Hasbro Toys Fly Under the Radar

Mark Pesce of "A Playful World" fame [http://markpesce.com/playfulworld.html] makes the point that how we learn is changing- not that we learn, which as sometimes been up for debate- but how we learn. Mark fly's full in the face of organized learning institutionalized "push" which high schools, colleges and universities, both non, and, technical, are all too happy to "foist" upon the students. The push is that they know the way; the truth is that, that way may not be real in the future coming our way!

Pesce brought to point how innovative the "Furby" toy produced by Hasbro is, how children, very young children, were learning to interact with artificial intelligence and the relationship that forms there. It is a different relationship than the projected psyche of "Barbie and Ken" or projecting action via "figures," this doll interacts with the child. The response factor allows the child to understand and modify their behavior to fit the Furby, which in turn, modifies its behavior to fit them.

The empire Sony has another artificially intelligent toy, AIBO, on the market, and the owners of AIBO swear by it. The fun of training the unit, having it respond to your instruction, and then in response, learning new behaviors for it, make for a sparkling market of resupply. Sony with this harder looking toy, however, may have missed the soft and cuddly image that Hasbro put into the market via Furby, and if sales are any meter, Furby is outselling AIBO.

This brings you into the picture in your learning, and in what you are aware of in terms of what your children, friends, and relatives are learning. What the toy world does is impact the underbelly of culture and society as it deals with children, friend's children, and the relative factor of growth. How much do you know about what your child and their friends believe and adhere to as belief about their reality? Artificial play with interactive learning is teaching them lessons that you may not comprehend.

Pesce is telling us something that many people haven't caught hold of, he's commenting not so much about the technology, he is pointing to changes that are happening in education. Education, your education, your children's education, and the society and culture, isn't a closed box, it is an open ended mechanism- and that mechanism is undergoing changes, according to Pesce, that are fabulous but also fraught with danger.

The issues in learning are not creativity, but ability to make use of, the figures that it entails. The reality of learning in this 21^st century is speed, acquisition, marketability, survival, not on the ability to regurgitate factoids, but the true ability to think outside the box. The century of technological giants is what it is, we can decry the lack of moral gain, but that won't stop the train- it's rolling, and Pesce's point is valid. Education is changing, will change, and will continue to change, but not if we don't let the standard institutions know that change is what they should be about.