Chiara Nakashian: Games in Education! (Post #4 due 10/18)

I've always separated technological games and social networking sites from my professional life; so much so that I've blocked every one of my coworkers on websites such as facebook. However, to my surprise, this article, The Instructional Power of Digital Games and Social Networking Simulation and How Teachers Can Leverage Them written by Klopfer, Osterweil, Groff, and Haas, is pushing for the use of these social technological advances inside the classroom so to use them for instructional gain.

According to Dawley (quoted in Klopfer et. al.), "[i]n a given week, the average eighth-grade boy will play video games for about 23 hours, while the average girl will play about 12—that’s even more time than they spend watching TV (Dawley, 2006). Therefore, one of the most obvious benefits to using these technologies for learning is that students are often already familiar with these interfaces and the “language” of interacting with and utilizing them." Twenty-three hours a week isn't far from the average work week of an adult. In addition, other researches quoted in this piece state that playing video games (even those that are not labeled as "educational") help children to develop certain necessary skills including quick information processing, relevance, parallels, exploring non-linear information, problem solving, etc. This theory seemed interesting to me, however left me wondering how these skills--acquired through a non-educational medium--can then be applied to learning information in school.

Putting that question aside, I did find a lot of validity in using specific games inside the classroom as a means of acquring those skills while simultaneously learning. For example, the use of the game Diplomacy in Ross' 7th grade classroom allows students to experience virtual political scenarios that replicate historical scenarios of WWII, all the while playing a video game. As John Dewey writes in detail about in his philosophical work, Experience and Education, students must learn through experience. Using technology and specifically a game like this is a perfect way of allowing students to actually experience the impossible--history.

Regardless of the benefits of this type of experience, I'm still not exactly sold on the use of the social networking sites within the classroom, even those specifically created for educational purposes. However, this article also provides wonderful resources and advice regarding what an educator can do to experience the benefits of technology themselves and become more comfortable with the use of it with children.