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| Saturday, July 24, 2004 |
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Survival of the funnest 
| | 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. |
| | Watching Lance Armstrong pump one stage closer to winning his 6th Tour de France this morning, I thought about what his kid said in an interview about the old man's work: "Daddy makes other people suffer." Consider, then, the sum of character-building in Lance's dust. Lance will win the title, but will the rest of the pack learn more? Or become deeper in some way? You betchas. Failure tends to be a better teacher than success. |
| | Right now you're reading a former student who didn't achieve more than a C average until his third year in college, and whose SAT scores were a lot lower than yours. And yet I'm sure I learned at least as much as the better students around me. Some of it was even what they taught in classes. |
| | Anyway, this all makes me think also about another winner we haven't heard from for so long we might think him a failure, or at least a has-been. |
| | The man built AOL from nothing to the parent of Time-Warner. He brought the Net to more households than any other single human being. But, by nearly all accounts, that last move with Time Warner was a failure. Yet... was it? What did Steve learn from that? How about the rest of us. I'll bet it was a bunch. And I'm also sure Steve's a better man for it, and that in the long run the rest of us will benefit too. |
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