Professor James Paul Gee of the University of Wisconsin-Madison spoke on March 23, 2005, at the University of California at Irvine Distinguished Speaker Series in Education. His title was Literacy and Video-Game-Like Learning.
This talk will deal with the sorts of learning good video games recruit, how such principles would apply to schools, with or without games, and how the issues we confront here speak to current controversies in the areas of reading and literacy.
He addresses what he calls the “content fetish” in schools …the view that any academic area (whether physics, sociology, or history) is composed of a set of facts or a body of information and that the way learning should work is through teaching and testing such facts and information.
His counter to fact based learning is what he calls …”post-progressive pedagogies“, that is pedagogies that combine immersion with well-designed guidance such as what occurs in video-games.
Hmm, this will take more reading and thought. I agree with his premise that immersion and guidance can lead to deeper learning, and that games provide immersion and guidance. At the nominal level, this makes sense. I want to understand his technical argument to understand how a Tablet PC ISV might use his proposition. What do you think?
I’m shocked that he didn’t cite anything by David Thornburg like this!The idea of pen/ink aware simulations and simulation software is very cool. One product that has caught my eye is xThink’s MathJournal. Just showing it to the math teachers in my school was enough to get them to start looking at buying their own tablet pc’s! There are numerous simulation programs out there that I’d love to see become pen/ink aware, and I’m going to start hounding them…I wonder if Agilix InfiNotes can be made to work with STELLA?
I enjoy reading through your blog. By the way, if you are interested in talking about a link exchange with me at http://best-kid-games-online.com, please let me know.