Grand Theft Education
The cover story of the September 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine is a forum entitled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. Participants in the forum include Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You), Ralph Koster (video game designer), Jane Avrich and Thomas De Zengotita (authors and high school teachers), and Bill Wasik (senior editor at Harper's).
While the forum is good read, I was disappointed that they didn't have someone who actually studies the intersection of gaming and learning (I can think of a few folks here at Madison who would fit the bill rather nicely). I felt that the group really only skated on the surface of the possibilities and intricacies of video games as learning environments. I wonder whether there is an unedited, more complete record of their conversation available somewhere.
One area that they did briefly discuss was the phenomenon of players writing game guides. Clearly the impulse to write guides is one that cuts across areas of expertise, with examples both amateur and professional (off the top of my head: travel guides, restaurant guides, ratemyprofessor.com serves to help one navigate the game of school, etc). I wonder whether the act of creating game guides is a performance of proficiency that could be incorporated into epistemic games. For example, in Journalism.net, the type of things that reporters choose to write might be a useful way to assess the performance of the editors, or simply to improve the next iteration of the game.
While the forum is good read, I was disappointed that they didn't have someone who actually studies the intersection of gaming and learning (I can think of a few folks here at Madison who would fit the bill rather nicely). I felt that the group really only skated on the surface of the possibilities and intricacies of video games as learning environments. I wonder whether there is an unedited, more complete record of their conversation available somewhere.
One area that they did briefly discuss was the phenomenon of players writing game guides. Clearly the impulse to write guides is one that cuts across areas of expertise, with examples both amateur and professional (off the top of my head: travel guides, restaurant guides, ratemyprofessor.com serves to help one navigate the game of school, etc). I wonder whether the act of creating game guides is a performance of proficiency that could be incorporated into epistemic games. For example, in Journalism.net, the type of things that reporters choose to write might be a useful way to assess the performance of the editors, or simply to improve the next iteration of the game.
posted by Gumshoe at 11:06 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home