H Duderstadt, New Tech Maven

Here’s a fascinating article from Eschoolnews on how the “I-generation” require a different approach to instruction.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2010/04/12/author-igeneration-requires-a-different-approach-to-instruction/

One of the things that we always hear about is how awful video games are.  We are reminded how the kids responsible for the Columbine massacre were avid video game players, video game addiction is spoken of grimly by noted child psychologists on network television, and on and on.

Now, I’m more than willing to admit that children can spend too much time playing games.  But, to say that video games are inherently “evil” is just not true.  In fact, there are many respected educators who feel video games are a key component of the future of learning.

Every year I attend a conference sponsored by the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison called the GLS Conference, for Games, Learning & Society (http://www.glsconference.org/2009/).  This event brings together teachers, professors, and game designers from all over the world who are doing very real and very exciting research into just how games can be integrated into learning.  And, I’m not just speaking of “educational games”, but main stream popular games.

I’m not going to delve deeply into this area, because it’s already been covered so well by many of the guest speakers at GLS .   Keep your eyes open for a new book coming out  by Deborah Todd, an experienced game designer, that promises to be an excellent insight into this.

Instead, in one key part of this blog, I want to focus less on existing games and how to use them in education, and more on how to make them and how very powerful tools to do this are bundled with many of the most popular games today including Civilization IV, Warcraft III, Grand Theft Auto 4, Unreal Tournament, Crysis, Fallout 3, World in Conflict, the Sims, Quake IV, and many of the games offered through the Steam system to mention only a few.

Beyond learning obvious skills such as design, computer programming, and 3D modeling, video game design also can also be a very powerful path to understanding less apparent subjects such as Math, Physics, Engineering, Architecture, Creative Writing, Drama, Music, Film-making, Business, and even Classics and Languages.  I’ll attempt to reveal these in articles as I progress through this part of the blog.

As a high school game design teacher, I know that many of my students probably won’t pursue careers as video game designers or programmers, but I also seek to use the subject as a means to make other subjects more relevant and interesting.  In the course of this blog, I hope to help you see this as well and discover how you can also use making video games as a powerful way to inspire and in develop interest and the tools you can provide to help.Video

You might think I am a typical “EdTech” evangelist who believes that technology is the “Holy Grail” of  our education system.  Transforming every classroom into a digital nirvana of state of the art computers with high speed Internet access,  handing out iPads instead of textbooks, requiring all teachers to put their curriculum online are all things I should be a advocate for claiming they will turn around the problems we face our schools.   But, you may be shocked to learn that I don’t believe anything of the sort.  Yes, I do NOT believe that technology is the answer to the United State’s long suffering education system.

Now, before you brand me as some kind of a Luddite who wants to take schools back to the days of one room school houses with blackboards and school marms (though I did like the idea of a one room school house…more on that some other time).  I DO believe that technology, and the tools it represents, is a KEY part of solving our problems.  It’s just that it alone won’t necessarily help.

To better explain this, let’s take a trip back to the 1990′s when the dot com revolution was raging and everybody believed that the Internet was the future.  A group of very dedicated network experts and technologists started a program called “Net Day”.  I had several friends who were a part of this.  The goal of Net Day was to bring together technology experts to wire public schools with high speed internet access using fiber optic cable, the latest in networking technologies, and a whole bunch of volunteers who worked in schools all across the country.  It wasn’t a bad idea.  It was a very good one.  But, in the end many of those high speed lines just made teacher’s lives harder than easier and teaching more difficult that effective.  A lot of the reason was  whether teachers were trained in just what to do with all this data they had access.  Certainly, there were those who had a good understanding of the internet and were able to see a dramatic improvement in their student learning with the connectivity that Net Day brought.  But, there were many more who ended up having to shut off the computers and even unplug them as kids started doing what kids do when they get around computers.  They’d start trying to visit web sites they shouldn’t, and they’d play games.  In the end, some rooms even had the computer removed and how have these weird connectors in the corner where the fiber optic cable came in.  Don’t get me wrong, Net Day was definitely not a flop.  It actually did a lot of good.  In fact, link to Project Tomorrow and you’ll see it’s still going strong.  But, there’s a tendency to embrace a technology just because you are caught up in the excitement about it without really thinking out how it is going to be used and making sure the teacher using it knows what to do with it.

So, there are many wonderful technologies that could improve learning in our schools.  From hand held devices such as iPads to video games to blogs, there are an amazing array of wonderful things out there that we should give serious thought to using.   And, in this blog I’ll talk about a lot of them.  We just must make sure we don’t forget the teachers who will be using it, and ignore the potential downsides so that we can prevent these from hurting their very real potential.

In the end, heck yes I am pro-educational technology.  But, I’m also pro knowing what do, how do it RIGHT and what the results will be before you commit to it.