For my graduate class this week we were assigned to read most of the first half of James Paul Gee’s book The Anti-Education Era. If you are not familiar with his work or his ideas I suggest checking him out. He is an educational expert that is a huge promoter for learning through games. I suggest checking out the video below where he talks about how students can learn through gaming. He talks about how people learn things while playing games and then choose to extend their learning when they are passionate about the game. If students can (and do) learn this much from video games – why can’t we incorporate that into education?
In his book The Anti-Education Era, he discusses why people are stupid and the many limitations that prevent us, as humans, from being smart and capable of solving complex problems. I would argue that a lot of the “complex problems” that he speaks about in his book more closely resembles the definition of a “wicked problem” that I learned about last week since they are unsolvable and rely on an excess amount of variables. Some of these problems he discusses are the financial collapse of 2008, religion, universities, global warming, and education in general. If you would like to read more detail about this book and how I relate to the ideas in my teaching please read my short paper.
References
Edutopia. (2012, March 21). James Paul Gee on Learning with Video Games [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnEN2Sm4IIQ
Gee, James Paul. (2013). The anti-education era: creating smarter students through digital learning. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
TRF_Mr_Hyde. (2012, June 15). Stupid [Picture]. Retrieved from https://www.flickr.com/photos/scottchene/7340414978
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