Gaming on education

The game of school: game theory has something to say about education
There's a think-tank session coming up in mid-May on this topic (more on this later), and in advance I'm really digging into current theory and controversy in this area - and there's a lot!

Let's start:

Getting your head around a more expansive understanding of serious gaming and its implications for the future of learning and education? Here are some thought-provoking background resources as an initial jump off -

The concepts and ideas on Clark Aldrich’s blog provide lots of food for thought - samples include:

1) Aldrich's time line for how he envisions the next five years will play out in terms of gaming and simulations and learning/education;

2) A venn diagram outlining the convergence:

3) An interesting interview transcript:

easily way of summarizing this approach is, "the world has changed - what schools need to teach should also change." But that simple statement will be hard, perhaps impossible, to achieve because schools have a dark secret. They rely on media. Schools can only teach in a way that is predictable and scalable if they rely on mass media. And again, because media today is linear, it forces a focus on passive "learning to know" skills rather than active "learning to do" skills. Schools today can't teach big skills like leadership, innovation, stewardship, and relationship management because they are not supported by today's linear media. Thus learning how "to do" is unscalable.

A different take on gaming and online life

South Korea has heavily gone down the road of integrating internet into education.
Watch the excerpts from "Digital Nation" recent PBS special on S Korean kids:

PBS: Last October we traveled to South Korea, one of the most advanced digital societies in the world. We wondered if Korea has any lessons to teach the rest of us as we move forward in the digital age. Much of the footage we shot on our trip aired as an episode of FRONTLINE/World on April 13, 2009.

.. I found both the segment with the kindergarten class being rotely taught netiquette (in isolation from actual use) as a standard part of the curriculum, and the "detox" center for gaming addicted children to be fascinating clips of what can go wrong.

My thought process...

Over the next bit, in the lead up to the Knowledge Ontario Ideas Forum (to be held in Toronto on May 21st at Oakham House, RyersonU) I intend to update and post what matters to me in this discussion space, and well as over on the main NING space set up for the forum...

Please add to the debate and share some ideas with me...