Turner
lecturer in educational technology, digital literacies and communication design
Faculty of Education, Creative Industries Faculty,
Queensland University of Technology
j.turner@qut.edu.au
Proposal abstract : Games are education .......
[truna aka j.turner, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia]
you remember dick? he's the guy who tried to ban rock music because he feels that the lyrics promote violence. it's music dick! he's also the guy that wants to pull every video game off every shelf in the country because he feels that the video games diminish the intelligence of our youth ..... c'mon dick .... it's the only education we got ...
[zander cage [vin diesel] xXx, columbia pictures 2002]
This paper - performance explores and de-constructs the extra-ordinary resonance between the educational philosophy of constructivist learning, the demands of critical literacies in digital environments and the design and the structures and embedded epistemologies of the game format ......
Education - teaching and learning - is a social and cultural act. Any educational event or educational construct be it course, workshop or software has embedded philosophies or pedagogical design. These can be analysed in terms of their positions on a spectrum of theory, ranging from the instructivist at one extreme pole to the constructivist at the other pole. The instructivist extreme, the philosophical approach of delivery of knowledge, resides in behaviourism and announces the inclusion of [educational] goals and objectives that exist apart from the learner or user [player]. The constructivist pole of the spectrum - the idea that learning is a result of doing and constructing knowledge about the world from the individual perspective resides in a cognitive view of the mind and embeds a post modern view of knowledge or knowledges as fluid and context specific.
What is interesting is that the majority of specifically designed educational programs tend to embody an instructivist view and advantage the modernist epistemological stance in quite startling contrast to current teaching and learning practices and pedagogical theory.
What is really interesting is that digital games and game environments with their emphasis on user agency - the action cannot occur without the user doing something - and user [player] cognitive skills - making discoveries about the environment they are playing within in order to gain skills - these attributes resonate with the actual goals of educational practice.
my own kid's current favourite game is GTA vice city. If learning is seen as the simple act of being instructed in order to achieve knowledge the vice city is a little problematic ... :) [do I admit to hiding it when other parent's visit?] ... however, if learning is seen as the process of developing skills and literacies then the in depth exploration of the environment that the game engenders, the need to collaborate and seek out specific cheats and short cuts, the motivation to construct upon their previous experience within the game is entirely appropriate to the goals of learning and literacies ...
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