technology

Making Video Games Educational or Making Education like video gaming?

Ryan Bretag (Ex. Paine in SL) Points to this Slate article that is skeptical about the ability to cross the line between education and gaming. The best assertion is at the bottom - the complexities of learning that take place in some complicated video games and online worlds do not necessarily directly translate to more finite skill sets needed by workers and learners. In other words, those creating educational games are skating the surface but not really mining the potential????

Librarians call for serious gaming

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education points to the connections between the real world and the teaching world.

A Librarian's Plea for 'Serious Gaming'

Here’s a sign that “serious gaming” is hitting its stride: Corporate monoliths like MTV, Reebok, and Starbucks are all giving it a shot. The companies have commissioned games that tackle weighty topics like global warming and the genocide in Darfur, notes Michelle Boule, the social-sciences librarian at the University of Houston.

In a guest post at ACRLog, Ms. Boule argues that libraries could learn a lot from those corporations. In seminars and workshops, information literacy can seem like an abstract topic. But in video games, she says, the topic might come to life: “Information modeled in an online environment can become almost anything from a maze, to an amusement park, to a fully formed world and story.”

Most libraries lack the budget and expertise to create fully formed information-literacy games of their own, Ms. Boule notes. But now that some libraries are carving out space and buying equipment for video-game players, she says, it might be time for those institutions to take a closer look at serious gaming. —Brock Read