video games and education notes

Hi Sherol,

I read your notes on video games and education. I'm sure I don't have
the whole picture since I wasn't present for the presentation, but I
think I have the general idea you were trying to convey.

While I agree with some of what you said, such as education being in
"competition with entertainment for the attention of youth", and how
education sticks "to traditional approaches on teaching, while
technology is pushing for entertainment to be evermore stimulating."

But regarding your conclusion, "As our culture is ever-changing, so
should our attempts in educating the next generation to come. The
involvement of technology in the classroom should increase in
correlation with the rapid advancements in technological research.
Since education is resistant toward changing its approach, each
generation of students is growing more and more detached toward those
old-fashioned methods of teachings. Therefore, it is detrimental to
our society to overlook digital-entertainment as a means of
stimulating learning. Conclusively, we MUST integrate video-games into
the classroom and this will not occur unless more legitimate research
is conducted at Universities.",
I think that I either (1) don't understand how we would do this,
and/or (2) disagree that we -should- do this.

I recognize that entertainment changes and gets bigger, while
education continues to do the same thing, but I don't think that means
we have to change the education system.

I'm also not sure that making education entertaining would work or
improve it. For example, I don't think Medieval Philosophy -can- be
more entertaining than Kate Rogers teaches it, or that the differences
between private, protected, and public class methods -can- be taught
in a highly entertaining or highly stimulating fashion.

School is fun, but it isn't as exciting as watching Neo fight hundreds
of Agent Smith clones or as awesome as watching space marines blow
away dozens of aliens with automatic weapons (in the movie, Aliens).

Reading David Lewis's view of Modal Realism is exciting but it is very
different from watching the Terminator fire a shotgun at the T-1000,
or winning a clan match of Team Fortress or CTF.

Does what I've said make sense?
What are your thoughts on how we could incorporate excitement into
education in competitive ways to straight-up entertainment?

In Christ,
Mark Strobert

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the emphasis isn't on improving education; moreso on why is there such deprecation toward interactive media. I'm not out to cheapen education, rather embellish it. for the presentation, in particular, it was mainly emphasizing early high school and middle school education, so college would be a whole different ball game.

here is just one example (from university of alberta)

http://www.gamesconference.org/digra2005/viewabstract.php?id=226

my research is just on interactive storytelling as a media of its own (apart from video games, movies, and novels).

http://copland.udel.edu/~paladin/agents/