If at first you don't succeed...

Last week we had the pleasure of gathering for TLT in Albany. One of the highlights was listening to Marc Prensky speak about the "Digital Natives" generation and their expectations regarding engagement. The notion of engagement in regards to motivation and it's relationship to learner success has been on the table since John Keller described his ARCS model of motivation;so I won't say I was particularly startled by Prensky's comments. One element that was implicit in his presentation, but never really stated, was that most really good game play is incremental, in that your experience builds from a succession of failures.

Think about that for a second: why do we stick with certain games? Because they suck? Because we can beat the system senseless in no time flat? Even if you're ancient like me, you can recall that even the most primitive, crappy interface can hook you for hours (Come on, who had an Atari and remembers Pong? Raise your hands..). Now, let's flip back to ARCS for a second, with this comment from Driscoll: "Students gain confidence in their own abilities when they experience success at challenging tasks" (Fernandez and Dabbagh, citing Driscoll, 1993, p.312). A challenge can really only produce two results: success, or failure. We often think only in terms of learner success and satisfaction. How often do we consider the concept of learner discomfort as a tool that builds knowledge and skills?

One committee I sit on is considering how to create a comforting, encouraging, warm, fuzzy, safe, makes me think of Mom and Home environment for our campus library. Well, possbily "makes me think of Barnes and Noble" is a better descriptor, but at any rate- one member pulled up this article that focuses primarily on the notion that computers can learn. Roger Schank's response follows his pet theory that humans learn through failure. I've seen Schank put this concept into play in a CD-ROM that trained non-profit managers how to deal with people. In a great scenario, you, the learner had to choose how to deal with a particulary angry man of the cloth who needed to speak to you RIGHT NOW about a pressing issue. At this decision point, I recall that you could (a)listen to the Padre's complaints or (b)blow him off by filtering him through your secretary. Choosing (b) later results in said Man of God showing up at your Board meeting, rising out of the audience and shaking his finger at you, decrying that you were "too busy" to deal with him when issue x wasn't a crisis. Hoo boy, talk about discomfort :-)

Now, to attempt to pull these threads together: What Schank posits is that learning can occur from failure - from "lessons learned", if you will. I would guess that if you polled any avid gamer about why they play Halo, Doom, "Let's Count Sand", whatever- you would find that it is the *challenge* of trying to beat the system - to win. But we know that winning takes many hours of time invested, thought, perhaps cribbing strategies from fellow gamers- but it also takes many hours of "got the humanoid- got the invader" type failures - incremental failures- to move towards the ultimate goal. In closing, I'll quote from my colleague Doug Deal:

"...but we should not forget that intellectual encounters--if they are to have lasting results--should involve challenge and discomfort, the edge of anxiety that characterizes the unsettled mind in the learning process. Can we find a way to do justice to the lurching uncertainties, the risks to complacency, and the abandonment of what is comfortable--the common side-effects of intellectual engagement of the serious variety? Gathering information is, on one level, a simple and fairly benign process, but shaping information into new knowledge, distilling deeper insights from that knowledge (flirting with "wisdom" here)... surely these evoke emotions and mind-states other than those we associate with the comforts of bean-counting"
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