Always Learning

What a privilege it is to live in 2022 as a life-long-learner. It’s easy these days to have a negative mindset about a lot of things, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how much easier it is today than it was just a decade or two ago to access learning resources for just about anything. This is due in part to the Web 2 phenomenon in which knowledge is being collaboratively created, curated, and repackaged and reposted faster than it can be consumed. At the beginning of the millennium 22 years ago, if I wanted to know how to repair something, I couldn’t hop on to YouTube and find hundreds of tutorials covering every possible model and method. Hundreds of millions of people around the world couldn’t yet hop onto Khan Academy to practice mathematics or learn about economics, cryptography, or art history. And before the social web it was unheard of for the average learner to have such easy access to top experts. Today, it’s likely that I can find an online community or LinkedIn connection to an online community in which the world’s experts in any subject hang out. Access to information is only part of it. I want to know how the experts think about a subject.

I’ve been learning recently from immersing myself in a community. I initially joined this community based on an invitation from a friend, as a hobby and to satisfy a general interest to learn about blockchain-enabled economies, but this group includes some of the top experts in the world at community-building and human-centered design for motivation. I only recently realized that this experience is connected to one of my personal goals in 2022–to build community around the ideas in my forthcoming book, the Learning Engineering Toolkit: Evidence-Based Practices from the Learning Sciences, Instructional Design, and Beyond. The book will be published by Routledge this year. (Calling it my book is not exactly correct. It’s the product of 29 authors and countless other non-author contributors.) 

My goal, shared with many others, to build community around the practice of learning engineering is driven by a deep desire to help people reach their full potential and enjoy the new opportunities that learning will bring to their lives. Current models, methods, and systems of learning are far from perfect. Learning engineering promises a bright path forward.

My eureka moment recently was that my new “hobby” was not only allowing me to engage with some of the world’s experts in a topic, it was also giving me an immersive learning experience that could transfer to other contexts and learning goals in work and life. The community I joined was the Discord channel for the Metablox community and the experts include people like gamification expert Yu-kai Chou, Google YouTube product manager and serial entrepreneur Jun Loayza, and people like Jerod Morris, partner at the Unemployable Initiative who knows a whole lot more about both crypto and community building than I do. Blockchain and crypto are getting a bad rap these days but I like that this community is trying to do something positive with it. 

I’ve learned a lot by being a part of this community about how to use “game mechanics” as a positive influence in community building, i.e. the things that keep you engaged and having fun in a great game can be applied to build momentum for positive change in serious endeavors. My serious goal is to advance the practice of learning engineering for the good of all learners around the world. For the founders of Metablox the serious goal is to preserve the most precious memories for generations on a blockchain and build an economy that sustains those memories. A Metablox is a digital asset that represents real places; that could be a landmark, like the Golden Gate Bridge, or a place representing a neighborhood park or family home or group of apartment buildings. People have fond memories tied to places, so what makes Metablox valuable are a limited number of attached memories preserved for generations on blockchain. Metablox uses the same technology as the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that you may have heard about, but is NOT about digital art collecting or JPEGs of rocks selling for $1.7 Million. It is also NOT about virtual lands in the metaverse such as The Sandbox. I don’t have $1.7 million to throw away on free clipart, and for now maintaining my real home keeps me busy enough (although The Sandbox sounds like fun). For now being involved in the pre-launch of Metablox has been a rewarding way to spend some free time.

The founders are running the pre-launch community much like an online game as a way to build excitement and engagement. For example, people in the community gain more experience points (XP) the more they engage in conversations in the Discord channel by posting messages, asking questions, giving feedback on the design of the platform, and completing challenges aimed at growing the community and educating the community about the platform. The game mechanics in the pre-launch community also have statuses and rewards that will have value beyond the pre-launch community such as the right to reserve Metablox prior to public launch. 

These game mechanics recognize the eight core drives for human motivation defined in the Octalysis Framework, a human-focused gamification design framework developed by Metablox co-founder Yu-Kai Chou. As the research of Ken Koedinger and others suggests Learning is Not a Spectator Sport. As valuable as reading Chou’s book was for me, this immersive social learning experience, doing something with the author, is priceless. 

In the end, the Metablox experiment could turn out to be a bust as a business model and a short-term avocation, but it won’t be a waste of time for me because of what I’m learning and the valuable relationships I’m forming through the community. I’ve learned so much more by being immersed in the community than I would have learned if I had just read a whitepaper about it.

If you’re curious, like I was, and decide to check out this Metablox community be sure to post a message in the #introduction channel that tags me @Dryvacula (that username is a story for another post). I’ll be glad to show you around and introduce you to the rules of the game and how to level up in the community, as a neighbor and as a player in this immersive learning experience.