Group items tagged

What is it about games that is transcendent? Perhaps it’s the fact that games are optional, they are obstacles that we volunteer to overcome. Games are what we choose to do. They are what we are drawn to when we have a choice about how to spend our time and energy.  Games are freedom.

There is something transcendent about playing games that lifts us up and out of the tedium and pain of everyday life.

When we ask “Are games good for us?” we should take more seriously the idea that games helps us feel better, in the moment, and that this is important work. Reducing the time we spend experiencing negative emotions and increasing the time we spend experiencing positive emotions is a fundamental good in and of itself. Even if games don’t change anything else in our lives, the power to change how we feel in the moment is a very good thing indeed.

dialogue is far removed, however, from the intensely heated conflict that exists at the smaller, more personal scale. On the one hand you have the millions of Americans who play games, whether on a console or a smartphone, and have been raised in a time where such things are ubiquitous. On the other is a (generally older) population whose exposure to games has been limited to the most visible examples of the medium, including billion-dollar series like Call of Duty and notorious time sinks like FarmVille that paint a limited portrait of gaming's full range.

"You’re not wrong to be concerned about the time your son spends playing video games," wrote Moody. "But let me ask you this: If there were no video games here, wouldn’t there be some other stimulus that could threaten his time by diverting his attention away from, wait, what did you call it? 'What I feel are much more worthwhile and ultimately rewarding pursuits.’ 

fears about video games are understandable. Like anything else, they can become the focal point of unhealthy behavior all too easily, a point Moody is quick to emphasize. As Moody says again and again, though, that’s hardly the fault of video games.

You’ve written that too many teachers are “un-Googleable.” What do you mean by that and why does it matter? What I mean is that too few teachers have a visible presence on the Web. The primary reason this matters is that the kids in our classrooms are going to be Googled—they're going to be searched for on the Web—over and over again. That's just the reality of their lives, right? So they need models. They need to have adults who know what it means to have a strong and appropriate search portfolio—I call it the “G-portfolio.” But right now—and this is my ongoing refrain—there’s no one teaching them how to learn and share with these technologies. There's no one teaching them about the nuances involved in creating a positive online footprint. It's all about what not to do instead of what they should be doing. The second thing is that, if you want to be part of an extended learning network or community, you have to be findable. And you have to participate in some way. The people I learn from on a day-to-day basis are Googleable. They’re findable, they have a presence, they’re participating, they’re transparent. That’s what makes them a part of my learning network. If you’re not out there—if you’re not transparent or findable in that way—I can’t learn with you.

Why do you think many teachers are not out there on the Web? I think it’s a huge culture shift. Education by and large has been a very closed type of profession. “Just let me close my doors and teach”—you hear that refrain all the time. I’ve had people come up to me after presentations and say, “Well, I’m not putting my stuff up on the Web because I don’t want anyone to take it and use it.” And I say, “But that’s the whole point.” I love what David Wiley, an instructional technology professor at Brigham Young University, says: “Without sharing, there is no education.” And it’s true.

What could a school administrator do to help teachers make that shift? Say you were a principal? What would you do? Well, first of all, I would be absolutely the best model that I could be. I would definitely share my own thoughts, my own experiences, and my own reflections on how the environment of learning is changing. I would be very transparent in my online learning activity and try to show people in the school that it’s OK, that it has value. I think it’s very hard to be a leader around these types of changes without modeling them.

he had happened on an emerging educational philosophy, one that applies the logic of the digital age to the classroom. That logic is inexorable: Access to a world of infinite information has changed how we communicate, process information, and think.

In 1970 the top three skills required by the Fortune 500 were the three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 1999 the top three skills in demand were teamwork, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills. We need schools that are developing these skills.”

That’s why a new breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.

We are deeply and fundamentally attracted, in fact, to games: those places where efforts and excellence are rewarded, where the challenges and demands are severe, and where success often resembles nothing so much as a distilled version of the worldly virtues of dedicated learning and rigorously co-ordinated effort.

"It's amazing what you can do with boxes and junk," he says. That could almost be the slogan of the New York Coalition for Play, which provided the boxes and junk. The nonprofit association ran one of the two dozen booths at the Ultimate Block Party, an event last fall that brought together companies like Disney, Crayola, and Lego, along with researchers from Columbia and MIT, and attracted thousands of parents and children. The goal was to "celebrate the science of play" and to push back against the notion that education happens only when students are seated at their desks, staring at chalkboards, and scribbling furiously in their notebooks.

Within the world of those who take play seriously, there are multiple camps, each with its own dearly held tenets. There are the Free Players, who argue that play is a human right and that adults should more or less leave kids alone. There are the Play Skeptics, who see play as useful for blowing off steam but are dubious about its cognitive upside. And there are Play Moderates, who advocate a mix of free play, adult-guided play, and traditional classroom instruction.

There are anthologies of great literature and primary documents, but why not “30 for Under 20: Great Nonfiction Narratives?” Until such editions appear, teachers can find complex, literary works in collections like “The Best American Science and Nature Writing,” on many newspaper Web sites, which have begun providing online lesson plans using articles for younger readers, and on ProPublica.org. Last year, The Atlantic compiled examples of the year’s best journalism, and The Daily Beast has its feature “Longreads.” Longform.org not only has “best of” contemporary selections but also historical examples dating back decades.

Adult titles, like “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” already have young readers editions, and many adult general-interest works, such as Timothy Ferris’s “The Whole Shebang,” about the workings of the universe, are appropriate for advanced high-school students.

In addition to a biology textbook, for example, why can’t more high school students read “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”?

here are clear differences between older people and younger in their use of technology, there’s no evidence of a clear break between two separate populations.

So Prensky was right the first time – there really is digital native generation? No, certainly not – and that’s what’s important about this study. It shows that while those differences exist, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. The researchers regard their results as confirming those who have doubted the existence of a coherent ‘net generation’. “We found no evidence for any discontinuity in technology use around the age of 30 as would be predicted by the Net Generation and Digital Natives hypothesis," says the report. What the reseachers do find interesting and worthy of further study is the correlation – which is independent of age -- between attitudes to technology and approaches to studying. In short, students who more readily use technology for their studies are more likely than others to be deeply engaged with their work. “Those students who had more positive attitudes to technology were more likely to adopt a deep approach to studying, more likely to adopt a strategic approach to studying and less likely to adopt a surface approach to studying.”

we are educators, not nannies. We are educated professionals who work with kids every day and often see your child in a different light than you do. If we give you advice, don't fight it.

if you're willing to take early warning advice to heart, it can help you head off an issue that could become much greater in the future.

Parents, be a partner instead of a prosecutor