TeledyN - Grand Theft Education - Comments

To understand the future of learning

TimmyG — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 06:36:35 -0500

To understand the future of learning (and the role of technology therein), we have to look beyond schools to other arenas of technology innovation, disruption, and adoption/adaptation in society -- including to video games. Amen. Yet, most games (including so-called 'educational games') to date have been produced in the absence of any coherent theory of learning or underlying body of research.

TimmyG

I'm not even sure if this is

mrG — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 16:22:42 -0400

I'm not even sure if this is relevent, it just strikes me as apropos, a shred of the story of why stories in the modern sense fail to satisfy. First day of school, the children brought home the catalogs of fundraiser books held out to parents to be purchased in the name of 'literacy' and going through the titles it just seems that something is missing. Far from fostering a 'literacy', there's so much that seems more a fostering of a certain mainstream nihilism, and it's from that where I stumble over these words about Platonov as just another instance ...

The powerful can't tell stories: boasts are the opposite of stories, and any story however mild has to be fearless and the powerful today live nervously. A story refers life to an alternative and more final judge who is far away. Maybe the judge is located in the future, or in the past that is still attentive, or maybe somewhere over the hill, where the day's luck has changed (the poor have to refer often to bad or good luck) so that the last have become first. Story-time (the time within a story) is not linear. The living and the dead meet as listeners and judges within this time, and the greater the number of listeners felt to be there, the more intimate the story becomes to each listener.

Stories are one way of sharing the belief that justice is imminent. And for such a belief, children, women and men will fight at a given moment with astounding ferocity. This is why tyrants fear storytelling: all stories somehow refer to the story of their fall.
[ That have not been asked:
ten dispatches about endurance in face of walls
by John Berger ]

Grand Theft Education

mrG — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 20:22:23 -0400

Fiercely educational, harmless fun or the Digital Menace, computer gaming is likely all of these things, each for it's own reasons as much as we all know there are some teachers who are worth their weight in tenure gold and others a veritable pox that could extinguish the inquisitive spark in just about anyone; what we do know is there's something about the top video games that is escaping educators, both in their competition for the minds and imaginations of students, and in their own craft of carving digital experiences that can draw them in, and it's to that end the latest wwwtools newsletter has assembled a long and thoughtful list of debate, debunk and best-practices on Gaming in the Classroom:

on the one hand, some educators will point out that apart from their undeniable power to motivate, games are capable of fostering the development of valuable skills in areas such as strategic thinking, communication and collaboration, group decision-making and negotiation, literacy and numeracy; on the other hand, others (perhaps less willing to accept the role of fun in education) see games as wasting valuable time, irrelevant to set curricula, and incapable of helping students to achieve mandated high-stakes outcomes.
[ wwwtools for teachers ]

As with so much in education, I'm not of the mind to say the games are good or bad unless we're willing to admit and confess that the entire opus of educational games committed to classrooms thus far are vacuous loads of thoughtless crap, which is maybe going a little too far (since I couldn't have possibly previewed them all) but you get my drift.