August 03, 2005
Gaming and Education
Role of video game technology in educational settings
Innovate: an interesting journal of online education, recently devoted an entire online issue to gaming in education. I have begun reading through the articles and find them marvelous. Let's look at the first one: “What would a state of the art instructional video game look like?” by J.P. Gee.
Before you run fleeing for your life from that very title, let me suggest a few parts of the article that sound a very different note, one which those of us in faculty support units need to heed.
Education, K-12 and higher ed, is suffering from a “continued allegiance to bad theories of learning.” Ouch. That's rather harsh. How about if we say that the theories of learning are out-dated, rather than simply “bad.” He does make a telling reference to what he has called “content fetish,” and, being an ex-high school English teacher, I know what that means. I felt compelled to cover British literature in one year. Tough job.
He then moves up a level of abstraction and begins to explore what defines a “domain of knowledge.” In my work with Educause's NLII in their virtual community of practice pilot project, I became very familiar with looking at an area of learning as a domain of knowledge, defining that domain, and trying to create a virtual learning environment that would embody that domain. Heady stuff.
“Any domain of knowledge, academic or not, is first and foremost a set of activities and experiences.”
That's a good premise. Because it moves us seamlessly from the traditional domains of knowledge that originated in Greek times and were formalized in medieval times as the university system developed to the 21st century. Now. Let's look past that spell-binding term “academic,” and consider a university of a different kind.
An article on the Fast Company blog (a very rich feed), “Welcome to Video Game University,” describes a Video Game University. This institution was created because of one company's perception of “the talent shortage that now grips the whole industry.” Some statistics will reveal a little bit about the economics and perceived value of this university:
- 20,000 prospective students requested applications
- 800 applied
- 60 were accepted
Since games are never produced by one person, the entire learning structure is based on teams. One student notes, “We're trying to grab the school by the throat and take everything we can from it.”
When was the last time you heard a traditional university student respond like that to the experience of freshman year?
Reading the two articles side by side triggered some new areas of thought about teaching and learning. Thoughts?
