Recent posts for How Computer Games Help Children Learn
Blog Examines Microworlds and Explanatoids
Check out David Learns Games to read one blogger’s thoughts on tech development, academic research, and game-based learning. In a recent post, Microworlds, Explanatoids, and Extending the Islands of Expertise Theory, the author synthesizes David Williamson Shaffer’s book How Computer Games Help Children Learn, with other scholarly work David has done with Gina Svarovsky. The blogger, who is a game designer himself, ends with the comment that, “If it is true that a game seeking to deliver learning through exploratoids must be not only iterative and autoexpressive but also expressive then I fear that I may be in a hot spot!”
MMOG Madness!
In a Fox News segment on the dangers of kids losing their “moral compass” through playing online games, David responds to the fears of online kids gone wild by suggesting the ways adults can encourage children to play video games responsibly. As he explains in How Computer Games Help Children Learn, the most important things parents can do is play and talk about video games with their children.
David Williamson Shaffer in the Rocky Mount Telegram
David was recently interviewed for “Got Game?” [link removed by source], an article that ran in North Carolina’s Rocky Mount Telegram newspaper. In it, he argues that video games can teach children specific skills and give them motivation to solve real-world problems. “Learning how to play the games first might even inspire people to try new activities when they see the tasks are more possible than they thought,” David said.
Straw Men
I just posted a comment to a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education Review website. Mark Bauerlein, author of the recent controversial book “The Dumbest Generation,” argues (in a post titled “Web Reactionaries”) that:
Game Scientist David Williamson Shaffer believes that computers alter ‘the way people think in the digital age,’ and he rates their advent with ‘the development of language itself.’
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If Web 2.0 marks something fundamentally, radically different in the nature of knowledge and the means of intelligence, and if the young are the lead carriers of the revolution, then the ‘kids-are-alright, everything’s-okay, stop-the-handwringing’ response doesn’t apply. If a revolution is in play, one that reaches down into the hard wiring of thought, it’s not a version of the same old thing. And if the critical reaction to it addresses aspects specific to Web 2.0 and teens’ standard use of it, let’s not pooh-pooh it with easy comparisons to Socrates and the fear of writing.
And my reply:
Something in the air
Did you ever have one of those days where the whole world seemed to be trying to tell you something?
There was a story in the news some months ago about Megan Meier, a teenage girl in Missouri who committed suicide after her neighbor (an adult) pretended to be a teenage boy on MySpace, became friends with Megan, and then sent her hateful, taunting messages. (One of the best pieces on the story was an op-ed by Leonard Pitts.)
At the time, I thought about writing something on the issue. But the lessons were obvious: that we need to take online interactions seriously, and parents need to know what their kids are up to. And somehow using such a terrible tragedy to make that point seemed to belittle the horror of what had happened.
Today, the story was back in the news as Missouri passed a law against cyberbullying (originally available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/01/cyberbullying.ap/index.html?eref=rss_tech), based, in part, on what had happened to Megan.
Moments after I saw the story on my RSS feed, I got an email from a colleague about a website: http://www.stopcyberbullying.org, with useful information, tips, and resources for parents, children, and teachers.
An hour later, I got a call from a reporter on FOX News, who wanted me to comment on an LA Times story about bullying in virtual worlds for kids (originally available at: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-kidssafe2-2008jul02,0,5590073.story?track=rss): children who are getting access to other users’ passwords and then stealing their cash in Webkins and other games.
And then I read in our local paper (originally available at: http://www.buffalonews.com/businesstoday/businessfinance/story/383195.html) that hackers had broken into Citibank’s network and stolen PIN codes from ATM transactions from October 2007 through March 2008.
It is tempting to respond to these stories with fear, and to turn away from this new medium that promises to connect us together and yet reveals such flaws.
I hope, though, that what we take from incidents like these is that the internet is a public space. Like any public space, it offers a chance to connect with other people, to learn from them, to interact with them, and to share with them. We need to embrace this new space–and we need to teach our kids to embrace it–with care and vigilance, just as we would any public place.
And surely as I have pointed out at times before, these stories show once again that just because a world is virtual doesn’t mean that we don’t experience it as being, in important ways, very, very real.
