About five years ago, I had an Asian student in my English 111 class at Nova. He was a quiet, attentive student, who occasionally dozed off, but generally, started the semester strong. After a few weeks he started skipping class and stopped turning in work. When I finally saw him, I kept him back for a few minutes after class and asked if everything was ok. He was failing the course and I wanted to see whether he was willing to get back on track, or if he would drop. He confided to me that he had an addiction – a video game addiction. He never slept, instead he played games all the time – all night, all day. He had already failed out of VCU and he was mortified to admit this. Worse, he was in danger of failing out of Nova – which would multiply the humiliation dramatically. Given his ethnicity, and the pressure from his parents, as he explained it, he was in big trouble. In his words “An Asian kid failing Nova is pathetic”.
This left a really strong impression on me and I’ve never forgotten him. Before that I hadn’t encountered the truly debilitating impact that gaming can have on young people. This young guy had no control over his life. While I’ve bought my fair share of games and own the latest gaming system, I just don’t buy the connections that Gee is trying to make: teachers could be capturing students by incorporating elements and strategies of gaming. I see socializing via the Xbox, but I see it in real life too. I see scaffolding and planning a strategy in Xbox, but they are already there in real life too. I creativity in Xbox, but it’s already there in real life too. My point is that whatever skills kids are using in their games, they are already using them in life – in fact, they learned them in their real life.
I am not going to use video gaming ideals in my college teaching. And I’m not sure I would want to even see an elementary school teacher using gaming. It all seems a bit trendy to me – and many of these would-be trend setters don’t address the negative impacts of gaming. Now the newest trend is figuring out a way to apply some of the strategies kids are already employing in their gaming, to the classroom. However, I think the classroom should push students out of their comfort zone, out of their virtual worlds if need be, and engage them meaningfully in the real.
I am very much in favor of using different technologies in my classrooms, but all assignments are intentional acts of creation, with editing and revising, team work and presentation. These are also acts that students might be using in their favorite video game. But I don’t see that it’s necessary for me to draw those parallels for students – it seems quite unnecessary, to me. And I feel absolutely no compulsion to join the trend.
I think I read Gee a little differently than a lot of people; I didn’t see him purposing we use videogames in the classroom so much as we use or consider the benefits of the learn / do / adapt method of learning that is fundamental to all videogames. I went to a progressive elementary school, which was great in some ways and miserable in others. When it was great, most of the time it was because my teachers had the class size, the resources, and the desire to follow this method. When it was terrible, most of the time it was because we needed to sit and learn things that we never did, like grammar. Gaming tutorials, which appear at the beginning of a game and teach you the basics of that game, are relatively interesting. Is there a way to make grammar interesting? Well, I don’t know. All my pedagogy teachers say the research shows that teaching grammar doesn’t make better writers, but from my experience not teaching it makes decidedly worse writers.
Anyway, that aside, I wanted to comment on your first insight. I wrote about this on my post too. Video games are SAVAGELY addictive. I mean, it’s totally crazy. I’ve known and been around some pretty serious drug addicts back in earlier days, and I must say I have never seen a human being act like one who is possessed by a video game. Gee, I think, did a disservice to his study by not taking the time to mention and stress the problems that video games present; without this he seemed either 1. ignorant of those problems or 2. like a dude who purposely chose to ignore them because they did not bode with his argument.