Learning, Boredom and Fun

Greetings everyone!
I'm a 670 student past, and noticed that the course was starting again. I perused the syllabus after Bernie tweeted it and just couldn't resist chiming in on this topic. Here's why.

I'm not sure if you'll be introduced to the Second Life platform this semester; it's an interesting study on learning, boredom and fun. The platform itself isn't a game, although veteran game designer Scott Jennings wrote a clever essay on it through that lens.

SL is more like an sophisticated Lego set. I'm surely dating myself, which is deliberate, because it's nontrivial that a lot of 3o - 50 something-year-olds are spending lots of time playing in SL. Images of adults playing Legos don't come naturally to me. Constructionism seems to describe best what I've observed, but the theory has yet to be applied to adults. Hmmm? Adult learning theories too are rather inadequate at explaining what's going on. It's indeed an interesting mystery.

Anyway, I'll be scratching the surface a weeee bit with a study of how sl residents learn to create it. I also blog about SL and virtual environments, situating them in an institutional context, which means that we look at them from within a highly structured learning context (SDSU).