Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch

Tuesday, July 27, 2004day link 

 Utopian World Championships
Via Global Ideas Blog, the Utopian World Championships. Yeah, that's a bit odd to have a competition for the best Utopia, but why not. I didn't read anything earth shattering so far, but it is a good exercise to design utopias. I'd probably have submitted something if I had noticed before.
[ | 2004-07-27 11:06 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >

 Learning by Dying
picture Bernie DeKoven on e-playing and e-learning, via Doc Searls:
I call it "learning by dying" and I think it's probably one of the most powerful contributions that eplaying has for elearning. The most fun and efficient way to master most computer games is to play until you get killed, and remember what killed you. You usually have a few lives to sacrifice to learning. And you can always start over. This approach to learning has given most young people so much confidence in their competencies that, when confronted by a new game or new technology, they hardly ever need to look at the instructions.
That is indeed a different way of learning. Different from what I grew up with. My kids quite obviously prefer to learn a different way than I. Is it better? For some purposes it obviously is. And more fun. And maybe the educational system needs to better catch on to this whole thing.

Learning by Dying. Something kind of disturbing about that, though. Although, it is maybe closer to how nature works than any other educational system we've cooked up. Maybe we need to recycle ourselves more often. Speed up evolution.

Anyway, he also quotes from an article Online Learning and Fun, about:
"...the concept of meaningful failure. A player learns through trial and error and especially from mistakes, trying a different approach to accomplish the task at hand. Games often provide multiple opportunities and methods for a player to succeed. If a player fails using one approach, there are other ways to solve the problem. e-learning can leverage this gaming approach, offering multiple means of solving problems to encourage exploration and learning from failure."
Yeah, we need to fail more often. Fail in the good and meaningful way. Gotta know how to die, and be reborn, stronger and smarter. The faster the better. We're too stuck in things we really ought to drop and move on from. Go to the next level.
[ | 2004-07-27 20:05 | 5 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 How-To Aggregators
picture From Seb Paquet:
Kevin Kelly asks:
"What are the best how-to books, videos, software, websites that you've ever seen? I don't care what the topic is, I am primarily interested in the execution."
Building a distributed body of how-tos would be another great application of structured blogging. Paging Marc Canter: must add Open How-Tos to your list of digital lifestyle standards.

Update: Jeremy picks up the digital lifestyle aggregator idea:
"Now imagine that profile as a sort of e-portfolio, containing most of the stuff you careed about, things you were thinking about, connecting you to everyone else who wanted to learn the same things, helping you find the information and resources that would help you learn... "
Yes, yes, yes. Of course we need all of that. A comprehensive open archive of the how-tos for ... most everything. And an easy way of finding everybody who want to do the same things. And we might actually get to work.
[ | 2004-07-27 20:27 | 13 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

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