Are Video Games Educational?

Ever since reading the book Reality Is Broken by Jane McGonigal, I have been fascinated with the potential for video games to educate people (really all games, come to think of it). If you're interested in this concept, too, I highly recommend McGonigal's book and the accompanying website.

For more information and the latest in this field, follow some of my links below. I hope you'll find them interesting, informative, and inspirational. Happy hunting!

Quest 2 Learn:
A school for "digital kids", where learning takes the form of games, challenges, and quests. In New York City, for anyone in need of more observation hours with an interest in this type of education.

Are Video Games Educational?:
Article on Education.com providing a nice intro to the topic and guide for parents.

Gameful:
A social network dedicated to games designed to have a positive impact on players' lives, solve real problems, and change the world.

"Edutaintment" and Lessons Learned from Music Video Games:
Blog essay by Sherol Chen examining the popularity of music and dance video games and exploring the possibilities of connecting this to "real" music education. You know, like we used to have in schools.

Teaching Philosophy

Teaching is a performance art—a didactic, communal, interactive performance art. I learned a little bit about it from my parents, both teachers. I also learned a few things about music teaching in particular from Wynton Marsalis and Leonard Bernstein, two of my musical heroes.

Teaching has the potential to harness all the domains of art (visual, performing, theater, technical, language, psycho-social) in order to achieve its goal. This goal should be for students to understand the need to constantly learn new things and to acquire and develop the fundamental skills necessary to do that. The goal should not be to learn any set canon of facts, assumptions, dogma, or traditions.

The teacher’s stage is the classroom, but I strongly believe the classroom walls to be a semi-permeable membrane. Of course, we want them to keep out things like noise and street crime and snow. But I want a little bit (or a lot!) of the real musical landscape outside of school to creep in beneath the door; and I want students to keep rolling their lessons over in their minds once they leave the room. Anywhere can be your classroom. Anything can be your teacher. Music is everywhere.

Script for Final Presentation: Arts Educator Exchange

LIGHTS OUT—Rob’s Artex promo video plays.

LIGHTS UP—Artex home page projected in the background.

INT. DEPOSITION ROOM – DAY

CATHERINE ZUCKERBAGGS and JOANNA WINKLESTERN are seated at opposite ends of a long table, both facing the audience. Their respective lawyers, SCOTT (for ZUCKERBAGGS) and ROB (for WINKLESTERN), are seated at each end of the table next to their clients and face each other. CATHERINE and JOANNA are looking away from each other.

ROB

The site got twenty-two hundred hits within two hours?

CATHERINE

Thousand. Twenty-two thousand.

NYU & Blackboard Academic Suite

Blackboard is a seemingly ancient technology employed by NYU to organize academics online, but I must say it works swimmingly. I have always found it to be highly functional and useful, although I've heard that professors are at times flummoxed by it. As a means to share files, list assignments, connect students and teachers, and host class discussions, Blackboard is very successful and relatively easy to use. We've all gotten the emails that NYU is planning to switch over to another company for this type of online academic suite, but my vote stays with Blackboard.

My favorite part of every Blackboard website is the Communication tab. The simple ability to access a class email list to communicate with fellow students and/or your professor is an invaluable asset, in my book. This feature alone makes Blackboard worth the while, I feel.

The two most practically useful functions, after the Communication tab, are the Assignments and Course Documents pages. Here students can keep up with all their assignments, both short- and long-term, as well as access readings, extracurricular material, and digressions or extensions of material presented in class. These pages help organize a student's experience of the class and extend its scope and meaning beyond the conventional class period. Simply from a philosophical point of view, this is revolutionary and signifies an important attitude toward education that I happen to support. Namely, that learning does not stop and start at a bell and that it does not exist solely between the walls of a classroom.

R.I.P.
Blackboard
2011

We're gonna miss you!!!

My Classmates' Websites

Rob's Jedi Kitten Emporium:
Rob's website offers a simple, straightforward homepage with bold yet soft visual style. The layout is easy to follow and the page is marked with characteristically deadpan humor.

Highlights of the page are a great animated GIF made up of funny pictures of Rob's facial expressions, a Music page dedicated to the Super Mario Bros. theme music, and a link to our group's webpage Artex.

Unfortunately the YouTube video embedded on the homepage didn't work.

Jojo's Playhouse:
Joanna's website offers a cute and simple homepage with one photo, one YouTube video, and just three links. I like the quiet, un-busy feel, which is a contrast to most high-traffic websites nowadays. Her Images page contains some nicely edited photos of a winery and her Movies page contains a great slideshow video she created for her UCSD graduation. And if you haven't met Mitzie the dog, then you'd better head over to her Animation page right now!

Catherine Baggs Dancer Choreographer Educator:
Like attorney Wayne Jarvis from TV's Arrested Development, Catherine's website can be described with one adjective: professional. She has created a very polished, useful, and informative website representing herself as a professional dance educator. Part of her site's polish comes from the use of excellent photographs of Catherine and her performances. She also includes a YouTube link on the homepage of her most recent performance, an effective hook. Her Music page belies a love of Broadway musicals and her Animation page effectively strings together various colorful edits of a photograph of Catherine holding a dance pose. Altogether a great website. Very professional.

Well done, members of Steve Jobs' Zombie Army! I hope my website will be have as good as theirs.

How I Created the Logo for "Steve Jobs' Zombie Army"

*     *    *

My group for the final project in this class, Technology Resources for Performing Arts Educators, consists of Catherine Baggs, Rob Gioia, and Joanna Stern. Although we have no idea as yet what form our final project will take, Rob did coin a–literally–killer name for our group: Steve Jobs' Zombie Army. Take that as you will. Here's how I created our logo.

First I did a Google Image search to find some graphical grist for my multimedia mill. I downloaded images of the Apple, Inc. logo, zombies, zombie-related miscellany, and many "skull and crossbones" images. My idea was to manipulate these in a digital image editor (as in a previous assignment for this class) and overlay the resulting images on one another in layers to create the final logo.

The first image I worked with was a simple black-on-white silhouette of the Apple, Inc. logo. All I did with this was a simple crop and resize operation, to make sure its dimensions were appropriate for a logo. Next, I sorted through many "skull and crossbones" images to find the best one with the skull outlined in white, because I wanted to lay this over the black apple graphic. I used cropping on this image, then I cut-and-pasted it into the Apple, Inc. logo using layers. I filtered this layer with an "Add/Subtract" function to get the right look.

Finally, I cropped an image from another group named "Zombie Army" to exclude everything but the words. I then cut-and-pasted these onto the Apple, Inc. logo as yet another layer and filtered this with an effect called "Burn" to create the toxic-looking script.

Et voìla! The logo is complete. Now we'll have to see what the rest of the group thinks of it...

Internet Exploring Web Browsers

A Web browser is a computer application that interprets coded Web pages and displays them in graphical form, so that non-programmer users can browse them with simple "point and click" navigation. Web browsers can also access, display, and download other types of information such as documents, files, folders, and multimedia (photos, audio, video).

Common programming languages used to write Web pages are Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), JavaScript, XML, and CSS. Today, the most popular browsers are Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome, and Opera. The most accessible web sites are designed according to the Web standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Accessible, standards-based design ensures that code will be interpreted correctly by the largest number of browsers and will still function as standards are updated.

Mosaic, the first successful graphical Web browser, was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina in the early 90's. Later on, in the mid-to-late 90's, Netscape and Internet Explorer were created. As Internet Explorer came to dominate the market (due to being bundled with Microsoft computers), Netscape released the source code for their browser. After extensive changes, it emerged years later as the open source Mozilla Firefox Web browser we know today.