24hrmom

<<At Border's I finally succumbed to a book I have been teetering on buying for months . It is by an educator and university lecturer - James Paul Gee - and is called What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy.>>

He's also got an interesting short article online that was published by Wired magazine entitled "High Score Education - Games, not school, are teaching kids to think".

Trying to see which may come through as an active link ....

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/view.html?pg=1

<a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/view.html?pg=1">High Score Education</a>

If neither does, just cut & paste into your browser if you'd like to read it. ;-)

Pam L


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Gerard Westenberg

At Border's I finally succumbed to a book I have been teetering on buying for months . It is by an educator and university lecturer - James Paul Gee - and is called What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. I have skimmed this so many times at Border's that I hope to read it soon now its mine! lol!

I like the book because we are a family that enjoys gaming and I like the positive take on video games in the book - it will be a good book, I think, to pass onto video game naysayers.

I Can I share the final section of the conclusion ?

- " .... (video games) operate with - that is, they build into their designs and encourage - good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basic,test-them-until-they-drop schools. It is not surprising that many politicians, policymakers, and their academic fellow travellers who think poor children should be content with schooling for service jobs, don' t like video games. They say they don't like them because they are violent. But, in reality, video games do violence to these people's notions of what makes learning powerful and school good and fair...."

" Video games are a new form of art. They will not replace books, they will sit beside them, interact with them, and change them and their role in society in various ways, as, indeed, they are already doing strongly with movies....We have no idea yet how people read video games, what meanings they make from them. Still less do we know how they will read them in the future. It won't do to start this investigation by assuming they are dupes of capitalist marketers - though of course, some of them very likely are. But there will always be Mary Smiths out there who use cultural products, whether " high" or " low", for good purposes.".

Leonie

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