Learning in Playful Environments

Writing this “essay” has been fun. It’s a very different process to the many other essays I have had to write during the course of my life and, as a teacher of English who is learning about the process of learning in new communication forms, I feel I want to comment. Posting a comment is something different to writing an essay. It can be a lot less formal, for starters. It’s interesting for me to look back over this blog and notice the changing nature of my style and approach. Lots has been written about how technology is changing the way we communicate and I am regularly coming across articles decrying the destruction of our language in the hands of texting adolescents. The outcry that followed the inclusion of a text message in the NSW HSC exams last year is a case in point. I am more likely to use the first person in my blog writing, but I am finding that I am making more use of the first person in essays as well and I feel this is increasing my power to communicate, not decreasing ...

Playfulness is common in Shakespeare’s plays. In As You Like It , we are reminded by the character of Jaques that life is a kind of performance and that each of us must take roles and act parts. This idea is taken to extremes in the play when the female character “Rosalind”, disguised as the male character “Ganymede” confronts Rosalind’s suitor Orlando and attempts to cure him of his love for her by pretending to be Rosalind. Confused? Given that all parts in Elizabethan theatres were acted by men (or boys often for women), what we end up with is a boy playing Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind; in social class terms, a lowly actor playing a noble woman playing a nobleman playing a noble woman; in gender terms, a boy playing a woman playing a man playing a woman. What is most striking for me in all these layers is how, as an audience, we are able to sustain our understanding of the complexity of the interaction between characters and how the multi-layered identities of Rosalind...

Web 2.0 is said to be characterized by the way the web has transformed from a static medium to a dynamic one in which contributors are in constant dialogue rather than just posting data on a digital wall ( see this neat YouTube video on the history and nature of Web 2.0 for example ). Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University , takes the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 one stage further in his ethnography work. Implicit in his notion that the web ‘is us/ing us’ is an idea that cultural meaning becomes a collaborative construction perhaps a bit like the notion of “The Invisible Hand” in economics. “The Invisible Hand” is a metaphor used to describe the mechanism by means of which a balance is established between supply and demand in a market economy; on the web, suggests Wesch, the constant tagging and recording of activity serves to highlight particular areas of interest and activity. When, for example, the Google sear...

The perception of presence has a powerful sway over our subjective sense of self. Who I am is powerfully linked to the sense I have of an immediate and physical presence – a body here in this place and space where at the present time I am writing. Much of our cultural and legal traditions are predicated on subjectivities that are concrete and immutable: if “I” steal your sheep or fail to pay my bills, “I” can be held to account in our court system, for example. My name, my birth-certificate, my family and my history are all elements of my subjectivity that I wear as a kind of armour to protect me from the uncertainties of an existentially ambiguous world. In a playful world many of these certainties are brought into question. Further, in a playful, virtual world, the concrete certainties of traditional notions of subjectivity seem almost to be systematically undermined. In this blog I plan to explore some of the ways playful and virtual learning environments might be understood to be...