A Playful Approach to Learning on the Web

Word Safari is described as a "playful approach to sharpening your academic vocabulary." Excuse me for getting pedagogic, but there's a very big lesson to be learned here about learning and learning games and play and the Internet and stuff.

Today's "quarry" is fane. Go ahead, click on it and see if you can guess what it means. It's all right. I'll wait.

Did you guess correctly? Did you notice all the "sightings" on the correct page? How each of them point you to some fane-ish page on the web. Like this obscure, yet potentially titillating "Keats, Teats, and the Fane of Poesy" or the clearly questionable THE FANE OF THE PSILOCYBE MUSHROOM.

It's fun, isn't it? Fun to test and expand your vocabulary. Fun to find yourself on unexpectedly connected, sometimes clearly bizarre places on the Internet. It's kind of an accidental learning. Eventually, you guess the right word. When you do, you find yourself informed and invited to strange, and sometimes highly informative sites you'd never visit on purpose. And yet, every now and then, another bookmarkworthy site comes up, and a new light shines.

In many ways, Word Safari is a paradigm for what an effectively playful, web-supported learning experience should be. I hope it's a lesson widely learned.