What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy

In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee attempts to respond to the many critics who dismiss playing video games as a “waste of time” by discussing and demonstrating how video games actually communicate information and teach specific skills incredibly efficiently and effectively, how children and young adults actually learn a great deal by playing video games (and enjoy themselves at the same time!), and how schools and teachers could actually learn a great deal from video games as well – about engaging students and encouraging true learning.

Gee begins by summarizing the arguments of those who view video games as a “waste of time,” stating that in their view (and unfortunately, in the view of many current educators and administrators), important knowledge is “content”: facts and figures that can be “drilled and skilled” – learned and memorized by students, and then measured and assessed by standardized tests. This is effective education in their eyes, and they view any other form of work (especially playing video games) that does not involve such learning as “meaningless.”

The absurdity of such an approach is immediately evident to Gee, and he attempts to help the reader appreciate this absurdity by considering another type of “gaming”: the game of basketball. “Imagine a textbook that contained all the facts and rules about basketball read by students who never played or watched the game,” he writes. “How well do you think they would understand this textbook? How motivated to understand it do you think they would be?” Not. At. All.

Isn’t that absurd? Wouldn’t it be absurd to try to teach children the game of basketball by forcing them to memorize all of the facts and rules related to it rather than by actually playing it? “But we do this sort of thing all the time in school with areas like math and science,” Gee rightly observes. True learning only occurs when the game of basketball (or any type of subject or skill) is experienced directly by the learner, and that is the primary reason why Gee believes that video games are actually better at facilitating learning than the current flawed educational system in place in many of our schools and enforced by many of our teachers and administrators.

Rather than being the “waste of time” that most adults believe them to be, Gee concludes that video games “encourage [the player] to think of himself as an active problem solver, one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes; one who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning.” In sharp contrast to much of what passes for education in this era of “No Child Left Behind” which forces students to simply “ritualize the solutions to problems,” the playing of video games encourages children and young adults “to be the sort of problem solver who leaves himself open to finding new ways to solve new problems in new situations.”

If you are at all interested in education and/or video games, or are at least willing to have your assumptions about education and/or video games challenged (and hopefully corrected), then I highly encourage you to read Gee’s book. Support your local library and check out What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy!

Web 2.0 at Work

I didn’t really have too terribly many occasions to use Web 2.0 technologies during my student teaching, but whenever the opportunity arose, I most definitely took advantage of it, often incorporating excerpts from blogs or streaming videos into my instruction.

I also even encouraged students to consider creating their own digital audio or video content instead of just writing an essay and turning it in. In one very memorable instance, a student created a short video for an assignment and then uploaded it to YouTube, which made it very easy for me to view and to share with other teachers and students (with his permission, of course).

Also, while none of the teachers that I worked with used them, at various department meetings I would hear teachers at the lower grade levels discussing the use of blogs and wikis in their classes. One common use for these two particular Web 2.0 technologies was that students were asked to keep a daily journal or a reading journal in which they wrote about their reactions to the content covered in class that day or the material that they read for homework that night, which they would then post and allow the teacher and/or the other students in the class to comment on.

Another similar yet different use of blogs and wikis in the classroom involved students would being asked to write reviews of the books, short stories, plays and poems that they read for class and to then post them, allowing other students to comment on their reviews and note whether they agreed or disagreed with that student’s assessment.

While this sounded very interesting and appealing to me and to the other teachers, when I talked to my actual students about using blogs and wikis in the classroom, the reaction that I received was overwhelmingly negative. Even though they were “digital natives” and have in many cases grown up reading and even contributing to blogs and wikis, that didn’t make the idea of having to use them for class any more appealing than any other type of assignment.

I guess homework is still homework to them, no matter how technologically trendy the teachers try to make it.