Engage me or enrage me

In follow up to yesterday's post: The Feasibility of Forecasting, I just read Rick Nigol's latest posting on his blog: Breakthrough eLearning. He writes about Marc Prensky's recent talk:

Prensky's thesis is that many kids are thoroughly bored and uninterested in school because the nature of schooling has not changed much in hundreds of years. The digital natives face the same old rote memory approach to learning that we did. However, in their lives outside the classroom they are using digital tools (e.g. WWW, wireless text messaging, electronic games, MP3s, PDAs, high end software) to be creators and active participants in activities, not just passive receptors and regurgitators of information. Hence, their rallying cry at school is "engage me or enrage me."

He concludes:

I am not advocating a games-based approach to eLearning merely so that learners can be entertained. The point is always about realizing learning outcomes in the form of changed behaviour. It's just that you are more likely to get there if your learners are engaged in the learning.

If the folks experiencing your training are not yet yelling "engage me, or enrage me," remember that it's just a matter of time before the digital natives start outnumbering the digital immigrants.

In other words, the learners will provide the evolutionary pressure on instructional designs and designers to change before it is manadated by upper management.

Technorati tags: instructional design, Web 3.0