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TechnoratiWill video games save American education?
On-line games are being sold to teachers as a way to save the economy by revitalising the classroom. Hmmm.
No one, but no one, has detected a crisis in the video games industry. But everyone sees a crisis in education. Even teachers. Even geeks. And even manufacturers of video games.
A recent conference at the University of Indiana brought together academics, industry representatives, and teachers to discuss how to bridge the gap between kids' life on-line and their time in the classroom. Ruefully reflecting on the difference between the joy of the joystick and the joy of learning, one teacher at the Ackerman Colloquium asked: "Wouldn’t it be great if kids were willing to put in this much time on... challenging material in school and enjoy it so much?"
And not long ago, the Federation of American Scientists teamed up with the Entertainment Software Association in a conference about harnessing the power of video games for learning. Scientists from the Manhattan Project -- which harnessed the atom to create the A-Bomb -- founded the FAS. Now the organisation creates video games to harness "the potential of emerging information technologies to improve how we teach and learn".
Everyone is worried whether today's youth will have the skills to compete in global labour markets and to service an innovation-based economy. That's why many educators, assisted by the gaming industry, feel that games could save the American economy by turning your playground into your job.
Children and teens spend hours upon hours with on-line games, especially MMORPGs-- massive multi-player on-line role-playing games. According to the FAS, an average high school student spends about 316 hours a year gaming and 126 hours in the classroom. At the same time, fewer and fewer children are graduating from high school and many are dropping out. Attention spent on studies is dropping and teachers are struggling to get students to learn the necessary materials to pass state tests. Why not leverage this popular technology to revitalise education?
"The success of complex video games demonstrates games can teach higher order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change. These are the skills US employers increasingly seek in workers and new workforce entrants. These are the skills more Americans must have to compete with lower cost knowledge workers in other nations," says the FAS.
Really? Let's take a look at what the scientists claim.
In some areas, using gaming technology can and does produce results. Indiana teacher David McDevitt, for instance, uses games to teach history to his students. The technique is well-received by the students and does achieve great success. Simulation-based learning can work well to develop understanding of complex relationships. Similar gaming techniques are used by the Pentagon in war-planning and war studies as well, so the fit between history and gaming for simulation purposes works.
However, it would be dangerous to exaggerate the usefulness of technology. American education is in trouble for reasons that have little to do with the presentation of material. Test scores have been slumping for decades, long before the internet existed. Many indicators show that people were better educated decades ago in times before the world wide web.
The FAS report rhapsodises over the potential for on-line gaming to foster the skills employers are looking for. But it fails to note how the same technology has also impaired the skills employers are looking for.
Consistently, written communication skills rank highly with employers. in my view, more than any other single factor, the spell-check feature in Microsoft Word has ruined students' written communication skills by encouraging them to be lazy spellers and ignore grammar. Text messaging and instant messaging has made it even worse. I remember a Scottish schoolgirl's essay about her summer holidays: "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it's a gr8 plc." Now what sort of job has her cell phone prepared her for?
The main problem is that while kids may spend over 300 hours a year on gaming, the reasons behind that gaming are not easily (if at all) transferable to education. For instance, virtual community sites are forms of on-line games where people create characters to interact with others in a sterile and perfect little world.
The motivations behind people disconnecting from real society to log into fake on-line worlds deserve to be studied by psychologists, but escapism figures highly in such activity. How can this be harnessed for education?
One of the main drivers of the debate is simply a love of the latest fad. As someone who has worked in technology for years, I can testify that every few months there is something new that's going to "revolutionise" everything. The dot-com era was bulging with such promises. When 98 per cent of them were shown to be completely empty, we got the dot-com bust.
Web 2.0 and these internet technologies and games are the Next Big Thing. Applied in the right way, they can be a great help. But it needs be driven by fact and not by hype. Mitch Kapur, CEO of Linden Labs, the manufacturer of Second Life, an on-line game with about 9 million registered players, believes that MMORPGs have "the potential to fundamentally change how humans interact" and may even "accelerate the social evolution of humanity."
If the Next Big Thing will change everything, what is there left for the Next Next Big Thing to do?
While Mr Kapur can be forgiven his energy as he works for a company that makes money on such marketing buzz, a more sober look needs to be taken at the state of internet games. As a blogger and technologist, I agree that MMORPGs and internet gaming could change how humans interact.
But accelerating the social evolution of humanity? Pull the other one. I wonder if Mr Kapur has even logged into an MMORPG, or for that matter, if he has been on the internet much.
While there are some bastions of civil conduct on-line, for the most part the internet and gaming world is a brutal place. Most political columnists say that trying to have an intelligent discussion on-line is a non-starter. Blogs have done far more to degrade political discourse than to democratise the discussion. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft cater to the aggressive tendencies of mankind. If anything, MMORPGs and the rest of the internet have done more for devolution than evolution.
The Federation of American Scientists complain that schools are reluctant to adopt tools with unproven efficacy. Well, I say "bully for them!" Much more research is needed before the future of American school kids should be entrusted to massive multi-player on-line role-playing games. But, still, events like the Ackerman Colloquium and the FAS Summit on Educational Games are good start. As long as we move forward in a reasoned and sober way, our children will be better prepared for a changing world.
John Bambenek is a freelance columnist and blogger at Part-Time Pundit. He also writes for several other popular websites such as BC Magazine and the Internet Storm Center.
Great stuff.. Online games are a great way to make education more exciting
I for one believe that online video games are an effective way to teaching in a fun stress free manner..!
Crisis in education that might be, but I highly doubt selling online games to teachers and letting students play with it in the classroom will save the education.
Honestly, I strongly believe that if Education can fuse video games and the spirit of competition in the classroom, kids in general will feel more motivated, and actually WANT to perform better in class.
me personally i walked upon this site by accident searching for an mmorpg to waste my time i should be working in homework. i am an idea person i want to live a life of animation 3D and false truth...i think of ideas and “try” ( havent yet ) to draw them and model them out with 3ds max...im going to a high school that i am taking 4 courses to help my career and dream take flight...i know why a group of people want to make an educational low rated undr appreciated video game but sorry to say if you are trying to distract us from our school work and make us play a game that uhh duhh dee dee dee we know is for educational purposes...we frankly wont play it and play a real game
and what is that...the group that created the a-bomb...what a lame and poor excuse to put destructtion into a blog...i started with runescape a low pixel flash based rpg fun as hell but a total waste of my life i turned to console games once again fun as hell total waste of my life money once i completed the game in a couple days sooo i turned to a more challenging style of video games final fantasy hardest game any one person will play i liked what i played and geuss what got bored cause i beat the unbeatable...HOLLY CRAP im a loser haha XD…
ok mmo’s im currently waiting for requiem to come out i have an account and ive been following this game for a month now...if you have an educational game that the creators of the a-bomb have made give it to me...it should only take a couple weeks to make a low grade flash appropriate for school
ok child, student, gamer...guilty as charged
i agree much in what you are saying that students kids the future of the “world” are turning their cheek to a more enjoyable routine of sitting on a chair and doing what they want over what they should do...heck i have my mth homework right in front of me and i havent touched it for an hour except to get it out of the way of me food…
but to get on topic as to groups of people wanting to make educational games “fun” first put in what elementary middle school and highschool kids want...violence profanity anything that we arent supposed to watch but can anyways because we want to...seriously if you base an entire game off of...duuuh the sqaure root of 144 and you out that in a game i could see a little flash animation saying...shoot the amount of cans that you think is the square root...one two three etc.
it wont exactly work out as well as you planned i cant even see an educational video game being put to use in california and it actually having an influence...i mean it might for others but why spend my time on a game that has fake violence with colorfull blood as if you were promoting blood when i can log on to any mature rated mmo ( mmmorpg ) and get real violence real animated noodity...who likes that, get the real stuff...and at the same time im stimulating my imagination
I think that video games are highly reduce the level of education of children!
Could the following quick comment be passed on to the author, please? I’ve just caught up with this issue, because I didn’t receive important issues of MercatorNet while away. I’m not sure why.
My comment is that knowledge of correct spelling is a much less important literacy skill than knowledge of grammar. There are many children with special needs whose auditory processing problems make it very hard for them to be good spellers; but they can often be VERY good writers and thinkers with a sound understanding of linguistic STRUCTURE. Grasp of linguistic structure is VITALLY important in every language-based curriculum subject.
Knowledge of grammar is basic to an understanding of linguistic structure. So are many higher order thinking skills, of the kind usually possessed by philosophers.
The distinction I have just made is critical. I have spent a lifetime working on literacy. So I know which literacy skills are most important in civilised discourse! Spelling matters, and idiocies encouraged by quick SMS communications should be avoided; but sound spelling is not nearly as important as an understanding of how language works, and what best facilitates communication at its finest.
Teaching writing WELL requires a very thorough repertoire of skills
As you say, there are great projects in media literacy, in US.
Why do I stress media?. Because, there are a lot of courses on literature, but a few on communication, media. And they are part of our life, of our history, of our culture. And it’s not true that movies and games have “clinically demonstrable stultifying effect on the cerebral cortex of young students”. You are forgetting part of those studies’ conclusions.
Sometimes teachers and parents are ready to teach with the idea of “avoiding” media, “sensitizing” about bad TV contents, etc. Usually the education is focused in the negative side. In consequence, youngsters loose the interest to participate in. Education teaching indifference!.
Brin, Page, Spielberg are more famous than teachers. They are closer to youth lifestyle and way of perceiving reality. They become “good friends”!. What about if a teacher uses U2’s lyrics to explain freedom?. I know teachers who do that, with great success (and with Nirvana’s lyrics!).
Education is a process. Educators need to understand students, their world, their feelings, their emotions. And to take the best from them, guiding them to the real Truth.
So, why not to teach with new media?. Do you know that you could incentive imagination by virtual experiences?. You could check http://www.futurelab.org.uk.
Quoting Ratzinger “A kind of reciprocity emerges which points to the responsibilities of the media as an industry and to the need for active and critical participation of readers, viewers anand listeners. Within this framework, training in the proper use of the media is essential for the cultural, moral and spiritual development of children.”
It’s not a question of hardware. It’s a question to allow people an immersion to new realities and worlds. And, just to finish with a joke: Greeks taught without books. Probably we could come back to Plato’s times… what a nice world!. Only for educators, because I like innovations which improve society.
Reynaldo,
As a long-time educator, I have to say that your insistence that we must accommodate media, media, media in education smacks of fatalism. Why can’t we imagine educational regiments that do not incorporate a “world of media” media media? In fact, there is no need to imagine it because it is still happening in various--highly successful--pockets of education, at least here in the United States. Technology? Sure, a smartboard instead of a blackboard or an overhead projector instead of a handout are fine. But movies and video games? They have a clinically demonstrable stultifying effect on the cerebral cortex of young students, and the most prudent educators are turning back to what you referred to as 19th C. methods, but which should more accurately be called the methods of the educated human race throughout the observable historical record.
I do agree with your insistence on vocational knowledge for creating media, but only for some, and only after they have gotten a real education if they are capable of it (and media creators ought to be those capable of a real liberal education, otherwise the media will not be any good).
Hi John: good article and thanks to Mercator for publishing it.
Yet: what if FAS has created the A-bomb? (America saved the world the D-Day, and helped to defeat comunism, do you remember?); Second Life is not a game, it’s a virtual world (a bit different, you know). I agree with you in many aspects, but thanks God there are Americans who organize these kind of meetings.
We have to recognize it’s impossible to educate the millennium people with the same 19th century’s methods. It’s impossible to think in a world without media. It’s impossible to think in a world without internet, mobiles, video games, etc. As during the 20th Century it was impossible to avoid the books. Obviously there is an overdose of rhythm and interactions. Therefore, experts (specially educators) have to search a way, not only to “attract” the children and youth, but to help them to learn and develop their capabilities. Teachers have to accept that video game and media industries were more clever than them. They produce things that engage people. They constantly innovate. Summarizing, they know very well how to speak to the new generations. Teachers and parents, don’t. Who could blame the media/industry for that?. It’s absolutely necessary to educate people to use, create and enjoy the media, at the same time they become better persons.
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