I’m reading another book, and this one is a beast. I don’t think I’ve read anything so deep since I was in Graduate School, and I probably didn’t read that. It’s James Paul Gee’s, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.” Gee is an academic, teaching reading instruction at the University of Wisconsin, I believe. The book, so far, is more about principals of learning, than about video games. Maybe I’m just getting to the good part. But one thing that I have gleaned from the reading is the value of taking on an identity.
If I understand correctly, Gee seems to be saying that our identity, as a student, can be a barrier to learning powerful concepts. When I entered the classroom as a 9 year old child, and continued to be that 9 year old child as a learner, then I was limited to my perceptions of what a 9 year old child could learn. However, if I entered a video game, as a starship captain, then, according to my perceptions of what Gee is saying, I start to learn as a Starship Captain, breaking through the barriers of a kid’s perceptions of himself.
When this fiftysomething year old man, who can’t run across the street gracefully any more, gets on a snowboard, only one force of nature is accessible to my mind — gravity. However, when I dress up in a video game, as a 19 year old champion, wearing the logos of my sponsors, picking out my own board, detailing it to my liking, and then hit the slops along with other champions, concepts of angle, centrifugal force, spring, flight, gravity, and mass and momentum come into explicit play. Well, mass and momentum do occur to me when I’m really snowboarding. Well, there was only that one time! 😉
But it seems like Gee is saying that allowing or empowering learners to take on a new identity, provides a bridge to learning, and I suspect that this is not limited to a video game. In blogging assignments, we might ask students to write from the perspective of a newspaper reporter, political operative, world traveler, space astronaut, or 16th century explorer. From new identities, students might think in different ways, grasp concepts they didn’t before, and come out of it with a slightly larger perspective of their own identity.
Comments?
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Sharghi, K. “1080 On the PC.” Ksharghi’s Photostream. 1 Dec 2004. 15 Nov 2006 <http://flickr.com/photos/ksharghi/1841844/>.
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Wow! This is harnessing role play instead of fighting role play as many people do. I wonder if many of the disengaged teens who are quite engaged in Second Life could be given a second chance at high school online what amazing things they would do. I believe that when you use technology in this manner that you bypass the layer of insulation that teens put up to shield themselves from the adult world and get to the kernel of the person underneath. It is like when I sign into skype and allow my students to skype me or ask me questions orally, my students who are the quiet ones who hesitate to ask questions come out of their oral shell because they can text me. It is just another way to reach students.
Love it! The term I heard for this once was “situational cognition.” I so totally agree with your ideas about roles that kids could take on in their blogging. Comments are then addressed to the reporter, the traveler, the explorer and forces the kids to respond to those comments from that viewpoint as well. Gotta get that book!
I am currently using that book to research gaming and high school students – I am interested in having game nights for my students and this book has helped with my request. The students have come up with lists of games that they are currently playing and I am having them discuss what they think they are learning. Many have stated that they like to take on the alternate roles and how much it empowers them to learn and teach.
I have colleagues who have been doing things like this for years. One makes students become Greek gods and goddesses. For another major project, the students have to become someone else – an expert in the field – and assign a role for the audience (you’re a movie audience and I’m the director . . .). It also helped students release their inhibitions towards material, be it for reading it outloud or just allowing themselves to enter a story. I learned that type of a trick from drama in junior high – it’s served me well and helped me to become a better reader.
I haven’t read Dr. Gee’s book, but I did appreciate Scott McLeod’s summary at Dangerously Irrelevant. He put together a nice 8 page PDF of a couple weeks’ worth of blogging about it.
Oops, that’s what I get for not clearing my copy and paste cache! How about THIS summary instead!
Rich
Hi,
While I respect everyone’s enthusiasm over the relative merits of gaming in education, and I am by no means a luddite; I have to say I disagree. Yes, there is a place for it, but to assert that the “virtual reality” of a game role helps a child go beyond his level of cognition has its limitations. For example, that 9 year old is not experiencing the reality of what it’s like to be a Starship captain, he or she is experiencing a programmer’s view of what it’s like to be a captain. This is a game, not reality; and unless a real live astronaut contributes greatly to the development of the game, that kid is in hyper-simulation mode.
I read some of the commentary at Dangerously Irrelevant, and I also disagree with assertions made there. Of course, kids are drawn to gaming, some addictively so, as child obesity rates show us; the games, it is well known put our brain in a very relaxing, inert alpha-wave state. How much active learning really goes on when the brain is in this phase? I’d like to see hard research on that. Furthermore, to state that a child is in a safety net by receiving “nine lives” and that it increases their risk taking in learning seems to me a ridiculous leap of faith. Doesn’t this false sense of having multiple lives contradict the reality argument? A real Starship Captain blows up only once. This false sense of security can backfire.
It seems Dr. Gee’s arguments promoting gaming as a technological learning tool are dubious ones. They may have minor benefit but give us nothing new. Has anyone read Neil Postman for another viewpoint? Too often in education we jump on the next great bandwagon without having hard research and instead rely too heavily on anecdotal experiences. Aren’t we just recycling “Oregon Trail”?
Finally, David, I love your ideal on role-playing in blogging!
-Laura