Design is tough. And, trying to design new approaches to learning can be especially difficult when there isn’t an alignment with the culture of the organization. And, if there’s a lack of alignment between the aspirations of the organization and the actual culture – it can lead to frustration and wasted efforts. Beyond just thinking about design and culture, we also should recognize that in addition to growing skills, such efforts also go a long way toward keeping staff or recruiting new employees. In thinking about design, culture and learning organizations, the “Story of Joe” (video) provides a fictionalized account of  culture, learning organizations and the search for work.

Design and design thinking are key components on the path to improving the learning experience. And, if we think about how we further transition to our new ways of learning – we may just see that design efforts need to include discussions of democratization, decentralization, informal, social and so on. Yes, sometimes, there is a need to design a learning experiences. And sometimes, we need to think about how we design an environment and provide the support to help others design (and create) the learning experience. In learning to learn – we can think about the various forms of literacy. And one form of literacy, related to gaming, can provide some interesting avenues of exploration for learning to learn.

Game Design Toolkit: The Game Design Toolkit is the result of a group effort to create a learning experience oriented around building a video game. As discussed in the proposal for the effort, and reinforced in the post-project reflection, this GitHub based toolkit can provide many positive learning outcomes and reflects some thoughtfulness in design:

• Gaming literacy: There’s so much more that goes into game development than just coding. As we think about this literacy we can easily and quickly recognize that game creation requires design, storytelling, audio, visual, testing, project management, problem solving, teaming and or course, programming.
  • Diversity: And a hope is that by highlighting these rich and varied dimensions of gaming literacy it would pull in and appeal to a diverse range of participants.
  • Digital Organizations: Having digital literacy is recognized as a key requirement for today’s students and workers. Using gaming to learn digital skills can be both fun and effective. And this is a nice way to get past concerns about “too technical” or “geek mythology.” And, with this literacy in place, we could just be planting the seeds that support future development of new learning experiences (see End of Gamers – which further discusses domestication of the tools of production. I’d argue that similar parallels arise in education – perhaps we need to discuss the “End of Teachers”?)
• Constructionism: These literacies can be discussed, but to truly take hold, we need to use them “in anger” and gain fluency. That is, we learn best by doing and trying to build something.
• Frameworks: There are some interesting frameworks to guide development including Play-centric Design, Scalable Game Design and Model, Dynamics & Aesthetics (MDA).
• GitHub: There’s more to collaboration than a Google Drive or Google Docs. Our networked publics require us to think about how we connect, collaborate and socialize. Further, this collaboration could be something that occurs face-to-face or online – and, we also need to consider interaction patterns that could be synchronous or asynchronous. I’m thrilled that we produced the toolkit on GitHub and set it up to use GitHub during use in a classroom and by the students. Learning about versioning, wikis, Kanban, issue trackers and Git provides great exposure to ideas about team collaboration (and associated challenges).