hear or read a bunch of words, but that they have experiences from which they can learn and then generalize.  But these experiences must meet certain conditions: 

A) They must be structured around goals;
B) Learners must reflect on how goals relate to reasoning in the situation;
C) Learners must be given regular feedback;
D) Learners must be encouraged to offer and hear explanations of why expectations failed or errors happened; and
E) Learners must engage with a number of similar situations so they can debug their interpretations and explanations; and
F) Learners must have mentoring and debriefing so they can learn from the experiences and explanations of other people and so they can talk about why and how things worked in the accomplishment of goals. 

Good video games are clearly good at some of these conditions, but as they come out of the box, they are not necessarily good at them all.  Something has to encourage reflection and the full accomplishment of these conditions.  We have to go beyond the game.  “How” should be a leading question for the emerging field of games and learning and is one of the leading questions we want to take up in our work with MacArthur. 

Such questions will be discussed in part in the entry I’ll be writing for the Games Volume in the MacArthur Series.