My Thoughts on DevLearn 2009
Posted by Allen Interactions on Mon, Nov 23, 2009
by Michael Allen, CEO, Allen Interactions
DevLearn 2009 was great fun and informative. I hope you were able to attend. So often these days, conference keynote speakers are more entertainment than contributors to the substance of the conference. DevLearn showed how to do it right. Andrew McAfee, Eric Zimmerman, and Leo Laporte provided plenty of entertainment, but it didn’t upstage thoughtfully prepared and very useful content.
Eric Zimmerman is a character. Energetic, smart, confident, and free-spirited. At first I thought this session was going to be all fluff and superficial. Wrong! I learned valuable things from him in just a short amount of time, which would have been much shorter had he not sprinkled in audience-participation games. But the games reinforced his points, kept everyone involved, and demonstrated that games can energize everyone usefully. When that energy is productively focused, one can expect important outcomes.
Briefly, my takeaways are:
- Games are not about graphics, animation, or sounds. They are about rules.
- Games can exist only when there are rules: no rules, no game.
- Good rules make good games; poor rules make poor games.
- Rules acquire their full meaning as people learn to play the game and develop their strategies.
- Games are essentially learning activities.
If you can turn your content into the rules of a game or simulation, then you can get the deep learning that happens as players develop effective strategies to deal with them.
As I contrast some of our more popular e-learning designs to PowerPoint slides, I see that there are basically no rules to watching a PowerPoint slide (at least none that have anything to do with the content), but the rules that are evident in good learning simulations, such as how to deal with a terrorist situation, produce a fascinating game in which the rules take on real-life meaning. Brilliant. Useful stuff.