Innovate Online offers a James Gee article on the ideal educational game (Note – you will have to enroll to gain access). Gee offers the concept of “authentic professionalism” as the key to the ideal learning game.
Authentic professionals have special knowledge and distinct values tied to specific skills gained through a good deal of effort and experience. Authentic professionals do what they do, not for money, but because they are committed to an identity in which their skills and the knowledge that generates them are seen as valuable and significant.
I am starting to have the same reaction to the “game advocates” as I have to those educational researchers who do research in the lab rather than in the field. I understand what they are saying. The fact that they keep saying it achieves a diminishing return. I am convinced commercial games involve complex learning, higher order thinking, cooperation, etc. and motivate players in the way we could only hope to motivate classroom learners. It is time to spend less time on the commercial game environment from which such ideas are derived and spend more time creating and evaluating prototypes that bring such principles into the classroom. The core of this perspective is hardly unique. Classroom projects that attempt to involve students in a scaled version of practice have been the focus of many “project based activities (e.g., student as practicing biologist in contrast to student as recipient of what biologists know). Creating a technology-based version of scaled authentic practice is what those who develop simulations or exploratory environments attempt to create. It is true that there are far too few of these activities.
See previous post.
