{"id":2359,"date":"2012-07-04T08:32:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-04T14:32:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/?p=2359"},"modified":"2014-09-12T11:58:33","modified_gmt":"2014-09-12T17:58:33","slug":"is-the-structure-of-current-schooling-in-conflict-with-video-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/minkhollow.ca\/beckerblog\/2012\/07\/04\/is-the-structure-of-current-schooling-in-conflict-with-video-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Structure of Current Schooling in Conflict with Video Games?"},"content":{"rendered":"Approximate Reading Time: <\/span> 6<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

Memento Mori | Virtual World Learning and Whyvillle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The G4C<\/a> Rant (Games for Change) has become quite a thing, at least for those who follow such things. Memento Mori comes from this year’s.<\/p>\n

How can\/do games promote learning? and What role might games play in the classroom?<\/p>\n

Dr. Fowler suggests that maybe part of the reason that getting games into classrooms is so difficult is that the classrooms themselves, along with the curricula, and the system as a whole is structured for a different medium – a linear one. It could even be said that the entire formal education system from university down to kindergarten is structured around books and lectures – both inherently linear things.<\/p>\n

Perhaps even worse,could it be we bending the medium of the videogame to conform to the linear sensibilities of the currently dominant medium?<\/p>\n

Hmmmmm.<\/p>\n

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The entire post by\u00a0James M. Bower, PhD is repeated below:<\/p>\n

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Memento Mori<\/h1>\n
Posted on

\"\"<\/a>Having received the G4C invitation to rant, the next obvious and difficult question was what to rant about?\u00a0 So many possible subjects \":-)\" .\u00a0 The G4C conference, this year in particular, was an interesting mix of academics, game developers, government officials and various high end gaming and learning pundits, all there to discuss how games could be used to advance social good.\u00a0 Now in its 9th<\/sup> iteration, and with the growing interest in the specific question of how games might promote learning, a large contingent of the speakers and audience were specifically intent on figuring out what role games might play (sic) in classrooms.<\/p>\n

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Having first designed a computer game involving a virtual corn farm (I kid you not) for a 3rd<\/sup> grade classroom in 1984, I have spent some time both considering and playing with this question: for the last 13 \u00bd years as one of the founders and directors of the virtual learning world Whyville.net.\u00a0 Over those years, I have become more and more convinced that game-based learning and the larger educational opportunities provided by networked computers may be fundamentally miss-matched to the current structure of classrooms, curriculum and the educational system as a whole.\u00a0\u00a0 This, in turn, has led me to consider how pre-digital educational technology, and in particular the printing press and the university lecture hall have influenced the current system. Inevitably, this has meant a growing number of front and back of the room assertions that no part of the current structure of the educational system should be taken for granted, and in particular, that simple gamification of existing classrooms or curriculum misses the point and the real opportunity.\u00a0 But how to present that thought in six minutes (or so \u00a0\ud83d\ude42 ) in a way that might cause some small segment of the audience to reflect on educational history.<\/p>\n

I decided to appear before the G4C audience in the form of a 15th<\/sup> century Grand Guild Master addressing the crowd as if they too were Guild Masters making decisions about our educational future 600 years ago.\u00a0 For reactions, search twitter for \u201cJames Bower\u201d and \u201c Pirate\u201d\u00a0 \":-)\"<\/p>\n

\"\"The G4C Rant:<\/p>\n

Hello and greetings my fellow Grand Gild Masters.\u00a0 It is a privilege to be able to address you today.\u00a0 I come before you, however, with a serious concern weighing on my countenance.\u00a0 A concern born of a new technology now being wed to an institution whose marriage together will likely have long-term consequences we should consider.<\/p>\n

That technology, based on moveable type, and recently demonstrated in Strasbourg by the serial entrepreneur (and I must say somewhat adventuresome) Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg<\/strong>, is at once a wondrous invention, with great potential for engagement, and on the other hand an invention, perhaps for that reason, that will likely pattern much of what we do and how we do it for generations to come.<\/p>\n

I am here to remind you of \u201cMemento Mori\u201d \u2013 \u201cremember we die\u201d, but the structures we build often persist.<\/p>\n

To put it in plain terms, my concern is not for the movable type itself, or the easy printing that it allows, although I predict considerable social and political disruption may well result.\u00a0 Instead, I am concerned with what will likely happen as our universities, as they are wont to do, take this technology as their own and use it to solidify their hold on education.<\/p>\n

Remember, my friends, that 400 years ago, it was we, the Grand Guild Masters who built the first University in Bologna as a universitas magistrorum et scholarium<\/em>, a \u201ccommunity of teachers and scholars\u201d, devoted to teaching in the old ways, one-on-one, \u201chands on\u201d \u2013 the way that our own guilds have taught since and continue to teach.<\/p>\n

But what happens my friends when these universities, as they are sure to do, fall in love with printed works.\u00a0 Remember what the greatest teacher, Socrates said about learning from books. As recounted by Plato in Phaedrus<\/em>, \u201cwritten works are an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

My fear, my friends and colleagues is that the ability of printed books to capture and make legitimate the endless ruminations of academics, will create an edifice and an institution that feeds on itself, becomes more and more distant from real society and the real objectives of education and learning.\u00a0 Learning will retreat within brick walls more and more separate from its causes and effects and more and more in the hands of academics around which to construct their own house of cards.<\/p>\n

Will the ability to cheaply publish books, for example, mean that the academic disciplines that we have struggled to keep together, will inevitably divide and specialize, with books on Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Art, separate and unrelated.\u00a0 Will the Doctor of Philosophy we now hold in such high esteem, instead become broad in name only, with the actual training and focus and understanding of any one graduate far more limited?<\/p>\n

And will the ability to require our students to READ our thoughts, now mean that we ourselves no longer have to interact with our students, instead, for example, standing in front of 10\u2019s, or even hundreds of them, simply reading back our own words.\u00a0 What will happen to fun \u2013 to the excitement and opportunity presented by the rhetorical games of Socrates, or other games that we humans have always played to learn and change?<\/p>\n

And given the natural tendency for academics to self aggrandize, how much of that education will revolve around questions of what?, when? how?, and worse yet \u2018who\u2019?.\u00a0 Will we build communities nothing more than What-villes, and When-villes and How-villes and again worse yet Who-villes?\u00a0 What will happen to Why?\u00a0 A much harder question to address in printed form and without real interaction.\u00a0 How do we do Why-ville? within this new structure?\u00a0 I ask you?<\/p>\n

And won\u2019t all of this change and transformation result in yet a further separation between education for its own sake, and the real ultimate objective of education, which is to train young people in skills valuable to our communities and to themselves so they can create a livelihood for themselves and their families?\u00a0 Will there be a time in the future when a student graduating from our great universities and educated at a distance through books, will have no real skills but have paid a great cost?\u00a0 Such a great distance from our great guilds who built the universities in the first place.<\/p>\n

Of course I know and understand that our populations are beginning to grow and we must therefore use what technology we have to educate.\u00a0 And of course, this new technology, the printing press, is infinitely scalable.\u00a0 However, we must all know in our heart of hearts that this is not ultimately the right technology for this purpose.\u00a0 For that reason, someone will, someday invent a new and more appropriate educational technology.\u00a0 Whether that technology emerges from water or fire, soil or sand, it will emerge.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I know not when, whether 200 years or 600 years.\u00a0\u00a0 And here is my greatest concern \u2013 that when that technology emerges, the institutions of education we have built around ourselves and around the printed press will be so strong and well established, that they will fight to coopt the new technology.\u00a0 That they will attempt to bend it to their own image \u2013 use it as a new form of book, strive to maintain control of its use.\u00a0 Seek to maintain their position at the controlling center.<\/p>\n

We can only hope my friends that the technology, whatever it is, will be strong enough to force its own will and return learning and education back to its roots.\u00a0 Let the games of Socrates and the learning games of children back in the door.\u00a0 In fact, break down the doors altogether and once again link learning to its true purposes in human society.<\/p>\n

So again I say, memento Mori, remember we die \u2013 but the things we build, especially in times of great change, often persist \u2014 with significant consequences.<\/p>\n