Gaming in Education
October 10th, 2006 by trottahe
I saw this video on Angela’s blog.
One of the speakers is James Paul Gee, who authored What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, a book I am now reading for my independent study at Columbia this semester. I grabbed the link to tie the issues discussed with points made in the book … view the link below.
This video points out that virtual worlds in educations can be used for authenic and experiental learning, enabling students to explore subject areas more deeply, experiencing choice and consequence and the ability to play with complex variables only possible in these environments.
Gee adds that these virtual spaces and games allow students the ability to associate language with images, action and dialog, enabling students to understand word meaning in the context of a problem to solve. I never looked at these virtuals worlds from this viewpoint … interesting.
Clark Aldrich identifies the ability to incorporate games into the curriculum as the teaching skill of the future … the immediate future that is. I’m not sure many educators see the use of these virtual spaces for the potential they hold. The NMC Horizon report identified the use of virtual worlds and gaming as one of the emerging technologies most likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning and creative expression within higher education within the next two to three years.
Yet, we are plagued with technical issues when using these worlds in the classroom. Just yesterday, we had problems with students making accounts in Second Life. In an effort to resolve the problem, so students can participate in the class activity within Second Life, we found Linden Labs to be responsive. Here lies the challenge. It is difficult to encourage faculty to use emerging technologies in the classroom if the technology itself has issues. In addition, some of these environments are very labor-intensive to run, making a good experience for users dependent on special hardware requirements, not often found in the average classroom. Unable to use Second Life on university issued laptops, students needed to use a desktop in one of the special labs to have a full experience. Even then, students were waiting for objects to rez in.
When using virtual words/digital gaming in the classroom, consideration needs to be made as to the vendor interest and availability to support educators using the world. It will not help if a third of the class can not participate in the activity because they can’t make an account. The most frustrating part is not being able to get the problem resolved.
