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Ed Webb

Fun Inc: Why Games Are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield | Book... - 1 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...fun-inc-games-tom-chatfield

gaming games book review socialscience

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Apr 10 - Cached
  • Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield 288pp, Virgin Books, £11.99
  • games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
  • elf-and-safety roleplayer World of Warcraft
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • First, games are interesting in themselves, as constructions of space, logic and ideas (games are "a kind of playground for the mind"); second, they are interesting in their potential effect on other realms.
  • he possibility of using gamelike structures to produce empirical results in the social sciences
  • Chatfield's emphasis on games' fecund variety, on the other hand, will be valuable to non-specialists: he writes evocatively not just about Grand Theft Auto but about indie gems such as Passage, where your quest is meaningless and you die after five minutes. His comparison of videogames to installation art, meanwhile, is striking, and he even manages to make World of Warcraft sound interesting – though his awed description of a particular sword as being "the length of a full-grown orc" is rather lovable nonsense to someone who doesn't know how long orcs grow.
  • "the best games are a trigger for discussion, reading and writing – not an end to it"
  • Ed Webb on 02 Apr 10
     
    games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".
Lisa Spiro

SMALLab announces first funding, customer for classroom learning technology | ASU News - 0 views

asunews.asu.edu/20110922_SMALLabgrant

Kinect embodied-education

shared by Lisa Spiro on 23 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Lisa Spiro on 23 Sep 11
     
    "Emobodied learning" uses Kinect to promote collaboration, kinesthetic & multimodal learning
Ed Webb

digital digs: Welcome to badge world - 3 views

www.alex-reid.net/...welcome-to-badge-world.html

gamification education change11 opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • That's what this is about: making things count, commodifying life and passion in the context of a marketplace of education and expertise. However, it is painfully obvious how quickly that gets reversed, how quickly we shift from pursuing something because we are interested in it (and then retrospectively looking for a reward) to pursuing something strictly for the reward.
  • When we look at all the free, DIY learning that is out there now, it's free precisely because it hasn't been commodified. You can download stuff from MIT's Open Courseware because that kind of learning has no commerical value. If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost. All the big textbook publishers and educational technology companies will just jump right on badges. All those Sylvan learning type companies will be selling badges. Edutainment video games and such will come with badges and thus be more expensive.  Badges won't make learning cheaper. We'll be spending more money on education than ever, and we won't get any better results because the motives for learning will still be all wrong.
  • I'm trying to imagine my kids' lives (ages 10 and 12) in badge-world. We already live in what I consider a college-crazy community where parents of 12-year olds wonder whether keeping their kid in travel soccer is the best way to get a college scholarship or if they should switch to golf or oboe or fill-in-the-blank. Imagine a world where every potential after-school activity is commodified as a badge. The first thing parents ask is "which badge is most valuable for getting my kid into college or a good job?" Then it's all about the badges. My kids can just give up on ever having a single moment of joy in their lives. Even if they were going to enjoy something, how can they when they've already committed to this transactional experience instead?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Extrinsic rewards like badges might be good incentives for certain kinds of rote behaviors or to get someone to try something new. But, as I understand it, they have a negative impact on creative, problem-solving activites (i.e. the kinds of things we really need our students to learn to do). These are the things you have to want to do for some intrinsic reason, not to get some badge.
  • Bryan Alexander on 16 Sep 11
     
    I'm still gathering my thoughts. A few stabs: 1) MIT's OCW is seeking corporate endorsements in order to survive. Is that commodified? 2) "We already live in what I consider a college-crazy community" - doesn't seem to be the main people these badges are after.
Bryan Alexander

How Videogames Like Minecraft Actually Help Kids Learn to Read | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...video-game-literacy

education game

shared by Bryan Alexander on 08 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 08 Nov 14
     
    Brecht Vandenbroucke Minecraft is the hot new videogame among teachers and parents. It's considered genuinely educational: Like an infinite set of programmable Lego blocks, it's a way to instill spatial reasoning, math, and logic-the skills beloved by science and technology educators. But from what I've seen, it also teaches something else: good old-fashioned reading and...
Bryan Alexander

Can a Video Game Teach Just as Well as a Professor? - 2 views

www.bloomberg.com/...h-just-as-well-as-a-professor-

pedagogy game simulation

shared by Bryan Alexander on 22 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 22 Oct 15
     
    "The chance to learn about leadership and management from top corporate strategists is part of the business school guarantee. But what if your B-School professor could be replaced by technology, without sacrificing any educational payoff? An experiment conducted by John Beck, Ph.D., at Hult International Business School found that a business strategy video game proved just as effective in teaching students as a professor...."
  • Brett Boessen on 22 Oct 15
     
    Seems like Beck's conclusions are largely in line with other literature on games and learning. I'm curious about the fact that this has come up in the context of an MBA program and not another field.
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