Archive for April, 2006
A comment here, a comment there…
Meagan (yet to be approved)
Mike
Myst, in German, means “poop”
That about sums up my experience with Myst. I appreciate the thought of getting immersed in the game to learn about how it applies to teaching and learning. But after spending over an hour trying to turn all of the squares in the elevator/fireplace red (because there’s no clue about what to do, so that’s what I figure you had to do) I quit playing it.
I’ll just fondly remember my days as a youth, anticipating the weekend where I could spend all Saturday playing Metroid on my old Nintendo (the first version). That’s some gaming that I could get enveloped in.
So the question then becomes, how do we harness that ability to teach history. Or how can these principles be applied to teaching history in the digital age. Well, now, that seems to be part of the quest we’ve set for ourselves, now hasn’t it.
Frankly, it’s disturbing…
Virtual reality…
Gee’s hung up on using video games for education, while some people are wanting to move it into the business sectors.
All this has some companies mulling a wild idea: Why not use gaming’s psychology, incentive systems, and social appeal to get real jobs done better and faster? “People are willing to do tedious, complex tasks within games,” notes Nick Yee, a Stanford University graduate student in communications who has extensively studied online games. “What if we could tap into that brainpower?”
from Business Week
A little more palpable in small doses…
Gee is a bit easier to take this time around. He makes some great assessments as to how video games help people learn, (here it is, the big…) but I still think he’s missing something. I think learning tools and entertainment tools are separate, somehow, by their vary nature. They are different in a similar way that going to work is different than going to play in the back yard. I think they can be combined in some way, but I don’t think Gee gives a satisfying solution as to how. As a matter of fact he doesn’t seem to give any kind of solution at all. Perhaps he realizes there is some connecting piece missing as well.
constructive criticism of my design assignment
Use the UTF-8 style quotes and apostrophes (the fancy kind, curly quotes).
Center the links, no bullet holes. Cropping of the images (borders).
Horse and man facing inward, just man and horse (put on other side).