Edutainment: Engage me !

As if it is hard to see what Marc Prensky is pushing ! (author of Digital Game-Based Learning and the founder and CEO of Games2train, a game-based learning company whose clients include IBM Bank of America, Nokia, and the Department of Defense.)

"Those kids’ (in the past) lives were a lot less rich—and not just in money: less rich in media, less rich in communication, much less rich in creative opportunities for students outside of school."

What a load of %$#@% . Humans exist in a sea of information. Our senses don't stop collecting just becasue there is no digital transmission nearby.
IT evangalists often forget their biology, and forget is that the IT revolution has tranformed the selection of information available to students not the quantity e.g. students absorb information more commonly from digital displays whereas in the past they would be absorbing from the outside environment, or a book, or each other. The environments in the past were far more selective. Parents, teachers, local cultures could influence the information fed to children to a far greater extent.
Think of the diet of a child roaming with little supervision around a enormous unscrupulous fast food bar compared to a child that sits down closely supervised by a loving parent at a healthy family meal.
Our role as educators, is to inoculate students against the paralysing excess of options by giving them culturally specific feedback on type of creativity and knowledge is worthwhile. Without this guidance, they often assume that the highest kill count in Halo2 is a valid goal.

"All the students we teach have something in their lives that’s really engaging—something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it. ...Another commented: “Every day after school, I go home and download music—it’s all I do.”

It is instructive to read about objective measures of comparative happiness across cultures, and measures of personal dysfunction such as depression, self-harm etc. These point out the shallowness of the above analysis (and the example of creative engagement !). Students of today have a measurably reduced chance to find meaning in a world dominated by "post-modern" nihilistic self-centred relativistic dollar-worship.
Our role as educators is to entrance them with the beauty of the highest human acheivements. If you collect a list of the most boring topics imaginable fro children, then many of these achievenments will be high on the hit list. People like Prensky try to assert that you can deliver it in a computer game format. Others say that you can make it all "fun". This attitude has delivered our nation into a its most dangerous drought - a drought of high skill/ high commitment workers in so many areas. The solution for the next couple of generations is likey to be to continue to import these workers from other cultures - cultures that have a clearer idea of the necessity of failure in both building character and setting levels of comparative acheivement.

"And what they are being served is, for the most part, stale, bland, and almost entirely stuff from the past. Yesterday’s education for tomorrow’s kids. Where is the programming, the genomics, the bioethics, the nanotech—the stuff of their time? It’s not there. Not even once a week on Fridays. That’s one more reason the kids are so enraged—they know their stuff is missing!"
"The kids will master systems ten times more complex than algebra, understand systems ten times more complex than the simple economics we require of them, and read far above their grade level—when the goals are worth it to them. On a recent BBC show Child of Our Time, a four-year old who was a master of the complex video game Halo 2 was being offered socalled “learning games” that were lightyears below his level, to his total frustration and rage."

It is true that the most effective educational software categories are tools and simulations. The game format is but one specialised subsection of simulations. I am all for games as education. All higher animals use games as means of simulating and refining social, intellectual and physical tools for life in a controlled envioronment.
The only limiting factors is the availability of games that have worthwhile learning targets. So many have worthwhile content merely as a small side-dish in a "shoot em up". So many others, while of high quality, have such small educational targets that we would need anothe rdecade of ganing to cover a fraction of the current curriculum.
Our role as educators is to schoose the most effective means of acheiving the most learning in the most students in the least time with the least resources. Games will form a small but important part in this process - but are not a major solution. (Simulations, on the other hand, show far more promise, but are not nearly so motivating - the more real they are, the more they require hard work to master)

“Their short attention spans,” as one professor put it, “are only? for the old ways of learning.” They certainly don’t have short attention spans for their games, movies, music, or Internet surfing."

"And if we educators don’t start coming up with some damned good curricular gameplay for our students—and soon— they’ll all come to school wearing (at least virtually in their minds) the T-shirt I recently saw a kid wearing in New York City: “It’s Not ADD—I’m Just Not Listening!” So hi there, I’m the tuned-out kid in the back row with the headphones. Are you going to engage me today or enrage me? The choice is yours."

More rubbish unsupported by fact. The biology of students does not change in few decades. What is decreasing is the competence of parents and the coherence of culture which directly relates (on a family by family basis) to great increases in behavioural variability. It is simply wrong to say that these students have long attention spans, or the ability to overcome the frustrations inherent in mastering any complex system. Indeed, we see that these very students are the least likely to acheive in their chosen interests despite lowering their sights repeatedly.

There is no substitute for key personality attributes that are best inculcated by a healthy family, but can be enhanced by schools. There is no substutute for an education that consciously selects the best human acheivement as the focus for the very limited time we have to influence and entice children.

Prensky is just playing us for a profit.