Playing the Learning Game
Last year Lucy Bernholz from Blueprint Research & Design in San Francisco published a paper, Pedagogy, Playstations and the Public Interest, as part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative.
In the paper she addresses these three important questions:
1. How do digital media influence what and how youth learn, and what they should learn?2. What, if any, public responsibility do we have to provide these media as tools for learning?
3. If there is such a public purpose, how can it best be met?
What may be most interesting is that she focused her research specifically on one aspect of digital media - video games and gamers. Here is a peak at some of her conclusions.
What skills games teach, how they might be used to build content expertise, and how to use them effectively in both formal and informal learning and work environments is a series of questions to which researchers are approaching answers. How games matter - framed as a more complex issue than merely their relationship (or not) to violence - is a conversation that we can move toward, both in the general public and among policymakers. Games that are both fun and educational - either in the creation of them and/or while playing them - may be successfully introduced into the marketplace, if certain deliberate investments are made.There are both public and private interests at stake in this work...
A good read. Download the PDF from Blueprint's site.