Learning in a fact fetish culture...

What traditional education fails to do is position the learner, the learning experience and the content in contexts. Consequently, it is hard for students to be motivated, because what is taught is taught out of context. Games afford this combination, as they situate the content in narratives and contexts, providing meaningful experiences, and immersing the players into mastering them. By combining interactive rule sets, narratives and spatiality, games unfold virtual worlds that embrace content and establish meaning. Context matters for learning; it affords players’ situative embodiment in the learning experience and facilitates repositioning players and their understanding through experiences. The emphasis then shifts from teaching abstracted content towards facilitating the learner to master the content framed in microworlds that evoke, enact, embed, of afford the emergence of narratives, as Henry Jenkins argues. Educators can chose from the plethora of games, commercial and educational, the ones that best serve their students’ educational needs and embed them in lessons, providing learning experiences in situ and extracting the value of content in ways that are obvious for learners.

The use of information in gaming contexts becomes meaningful, and therefore, the learning experiences can be much more powerful than the ones in the traditional classroom. Students can act on and interact with the gaming spaces, manipulating curricular content and making meaning out of their content-and-context interactions. Schools provide abstract knowledge by transferring knowledge from the world into the textbooks, emphasizing on putting that abstracted knowledge into students’ heads. Shaffer and his colleagues from the University of Wisconsin, Madison were arguing in one of their articles that schools adopt a 'fact fetish culture'... It is true! Knowledge is abstractly delivered to students. Teachers just try to catch up with the curriculum, and the ultimate goal is the standardized tests! I was reading an article by Thomas and Brown (2007) a couple of months ago, and I agree with them when they sat that, in the games’ microworlds, the content is being situated in rich contexts through which the meaningful scenarios that derive afford deep conceptual understanding and development of dispositions. Students learn to be, they do not just learn about things, and with their imagination they can simulate, change as individuals, and ultimately transfer what they learn into real life.