Video of the Week: James Paul Gee on Learning from Games

James Paul Gee is one of the names everyone should know if they are interested in using games for learning. Here he is on PBS discussing Games for Learning. (Hat tip to Don Margulis for posting it first.)

Phrase of the Week: Experience Design

As we seek to move the focus in education from content to engaging learning experiences, we often have to embrace new words and phrases to describe the changes that are happening in front of us.

One emerging cross-disciplinary field which relates to what we are attempting to achieve is called experience design.

Let me quote Clark Quinn, author of Engaging Learning:

That is, experience design is about creating a user experience, not just focusing on their goals, but thinking about the process as well. And that’s, to me, what is largely ignored in creating elearning is thinking about process from the learner’s perspective. There are really two components: what we need to accomplish, and what we’d like the learner to experience.

Our first goal still has to look at the learning need, and identify an objective that we’d like learners to meet, but even that we need to rethink. We may have constraints on delivery environment, resources, and more that we have to address as well, but that’s not the barrier. The barrier is the mistake of focusing on knowledge-level objectives, not on meaningful skill change. Let me be very clear: one of the real components of creating a learning experience is ensuring that we develop, and communicate, a learning objective that the learner will ‘get’ is important and meaningful to them. And we have to take on the responsibility for making that happen.

A wiki definition can be found here.

Required Reading: "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants"

"It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." - Marc Prensky

The phrases "Digital immigrants" and "Digital Natives" have used a great deal in the recent past to explain the generational gap between those of us whose formative experiences were in the pre-internet era and those of us who cannot concieve of a world without Google or Facebook. (The latter group is also referred as "millenials" indicating that they came of age after the turn of the 21st century.)

While there is a book entitled Digital natives, Digital immigrants, a quicker introduction is Marc Prensky's seminal essay on the topic. it can be accessed here.