More from Booz Allen

Actually, it is blogger Mark Oehlert. But he has a wonderfully concise–if academic-ese–summary of some of the key ideas behind epistemic games. He blogs:

participation in a community of practice is a requisite but not in the way that most people would think. This doesn’t involve going to meetings or working jointly on problems; it involves the understanding that as each of us have our jobs to do, we do those as part of a larger community of people who do the same or similar jobs. Even presidents belong to a community of practice albeit a very small one. The power here is that if we can replicate that community – Schaffer describes learners using  “socially-valued practices toward ends they value” – then we have a high level of built-in motivation and interest.

So now we have the possibility of generating high motivation and interest and Schaffer adds to that the idea proposed by Vygotsky, that “play is the world a child enters when he or she learns to resolve in imaginary form desires that can not be immediately gratified.” How many of us could describe corporate training as a world in which learners are taught how to resolve things which are either not available immediately to be resolved or which carry too high a consequence for them to resolved incorrectly? Thus as Schaffer argues, the fun which comes from this experience, the ‘drug’ described by Koster, is drwan from the linkage of practice to the person’s corporate identity/role and to the idea that the learning that occurs will be helpful in their valued context.

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