Originally posted on April 20, 2011 on my Posterous blog:
I’ve always loved listening to Will Wright’s lectures. Here he talks about how playing games affects education. With play, you can fail and try again, while you build a mental model of what works and what doesn’t work. This is related to apprenticeship, an older model of learning a trade (e.g., crafting a chair). In contrast, modern education concentrates on theories. We teach you all the steps before you actually do anything, so that you can avoid failure.
His presentation style is very high bandwidth—he speaks very quickly and presents lots of related/cool pictures… until he hits his last slide, which says: “Stop Talking.” :-)
On one of his slides is a quote: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ~William Butler Yeats