More on “Creating Passionate Learners” with Kathy Sierra
I watched Kathy Sierra’s opening plenary performance "Creating Passionate Learners" with a mixture of excitement and disappointment.
Sierra is an engaging, funny speaker. She creates wonderful graphs using a unique, personal style (an enviable talent, with results I’d put on the spectrum nearer Indexed than Excel).
And I certainly don’t disagree with many of Sierra’s ideas. What I love about her is that she unabashedly drills right into the heart of the matter (of many matters): being passionate, engaging with passion, the feeling of flow that comes from "kicking ass" and how that feeling can be predictably enjoyed only as the result of practice and mastery.
My disappointment stems from Sierra’s presentation being essentially a stump speech, and one that I know pretty well because I’m a regular reader of her blog posts and other writing. Perhaps I’m too demanding when it comes to keynotes (and I acknowledge Alan’s point that keynotes are a difficult proposition given the difficulty in knowing the dynamics and composition of the group being addressed), but I would have enjoyed the presentation much more if she’d dug in enough to at least replace the software developer and technical writing references with parallels and examples from education proper. I’m not averse to connecting the dots! Nor am I saying that the examples should be drawn from education… but the address would’ve been much more interesting if some of the implied cross-domain parallels and analogies between the activities had been teased out.
Despite Sierra’s overt engagement in the gaming community, her presentation here invoked many characteristics of game mechanics with hardly a mention of games or gaming. I couldn’t help but consider presentations I’ve seen at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by speakers such as Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal, both of whom were careful to make explicit how characteristics, principles and techniques from one domain (game mechanics) could– and should– be implemented in another (social software systems; the real world). Specifics could help in two ways: the obvious, making it easier to actually envision and implement the ideas, and the more subtle, which is to battle the conflation of game mechanics as a way of developing rich educational experiences and the feeble, shallow stereotypes of "educational gaming" that seems to lurk everywhere in the discussions within the academy.
The concept of "hi-res experience" is an important one. Discussions in education often break down between the polarized perspectives of education as content transfer and education as a rich social experience in which knowledge is almost (if not actually) a byproduct. But beyond the initial taste and first impression(s), I don’t see how passionate engagement can exist without the "stuff" around and within which that passion is built. Fervor and zeal are complex emotions that quickly break the thin threads of pure, instinctive emotion. I don’t mean that education must be all serious all the time or we must elevate "book learning" above experience… a rich manifold of engagement has to include formal and informal learning, times of distinct, single-purpose focus and times of mindful wandering. At the same time, there’s nothing intrinsically elitist about the idea that the "thick" appreciation borne of study and practice and an understanding of context– which as often as not is a characteristic of the natural enthusiast as the dedicated student (and, ideally, how much difference is there between the two?)– represents a heightened, qualitatively better experience than its "thin" counterpart…
Another important area covered at some length in Kathy’s presentation was that of practice. I feel like a broken record when it comes to the importance of practice, not just in the sense of rote repetition, but the kind of attentive repetition that leads to mastery and overlearning and, when everything comes together, that wonderful feeling of flow. It’s essential that educators help students discover the power of practice, but also that they help them "shrink the 10,000" hours as Kathy put it. A few ways that come to me to achieve this end: increase the intensity of the practice, increase the richness of the practice (which might amount to the same thing), learn– and make habits of– a variety of ways of thinking (particularly pattern recognition, a skill with nearly ubiquitous application in our connected learning environment), and increase the number of opportunities to practice. Kathy’s example of her homemade saddle chair, which literally has a saddle for a seat, is a great example of the last method… it’s not just about the amount of the opportunity cost for practicing but when and where we have the chance to pay it.
Total immersion is, in essence, highly compressed practice. It provides an opportunity to reach that point when we can actually change our minds– when we can get "in the zone"– more readily. The best form of immersion (total immersion jams) are tied, as Kathy mentioned, to actually creating some kind of product, providing the constraint that– paradoxically– grants freedom of thought.
As expected, Sierra’s points can be distilled to the triad of dyads I wish were an inevitable part of these discussions: love & trust, passion & fearlessness, and practice & attention.