Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.
James Paul Gee’s work has come up in my reading a few times since 2008, and I was particularly interested to read What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy because of a recent family incident. My nephew, age 5½, was withdrawn from his day-school last week because of a classroom conflict. Little Newton has his own handed-down laptop, but he is only allowed to play video games which his father and I deem expressly educational. They must teach the following: preferably reading, possibly solving math problems, or my favorite, real-life problem-solving skills. We endorse PBS Kids games, PBS games, Nickelodeon’s game site, and such Rube Goldberg-style inventive games as The Incredible Machine. We limit his television time and his computer time separately, but his father brings him outside to play (and sometimes help work) at small farm tasks. Often he just ends up playing with the box, as the phrase goes, but Newton has been a great assistant and companion to me in my projects for years now.
Newton came home from school last week and told us that his friend had brought a Nintendo DS to school—the device I would still call a Game Boy, with two three-inch screens, one mostly for display and the other predominantly for input. The teacher insisted that the game system would only come out after five o’clock, but we found that the other student was actually playing the game for several hours before that and for the several days previous. I was miffed for just two reasons: the tiny screen would only permit one student to play at a time, while the other kids crowd around the tiny screens, peeping over the player’s shoulder. I was taught that if I were to bring food or a toy to school, I must bring enough for everyone. To be the only kid without a valentine card in his box is a sad way to start the spring. The second reason was the teacher’s attitude: upon my brother’s arrival, she asked, “Newton, did your daddy get you a Nintendo DS yet?”
My brother explained that we don’t let him play game systems or fighting games at home. She replied that video games in general are educational. My brother asked how, and the teacher said, “They improve hand-eye coordination.” My brother replied that he could think of several ways to teach hand-eye coordination to more than one student at once.
This is a typical conflict today, as it would have been in 1980 or 1990 or 2000. Newton’s father and I don’t object to the idea of digital media in school. The boy is taught at home with books and on paper, but also with a computer and with videos. His father and I hoped that school would stick to book learning, but we had hoped, more so, that school would teach him to be social, to interact, to share, to compete, and to communicate. Aside from sharing, I don’t believe that taking turns with a hand-held game system accomplishes those goals.
As an active and rather well-rounded farm kid, Newton is willing to while away an hour or two at nearly any task, so by limiting his access, we have encouraged him to think of his computer as a learning tool. My brother adds the programs he approves, and I set up the desktop and bookmark bar so that Newton can open any of that list of programs. I searched for games which I believe helped my own cognitive development, along the lines of Apple Panic, Think Quick, and later The Secret of Monkey Island and Lemmings. The best example was Rocky’s Boots, produced by The Learning Company, where I learned to make basic electrical circuits with and, or, and not gates. Just a two or three years later I realized I had been tricked: electrical circuits operate on the same principles as logical operations, and one who can produce an intermediate-level circuit can also make a flowchart, a grade book, fill out tax forms, and identify logical faults.
Little Newton has been withdrawn from that school (in a common story of parent-teacher conflict: high drama and an eventuality which doesn’t have much to do with the student’s learning), and many more school events have already been set up for Newton. The story raised several questions for me which are addressed by Gee. First, does hand-eye coordination add up to learning? Gee references the dexterity required to feed input to video games on several occasions What Video Games Have to Teach Us, but in so doing he confirms that tactile skills are just a vehicle for learning, not a method for improving mental acuity. I’d venture to say that Gee believes as I do—that calling a video game controller a tool for dexterity is like saying a gas lawn mower improves mental discipline.
Gee explains his games well, and he shows his ambivalence—guilt and pleasure—in teaching his children, getting tips from his children, writing his research, and mining the semiotics from video games, with a real aptness for explaining and with an endearing, precocious manner of address to his audiences. Splitting up his lists of learning principles with pages of research/explanation between contextualized the lists well. Having read the book, I’m sure I’ll be able to interpret the list and share Gee’s ideas. I’ll share them with my brother, for instance, so we can figure out how to use the technology to teach the child without boring him to death with my insistent Scrabble or my incipient coin collection. Gee’s politics rather overreach his argument, but the context—his clear anger about poor teaching and ludditism in the classroom by disinterested educators—comes quite welcome.
More resources:
I heard a story this week about a young man who put off medical school for two years because he was busy with his job and twenty-ish hours a week making raids on World of Warcraft. As a coda, he beat his obsession and began medical school. One phrase stuck with me: that he still had his account but would never login to WoW’s server again. It was as if he could only stand not to play if he knew his character still existed somewhere—like those who say it’s easier to quit smoking if you have a pack nearby.
I looked for recent articles, so all the following studies come from 2007 to last month.
CRC Health Group and video game addicts. I like the slogan: “When video games become more than just games...” (ellipsis in the original.) The split between “teens” and “adults” on this site rankles me. Note the slant on such articles as “When to Pull the Plug” and “Boys and Video Games: A Natural Attraction?”
http://www.video-game-addiction.org/
The American Psychiatric Association sports two .pdf studies on video game addiction, and I’ll link the search: http://www.psych.org/search.aspx?SearchPhrase=video+game
I was lured by this phrase: “Even though APA doesn’t classify video game addiction to be a mental disorder [...]”
LiveScience cites a study which claims pathological video game addiction affects ten percent of “youth gamers.”
http://www.livescience.com/5409-children-addicted-video-games.html
USNews Health’s article from January links depression/anxiety and video game pathology.
And I quote: “Eighty-three percent of the study volunteers reported playing video games sometimes, and another 10 percent said they had played video games in the past. The average time spent playing video games was around 20.5 to 22.5 hours a week.”
Tutorial:
http://lifehacker.com/#!5758404/learn-the-basics-of-photoshop-the-complete-guide
From Night School via Lifehacker, I’ve enjoyed a couple of these tutorials for Photoshop. I found the color theory section quite engaging, since my taste in color is neither theoretical nor tasteful.
It includes the following tutorials, each of which can also be downloaded as a .pdf:
Learn the Basics of Photoshop in Under 25 Minutes
Basics of Photoshop: Color Correction, Touch Ups, and Enhancements
Basics of Photoshop: Basic Drawing with the Pen Tool
Basics of Photoshop: Designing a Website
Basics of Photoshop: Next Steps and Further Resources
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