If the average gamer plays 10,080 hours by the time he is 21, then my 11-year old must be WAY above average. Let's see, 24 hours in a day, multiplied by 365 days, multiplied by 21 years...is 183,960 hours of total "living"time. So by my calculations, my son has already played about 6,570 hours, at 3 hours a day on average (even though his "limit" is 1 hour a day on the weekend and a half-hour a day on weekdays) since he was 5 years old (when my brother gave him his first gaming device, a Nintendo DS). So, if Evan keeps at the same gaming pace he will have "gamed" for 17,520 hours total by the time he is 21, that will be 11% of his life. I think I'm going to be sick. Of course, AFTER I graduate I will have all the time in the world to be the attentive mom that I was before and restrict my son's screen time to the aforementioned limits, or at least encourage him to play the "educational" games that will enhance the learning he does in the classroom. Yeah, right! He's having the time of his life right now...he will probably encourage me to pursue a doctorate degree after graduation;)
I totally agree with Jane McGonigal's TED talk, many gamers find more enjoyment in the virtual world than in the real world. It is easy to be disenchanted with a world that is not of your own creation, one that constantly puts limits on you, prevents you from getting to where you want to go, and demands things that you can not easily obtain...like credit, time, health, and energy- but this is where we live, in the world and we have to start improving it. Like right now.
Maybe we need to assess the real world in comparison to a gamer's virtual world to understand how we can make our real world a better place. Infinite life? Not so much. Unlimited materials? Nope. Infinite money-earning opportunities that involve simple bodily movements like running through bags of gold hanging in mid-air? That would be nice. Heck, maybe I should up my gaming time from about 2 hours a month and take a virtual vacation. If we could get all the gamers at SI to play the games developed by the Institute For The Future, just imagine what could be accomplished!
Speaking of assessment, I had some interesting experiences at my elementary placement this week. I taught a few lessons that included a student writing component. Every time as each class was wrapping up, students began to hand me their work, and every time I told them, "No, we reviewed it in class- you can take it home with you." During the course of a lesson, as they were doing their work I would ask them to share it with me and suggest improvements if necessary. By doing so, I suppose I was engaging in a type of immediate formative assessment, but I always had the feeling that students wanted more. It could be just a reflex that students expect to hand in their work at the end of the day or the end of a class, but it seemed to me that many of my students were looking for some other assurance that they had completed the task sufficiently. Maybe my quick "assessments" would have been more effective if accompanied by a gold star?
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ReplyDeleteI had a conflicting reaction to Jane McGonigal's talk, too. I agreed with a lot of her arguments - such as the fact that games represent a means of escape for lots of people - but am not sure how much I buy into her notion that games will change the world (which, I just realized, sounds a lot like our little school slogan). It was refreshing to hear her present gamers in a more favorable light than media-perpetuated stereotypes of reclusive, anti-social gamers. However, she seems to believe in the power of transfer, i.e. transferring game-related skills/knowledge to other contexts, such as saving the world. I'm just not sure how realistic this transfer might be.
ReplyDeleteThere's actually a lot of research going on regarding transfer skills from gamers. Arizona State University is doing a lot of work in that area. What I hear about most often is the research focusing on the transfer of leadership skills from in game to out. Businesses are finding that players with proven in-game leadership make excellent leaders even if they aren't necessarily the gregarious extrovert. Here are some examples:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ibm.com/ibm/gio/media/pdf/ibm_gio_gaming_report.pdf
https://asunews.asu.edu/20100222_videogaming
http://wowlearning.org/
http://www.statepress.com/2011/01/17/professors-hold-class-in-%E2%80%9Cworld-of-warcraft%E2%80%9D/
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/education/experiential-learning-in-virtual-worlds/project-archives/1st/session-1-leadership/
That your students had the "turn it in" process routinized raises lots of interesting questions: did THEY think they had gone over it? Is it just habit?
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