This excellent video came across our radar by James Paul Gee, Professor at Arizona State University. We concur with his arguments here. The clip is entitled “hands on learning with video games,” but it discusses a lot more that needs to happen in education besides video games.
It’s hard to watch this video without getting incredibly excited about the potential here to change the way people learn and get better.
- All a video game is just problem solving — All you do is get assessed every moment. Games essentially are a form of assessment – the most painful and ludicrous part of schooling. Games don’t separate learning and assessment
- “Seeing learning not just knowledge as facts but knowledge you produce collaboratively”
- He talks about the importance of situated learning and compares the use of a chemistry textbook with the normal use of a –game manual– You use it as a reference only when you’ve actually experienced something.
- He references the Sid Meier game Civilization (my all time favorite game growing up). In Civ, there was a “Civopedia” if I remember correctly that you could learn about countries and wonders of the world while you were playing the game, not as a reference text that you would read before playing.
- Kids want to produce, they don’t just want to consume.
- Schooling in the ability to solve problems and contribute to them collaboratively.
- People organize into groups faster than ever into passion communities — They’re way different than school.
- In passion communities you are often mentoring and also being mentored
- Modern kids see technology converging — cross media savants.
- Games are engaging kids in reading and writing more and more, contrary to popular belief.
- Many schools are just “test-prep” academies
- Teachers have to be rewarded for innovating themselves and bringing new tools into their classrooms.
- We’ve effectively deprofessionalized teachers – We’ve supervised out all of their creative responsibilities. Professional responsibilities as teachers need to be reintroduced.
- People who are going into teaching are not digitally savvy. This needs to change
- We have to make teaching a lot more sexy than it is.
- Creating radically new learning environments (the actual physical spaces, as in schools and museums). He suggests that we solve REAL problems in the world with students? I ought to show him BettrAt Challenges.
- Schools now have new competition from India and China that will put more pressure on them and contributing to the innovation crisis – could bring about a paradigm shift in college.
- Kids are learning 24-7 and more focused on the creative and collaborative.
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