My friend has been working on this school for social systems design for years: human-systems.org/school. The material itself is rich and important—but I wanna nerd out about the form! The goal is to teach the material *through your pre-existing work / activities*. (cont)
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The idea (as I understand!) is that a guide works with you to understand your current design projects, life activities, etc—then selects/adapts and sequences "quests" created to let you enact the textbook's contents in the context of your actual work/life.
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This is an intriguing path for instructional design!
It's like project-based learning, but those curricula usually supply/scaffold the projects, rather than working with ones you already have. It's like unschooling (framed around your projects), but with an explicit curriculum.
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I'm excited about this because I think building (or going beyond) the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer really means developing a) a mass communications media form which b) communicates through "enacted experiences"; c) which themselves serve some intrinsically meaningful purpose.
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By "enacted experiences" I mean: activities structured (sometimes secretly) so that the act of participating in them tends to make you experience certain emotions / appreciate certain values / acquire understandings. Game designers are the masters of this.
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A great dinner party host often pulls this off: they invite people and structure the environment so that certain experiences will be had.
Y Combinator's batch activities cause founders to intensely experience certain values and understandings.
But these aren't mass mediums!
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Games *are* a mass medium. Journey is designed to produce a series of powerful emotional experiences, made all the more powerful because you feel like you bring them about with your actions. And those enacted experiences serve an intrinsically meaningful purpose: aesthetics.
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It's that last point that "educational game" designers miss. They see that mass media for enacted experiences are powerful, but they (basically always) fail to make those activities serve either aesthetic joy or some other meaningful purpose for the player.
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The form of Joe's class is awfully close to checking all three boxes. Learning primarily happens not through implicit instruction, but as a carefully-crafted side effect of participating in activities woven into meaningful parts of your life. And it's *almost* a mass medium!
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The guides in Joe's class are, I suppose, a little like the ractors in the Primer. Maybe they'll experience the same fate! Hm hm.
(This thread's a bit ranty—I hope you'll forgive me. I've been collecting notes on this problem for a couple years, and I'm still lost in the forest)
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They do bond with their students. But unlike Miranda/Nell they don’t pretend to be artificial.
Perhaps it’s time to throw away the idea of mass media. Is meetup one? Is political organizing? Are Montessori schools?
The people / content ratio varies.
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Intriguing thread. There’s certainly an interest in automating tailor-made experiences in games. (Let me know if you want to know more and I’ll reply when it’s not 4 AM :))