Friday, February 06, 2004

Cribbage and the New World of Learning This little essay is not so much about the game of Cribbage as about learning in the new environment of online instructional resources, a kind of modern day, computerized, morality tale. The moral is "you can learn almost anything you want to learn by searching out resources on the net." A few weeks before last Christmas my wife heard me talking about memories of playing Cribbage with my dad decades ago. She surprised me with a Cribbage travel set as a Christmas gift. The Cribbage board came with a one page, two-sided set of instructions. When we left for our Christmas vacation trip to Victoria, Canada I included the travel set in the car, thinking that we could learn to play while driving and enjoy playing while staying in motels and hotels. Well, when I looked more closely at the instructions while traveling to our first hotel stop, I found them to be overly condensed; indeed, they were completely unintelligible, full of strange terms ("his nobs," "crib," "pone," etc.) and equally unintelligible instructions about dealing, counting, pegging, and scoring. The Cribbage board traveled with us throughout our one week trip, but we didn't play Cribbage. When we returned home I got on the computer right away and did a general search for "Cribbage" that immediately brought up many sites with information about learning Cribbage, the history of Cribbage, tournament Cribbage, software for Cribbage, and links to sites for playing Cribbage online. The link provided with this posting goes to the House of Cards section on Cribbage where many online resource links about Cribbage are organized, listed, and described. Within a few minutes of my first web search I located and printed some very helpful instructions and was able to start playing some Cribbage games with my wife within an hour. What had been very difficult in isolation, became very easy within the communication context of the Web. I also downloaded a shareware game for playing Cribbage that allowed me to continue to refine my knowledge of rules and scoring by playing against the computer software (http://casdra.com/interstellar/MacCribbage.html). The House of Cards site lists both locations for playing Cribbage online (against the computer or against other users signed on at the same time) and for downloadable software for Windows, Mac, Linux, Palms, etc. At first I lost most of the games and the computer won, but after a few days I began to win about a third of the games and then half of the games--I was learning and improving. I haven't yet ventured online to play Cribbage in online tournaments and I'm not sure that I will. I've been able to learn enough to play the game recreationally at home and to play the shareware game against my computer, that may be all that I want from the game. But I do know that if I do want to learn more and compete at higher levels, then that level of participation is available. One of the great benefits of the Internet, from the earliest days of ftping to Anonymous User download sites has been access to shareware and freeware. Another great benefit has been the ability to network with others interested in the same topics. For every interest there seems to be an interest group. Learning Cribbage is certainly not a great intellectual accomplishment, but it is learning. The way I was able to go about doing this learning is, I believe, a paradigm for the new world of online learning in which almost anyone can learn almost anything, just by hunting around and making use of the instructional resources that are readily available-- and by making contact with information and people who share common interests. [Three of the most entertaining and valuable sites that I located and have continued to use are the Cribbage Corner--Everything for the Cribbage Fiend (http://www.splange.freeserve.co.uk/cribbage.html), the Online Casinor Bonus Guide (http://www.pagat.com/adders/crib6.html), and the Cribbage Forum (http://www.cribbageforum.com/CribbageForum/). ] 2:57:21 PM    COMMENT []