James Paul Gee

How Computer Games Help Children Learn

Foreword: Seeing the Future J.P.Gee Introduction Epistemology: The Debating Game Knowledge: The Digital Zoo Skills: Eschers World Values: The Pandora Project Identity: Science.net Beyond the Industrial School: The Future of Education and How We Get There

Video Games and the Future of Learning

Will video games change the way we learn? We argue here for a particular view of games—and of learning—as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new technologies. We argue that to understand the future of learning, we have to look beyond schools to the emerging arena of video games. We suggest that video games matter because they present players with simulated worlds: worlds which, if well constructed, are not just about facts or isolated skills, but embody particular social practices. Video games thus make it possible for players to participate in valued communities of practice and as a result develop the ways of thinking that organize those practices. Most educational games to date have been produced in the absence of any coherent theory of learning or underlying body of research. We argue here for such a theory—and for research that addresses the important questions about this relatively new medium that such a theory implies. Video games and the future of learning Page 3 Video games and the future of learning Computers are changing our world: how we work... how we shop... how we entertain ourselves... how we communicate... how we engage in politics... how we care for our health.... The list goes on and on. But will computers change the way we learn? We answer: Yes. Computers are already changing the way we learn—and if you want to understand how, look at video games. Look at video games, not because games that are currently available are going to replace schools as we know them any time soon, but because they give a glimpse of how we might create new and more powerful ways to learn in schools, communities, and workplaces—new ways to learn for a new information age. Look at video games because, although they are wildly popular with adolescents and young adults, they are more than just toys. Look at video games because they create new social and cultural worlds: worlds that help people learn by integrating thinking, social interaction, and technology, all in service of doing things they care about. We want to be clear from the start that video games are no panacea. Like books and movies, they can be used in anti-social ways. Games are inherently simplifications of reality, and current games often incorporate—or are based on—violent and sometimes misogynistic themes. Critics suggest that the lessons people learn from playing video games as they currently exist are not always desirable. But even the harshest critics agree that we learn something from playing video games. The question is: how can we use the power of video games as a constructive force in schools, homes, and at work? In answer to that question, we argue here for a particular view of games—and of learning—as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe Page 4 Video games and the future of learning an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new technologies. Video games as virtual worlds for learning The first step towards understanding how video games can (and we argue, will) transform education is changing the widely shared perspective that games are “mere entertainment.” More than a multi-billion dollar industry, more than a compelling toy for both children and adults, more than a route to computer literacy, video games are important because they let people participate in new worlds. They let players think, talk, and act—they let players inhabit—roles otherwise inaccessible to them. A 16 year old in Korea playing Lineage can become an international financier, trading raw materials, buying and selling goods in different parts of the virtual world, and speculating on currencies. A Deus Ex player can experience life as a government special agent, where the lines between state-sponsored violence and terrorism are called into question. These rich virtual worlds are what make games such powerful contexts for learning. In game worlds, learning no longer means confronting words and symbols separated from the things those words and symbols are about in the first place. The inverse square law of gravity is no longer something understood solely through an equation; students can gain virtual experience walking on worlds with smaller mass than the Earth, or plan manned space flights that require understanding the changing effects of gravitational forces in different parts of the solar system. In virtual worlds, learners experience the concrete realities that words and symbols describe. Through such experiences, across multiple contexts, learners can understand Page 5 Video games and the future of learning complex concepts without losing the connection between abstract ideas and the real problems they can be used to solve. In other words, the virtual worlds of games are powerful because they make it possible to develop situated understanding. Although the stereotype of the gamer is a lone teenager seated in front of a computer, game play is also a thoroughly social phenomenon. The clearest examples are massively multiplayer online games: games where thousands of players are simultaneously online at any given time, participating in virtual worlds with their own economies, political systems, and cultures. But careful study shows that most games—from console action games to PC strategy games—have robust game playing communities. Whereas schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world, games bring players together, competitively and cooperatively, into the virtual world of the game and the social community of game players. In schools, students largely work alone with school-sanctioned materials; avid gamers seek out news sites, read and write faqs, participate in discussion forums, and most importantly, become critical consumers of information. Classroom work rarely has an impact outside of the classroom; its only real audience is the teacher. Game players, in contrast, develop reputations in online communities, cultivate audiences as writers through discussion forums, and occasionally even take up careers as professional gamers, traders of online commodities, or game modders and designers. The virtual worlds of games are powerful, in other words, because playing games means developing a set of effective social practices. By participating in these social practices, game players have an opportunity to explore new identities. In one well-publicized case, a heated political contest erupted for the president 1 As Julian Dibbell, a journalist for Wired and Rolling Stone, has shown, it is possible to make a better living trading online currencies than one does as a freelance journalist! Page 6 Video games and the future of learning of Alphaville, one of the towns in The Sims Online. Arthur Baynes, the 21 year old incumbent was running against Laura McKnight, a 14 year old girl. The muckraking, accusations of voter fraud, and political jockeying taught young Laura about the realities of politics; the election also gained national attention on NPR as pundits debated the significance of games where teens could not only argue and debate politics, but run a political system where the virtual lives of thousands of real players were at stake. The substance of Laura’s campaign, political alliances, and platform—a platform which called for a stronger police force and an overhaul of the judicial system—shows how deep the disconnect has become between the kinds of experiences made available in schools and those available in online worlds. The virtual worlds of games are rich contexts for learning because they make it possible for players to experiment with new and powerful identities. The communities that game players form similarly organize meaningful learning experiences outside of school contexts. In the various web sites devoted to the game Civilization, for example, players organize themselves around shared goal of developing expertise in the game and the skills, habits, and understandings that requires. At Apolyton.net (a site devoted to the game), players post news feeds, participate in discussion forums, and trade screenshots of the game. But they also run a radio station, exchange saved game files in order to collaborate and compete, create custom modifications, and, perhaps, most uniquely, run their own University to teach other players to play the game more deeply. Apolyton University shows us how part of expert gaming is developing a set of values—values that highlight enlightened risk-taking, entrepreneurialship, and expertise, rather than formal accreditation emphasized by institutional education (Beck & Wade, 2004). If we look at the development of

Reading as Situated Language: A Sociocognitive Perspective.

My main goal here is to situate reading within a broad perspective that integrates work on cognition, language, social interaction, society, and culture. In light of recent reports on reading (National Reading Panel, 2000; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998) that have tended to treat reading quite narrowly in terms of psycholinguistic processing skills, I argue that such a broad perspective on reading is essential if we are to speak to issues of access and equity in schools and workplaces. I also argue that reading and writing cannot be separated from speaking, listening, and interacting, on the one hand, or using language to think about and act on the world, on the other. Thus, it is necessary to start with a viewpoint on language (oral and written) itself, a viewpoint that ties language to embodied action in the material and social world. I have organized this article into four parts. First, I develop a viewpoint on language that stresses the connections among language, embodied experience, and situated action and interaction in the world. In the second part, I argue that what is relevant to learning literacy is not English in general, but specific varieties of English that I call “social languages.” I then go on to discuss notions related to the idea of social languages, specifically Discourses (with a capital D) and their connections to socially situated identities and cultural models. In the third part, I show the relevance of the earlier sections to the development of literacy in early childhood through a specific example. Finally, I close the article with a discussion of the importance of language abilities (construed in a specific way) to learning to read.

Performance structures: a psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal

Abstract Two lines of research—one in psycholinguistics and one in linguistics—are combined to deal with a long-standing problem in both fields: why the “performance structures” of sentences (structures based on experimental data, such as pausing and parsing values) are not fully accountable for by linguistic theories of phrase structure. Two psycholinguistic algorithms that have been used to predict these structures are described and their limitations are examined. A third algorithm, based on the prosodic structures of sentences is then proposed and shown to be a far better predictor of performance structures. It is argued that the experimental data reflect aspects of the linguistic cognitive capacity, and that, in turn, linguistic theory can offer an illuminating account of the data. The prosodic model is shown to have a wider domain of application than temporal organization per se, accounting for parsing judgments as well as pausing performance, and reflecting aspects of syntactic and semantic structure as well as purely prosodic structure. Finally, the algorithm is discussed in light of language processing.

Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines

This article asks how good video and computer game designers manage to get new players to learn long, complex and difficult games. The short answer is that designers of good games have hit on excellent methods for getting people to learn and to enjoy learning. The longer answer is more complex. Integral to this answer are the good principles of learning built into successful games. The author discusses 13 such principles under the headings of ‘Empowered Learners’, ‘Problem Solving’ and ‘Understanding’ and concludes that the main impediment to implementing these principles in formal education is cost. This, however, is not only (or even so much) monetary cost. It is, importantly, the cost of changing minds about how and where learning is done and of changing one of our most profoundly change-resistant institutions: the school.

The Narrativization of Experience in the Oral Style.

While acknowledging that the distinction between oral and literate styles of communication is not in reality a dichotomy, but a continuum of styles, this paper focuses on the oral style. Many child...While acknowledging that the distinction between oral and literate styles of communication is not in reality a dichotomy, but a continuum of styles, this paper focuses on the oral style. Many children, often from middle-class mainstream homes, bring to school the foundations of literate styles of speech even before they can write. Other children, often minority children, do not. This paper gives a detailed linguistic-stylistic analysis of a seven year old black childs “sharing time” narrative, a narrative that is clearly in the oral style. “Sharing time” (sometimes called “show and tell”) is a school exercise that is meant to develop literate style communication, though it in fact assumes for success that child already shares aspects of this style with the teacher. Thus, oral style children often appear incoherent to the teacher and end up being given less (and less quality) instructional time and attention than literate style children. The stylistic analysis given here seeks to explicate how the child makes sense of her experience through narrative (the primary role of narrative in human life). I take the position that narrativizing experience is a basic human trait and that, like language, it is not something that children should in any significant sense be better or worse at. Rather, barring the attenuation of this ability by cultural practices or by the school itself, all children make sense of their experiences and do so in a masterful way. Of course, cross-cultural differences also exist, some of them perhaps related to patterns and types of literacy. In fact, the narrative of the young girl studied here shares many features with narratives found throughout the world in oral cultures. I also briefly discuss the role of cultural stereotypes both in the construction of narratives and in the view schools take of communication (linguistics, anthropology, education, stylistics, narrative, and discourse).

Prosodic structure and spoken word recognition

Abstract The aim of this paper is to call attention to the role played by prosodic structure in continuous word recognition. First we argue that the written language notion of the word has had too much impact on models of spoken word recognition. Next we discuss various characteristics of prosodic structure that bear on processing issues. Then we present a view of continuous word recognition which takes into account the alternating pattern of weak and strong syllables in the speech stream. A lexical search is conducted with the stressed syllables while the weak syllables are identified through a pattern-recognition-like analysis and the use of phonotactic and morphonemic rules. We end by discussing the content word vs. function word access controversy in the light of our view.

Semiotic Social Spaces and Affinity Spaces From The Age of Mythology to Today's Schools

INTRODUCTION: FROM GROUPS TO SPACES In this paper, I consider an alternative to the notion of a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). This alternative focuses on the idea of a space in which people interact, rather than on membership in a community. I want to consider this alternative because I believe that the notion of what I will later call an “affinity space” is a particularly important contemporary social configuration with implications for the future of schools and schooling. The notion of a “community of practice” has been a fruitful one. However, it has given rise to several problems, some of which are: The idea of “community” can carry connotations of “belongingness” and close-knit personal ties among people which do not necessarily always fit classrooms, workplaces or other sites where the notion of a community of practice has been used. The idea of “community” seems to bring with it the notion of people being “members”. However, “membership” means such different things across different sorts of communities of practice, and there are so many different ways and degrees of being a member in some communities of practice that it is not clear that membership is a truly helpful notion. While Wenger (see Wenger, McDermott and Snyder 2002) has tried to be careful in delineating just what is and what is not a community of practice, distinguishing it from other sorts of affiliations, the notion has been used by others to cover such a wide array of social forms that we may be missing the trees for the forest.

Video games and embodiment

In this article, the author discusses one way in which modern video games can illuminate the nature of human thinking and problem solving as situated and embodied. The author first discusses why, over the last several years, many people have become interested in video games as a site to study human thinking, problem solving, and learning. The author then discusses what he call the “projective stance,” a type of embodied thinking characteristic of many (but not all) video games, as well as a form of thinking that is also, but more subtly, pervasive in everyday life and social interaction as well.

Assessment, equity, and opportunity to learn

Providing all students with a fair opportunity to learn (OTL) is perhaps the most pressing issue facing the U.S. education system. Moving beyond conventional notions of OTL – as access to content, often content tested; access to resources; or access to instructional processes – the authors reconceptualize OTL in terms of interaction among learners and elements of their learning environments. Drawing on sociocultural, sociological, psychometric, and legal perspectives, this book provides historical critique, theory and principles, and concrete examples of practice through which learning, teaching, and assessment can be re-envisioned to support fair OTL for all students. This book offers educators, researchers, and policy analysts new to sociocultural perspectives a readable and engaging introduction to fresh ideas for conceptualizing, enhancing, and assessing OTL; encourages those who already draw on sociocultural resources to focus attention on OTL and assessment; and nurtures collaboration among members of discourse communities who have rarely engaged one another’s work.