Continuing with this week’s meme of disruption, another site (Civic Tripod) comes across the brow that pesters a few questions (first quote from site, then questions):

…Mobile games are quickly appearing in many dimensions of our lived environment, but few go beyond the small screen. Mobile games that are particularly innovative or locative are often low-profile, focusing on art, or civics at the neighborhood level. The big picture for such games has been hard to see. This report addresses the mobile frontier for civic games, which is fragmented across the applied domains of activism, art and learning. We argue that these three domains can and should speak jointly — an approach we call the civic “tripod.”

Its an interesting approach, and one that was near immediate in some of the questions it made me ask of myself:

• Why haven’t Christian (or other fatih-oriented developers) touched this?
• Why don’t more current apps and services in the faith space attempt to tackle this
• Where are other opportunities that civics and gaming, combined with faith, addresses a need, not just draws light (re: noise) to an issue

To go a bit further,M listen to a perspective of mobile learning from this same endeavor:

…Mobile learning?  Too often, mobile learning is simply a repackaging of established content — at its most banal, re-purposing desktop content for a smaller screen, retaining unsuccessful game components that supposedly add “entertainment” (Klopfer, 2008). Mobile designs that take these incremental steps only obscure the domain’s potential. (Hint: the writers of this report are not very interested in mobile games to help memorize facts about a social issue; the more profound mobile shifts are a matter of form and experience, not content access.) As a sector and as researchers, we must insist on those aspects of games and mobile that are distinctive; only then can we understand which forms of learning are most appropriate and powerful. In other words, we must beware the temptation to “add mobile games and stir” — such games work like chocolate-covered broccoli: not tasty, and with uncertain learning.

Good games, by contrast, focus on experiential learning rather than content. For example, they can help players develop intuition for the systems of physics — but may be worse than textbooks at helping students memorize physics formulas. Another example: games can offer role-play with deep insights into the perspectives and identities of oppressed peoples — but games are often worse than Wikipedia for delivering biographical facts. In other words, games are particular kinds of learning systems, not a panacea for engaging learners…

These are tough questions and perspectives, and should be asked and addressed now – beyond the pulpit and the classroom. Perhaps Civic Tripod sparks your efforts? Or, perhaps you have been preaching a gospel with the emphasis on a paradigm of living that’s no longer applicable in your community. Dose that mean that culture has to adjust to how we want fatih to be lived, or we adjust how we live in order that the kernel of our faith doesn’t die, even if some behaviors, assumptions, or cultural activities do?