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!!!