In today’s increasingly “flat” world of globalization (Friedman ), the need for a scientifically literate citizenry has grown more urgent. Yet, by some measures, we have done a poor job at fostering scientific habits of mind in schools. Recent research on informal games-based learning indicates that such technologies and the communities they evoke may be one viable alternative—not as a substitute for teachers and classrooms, but as an alternative to textbooks and science labs. This paper presents empirical evidence about the potential of games for fostering scientific habits of mind. In particular, we examine the scientific habits of mind and dispositions that characterize online discussion forums of the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Eighty-six percent of the forum discussions were posts engaged in “social knowledge construction” rather than social banter. Over half of the posts evidenced systems based reasoning, one in ten evidenced model-based reasoning, and 65% displayed an evaluative epistemology in which knowledge is treated as an open-ended process of evaluation and argument (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008).
Wow. As in the exclamation, not the game. Who would have thought the WoW forums would be cited as support for the idea that the game is intellectual/educational...? I thought trolls (for non-WoWers, trolls are people who post on forums just to make other people angry-- more or less) would have dropped percentages like those considerably; but considering this, those stats are just all the more impressive! If you look at more technical and more heavily moderated forums, such as ElitistJerks (in my opinion), I bet those stats would be even more convincing. This shows that the time people invest in WoW isn't passive or thoughtless, in fact, one needs to be creative and actively problem solving in order to be the best player s/he can be. And if you don't do all the mathematical modeling yourself, you at least need to do some "research" on the forums to acquire this kind of information. I will be looking to both further develop the points made by these authors (the full text of their article should be available to me soon), as well as searching for a legitimate conflicting argument.
As always, comments on this are encouraged, just don't be a troll ;)
Official WoW Forums
Elitist Jerk Forums
Steinkuehler, Constance; Duncan, Sean. “Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds.” Journal of Science Education & Technology, v. 17 issue 6, 2008, p. 530-543.
