my thoughts on the Education Arcade (Score 1)

Here's an excerpt of what I've written about the Education Arcade conference:

I saw two camps of thought on the usefulness of games in education. On the one hand, the old school thought holds the belief that modeling educational software after computer and video games can be a way of getting kids interested, almost fooled, into interacting with the software. I saw this idea mostly among the attendees of the conference, and they held these ideas even after some of the sessions were over which is too bad since the other thought, and the one that I think was being stressed by the academics like Jim Gee, is that current commercial games are frought with learning opportunities. We just need to find out what they are and use them to best effect. Obviously, there were some ideas in between like all the projects coming from MIT which can been seen as a new breed of educational games based on constuctivist models rather than behaviorist models.

In other words, there seem to be a good deal of industry folks and educators making educational software who still believe that content is the most important quality of an educational game. It might be interesting to note that the majority of people who believed this were older, say in their 40s to 60s. I believe that games of this nature can only be suited for the classroom and only because schools can limit what kids have access to. As soon as you take away that limit, in other words look at kids at home or outside of the classroom, educational software fails miserably. There's just no possible way for something made primarily for education to compete for the attention of kids against something made for entertainment. In particular I keep thinking of the "attention economy" that Lankshear and Knobel talk about ("Do We Have Your Attention?"). I would say that the games MIT is making are still being targeted towards schools. Revolution looks awesome and it might be fun for outside of the classroom, but it sounded like they were definitely making it for a classroom setting and will be creating external documents, lesson plans, and curriculum to supplement and surround the game itself.

Another trend at the conference was that games can be used to address social issues and might be a way of redefining the school system in America. Brenda Laurel gave a relatively zealous rant (to an "Amen, sister!") on the problem with educational games and how they (don't) fit into the classroom setting. She made some good points and I almost agree with her. I do think, however, that games whether overtly educational, like The Oregon Trail, or not, like Civilization, can be used very successfully in the classroom so long as the teacher plays the role of guide and provides a framework for the games (see Kurt Squire's dissertation on Civ). This moves teachers away from being the source of knowledge to people who direct the flow of attention and who get kids to think critically about what they are engaging with. (Again, see Lankshear and Knobel.) That's the problem at the root, isn't it?-that people are not being taught how to think critically.

It was suggested at the conference that a major reformation of the American school system is in order. As far as I can tell, educators in academia have been saying this since the end of WW2. Actually, if you want to go farther back, need I mention Dewey? So why is it that nothing has changed? A lot of people at the conference seemed to think that the video game generation were bringing with them a new way of thinking (see new capitalism) and that this would eventually replace the old-schoolers' methodology and the schools would naturally reform. Some people felt that it was high time to embrace the new line of thought and it manifests itself by embracing games of all sorts in the classroom. I would argue, however (see above), that, now more than ever, teachers are needed to guide students as they participate in these new classrooms. (Participation is the key to everything, for it is through participation that people become literate in whatever it is they are participating in. It is through participation that they become citizens.)

More can be read on a blog I post to: http://www.markdangerchen.net/cmgp/index.php?p=137