Emerging Technologies Consulting

You might think it’s weird for an education blog to post about a game for the Nintendo DS, but I think this game and its ilk are things that kids can really learn from.  First, the game requires kids to come up with creative solutions, typing in things that might work for any given objective.  For example, to cross a river, one could build a bridge or a ramp and a motorcycle to jump over it.  It’s not as scripted as similar games might be. What seems more interesting to me as an educator is the ability to write your own game.  There is a simple scripting language kids can use to build their own levels.  From that, they learn the logic needed to excel at things like programming or even transportation management and they have the ability to be creative.  Increasingly, I think that’s where the best learning happens and where teaching should be focused, on that intersection between the creative and the logical, much like writing a sonnet.

This little nugget about an NYU course on video games and cognition popped up in my reader.  It sounds like a cool course, but the end of the article focuses on parents thinking that it, like other courses on popular culture, is watered down.  This is a common reaction to courses by everyday folks, and especially parents, who are shelling out thousands of dollars, thinking, “if I wanted my kid to learn about video games, I would have plopped her in front of the xbox.”  But not studying video games is actually a bad idea.  We want students to think critically, and one way to do that is to have them read and write about Shakespeare.  But, much as Shakespeare’s ideas still hold true today, students don’t always connect the dots to today.  Taking a closer look at video games and how they are shaping our culture gives students the opportunity to think critically about something they may do every day without really thinking about its effect on their lives.  The NYU course proposes to focus on cognition, which could be a quite fruitful avenue to explore.  How do people learn to play Guitar Hero?  What strategies do they use?  And can those strategies be applied to other areas, such as math or science?

While parents may balk at these courses, we can’t just ignore the world around us.  Video games are a part of our lives and learning more about them is one way to learn more about our world.

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• Game and Learn: An Introduction to Educational Gaming (hippasus.com)
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Steph's drawing of SIMS house

Many parents and teachers lament the obsession kids have with video games and have concerns over the violent and sexualized content, but not all games are bad and many of them, even the ones that look bad on the surface, can actually help kids learn.  James Paul Gee has argued that the way kids approach games should be a lesson to educators about how to make learning more engaging.  On the left is a picture my daughter drew to help her design a house in The SIMS, a game she really loves.  She spends all kinds of time arranging rooms and houses, building stories from the different characters she creates.  She’s nine, and already she’s developing spatial skills that may lead to an interest in architecture or engineering.  In creating stories, she learns about social interactions between people, how to develop a narrative, what people will be interested in (appreciation of audience), and description.  A couple of days ago, she replicated The Biggest Loser in The SIMS, creating Bob and Jillian, and several “contestants,” who got to move out of the house once they were fit enough.

I think we don’t always know what a kid will get out of a game.  My son learned about baking from Runescape and has helped me do some actual baking since.  My daughter also plays Spore and has learned something about evolution from it.  In social games, kids also learn about how to interact with kids of different ages.  My son regularly plays Runescape with an 18-year-old who’s in the army.  As long as parents stay involved in these interactions and monitor them, they can be good ways for kids to learn appropriate behavior around others.

There are pleny of people out there researching how games can be used in teaching and learning and many games are being built specifically for learning, but we shouldn’t knock some of the teaching and learning moments offered by those games we play “just for fun.”

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• Video games are good for you! (elearnspace.org)

On Wednesday, I’ll be conducting a day-long workshop at Gettysburg College through NITLE’s wonderful programming.  In preparation for the workshop, I prepared the following resources.  There’s so much out there now on using different social software tools for teaching that it’s hard to keep the list short.  I just threw a few things in each category.  If you know of other resources I should include, let me know.

General–interesting things on Social Software in Education

• Michael Wesch from Academic Commons, Learning in New Media Environments (The whole issue is worth exploring)
• Clay Shirky on Tagging
• Mark Prensky (classic writing on digital natives, gaming, education, etc.)

Blogs

• Academic Blog Wiki
• Research Blogging
• Blog Software

Wiki Assignments

• Writing/Evaluation Assignment
• Wikipedia’s invitation to participate and ideas for assignments
• Wikiversity
• Educause: 7 Things You Should Know about Wikis
• Wikis in Plain English (video)

Social Bookmarking

• List of articles/resources on using social bookmarking

Images

• The Commons at Flickr
• FlickrVision

Social Networking

• Social Networking for Educators
• 25 Apps for Facebook for Educations

Gaming

• SLED
• Second Life vs. WoW for learning
• Language Learning in WoW