I’m always being in my Harper’s reading. During my vacation (4C’s in NYC, and now in Pittsburgh), I was finally able to catch up on the September 2006 issue. There’s a pretty good Forum on using video games that might teach writing, with Jave Avrich (author of The Winter Without Mlik), Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad Is Good for You), Raph Koster (video game designer), and Thomas de Zengotita (author of Mediated: How the Media Shapes the World and the Way You Live It).
Koster at one point discusses consequences and education, which I thought was pretty key to our understanding of motivation:
In the video-game world, this is called the “magic circle” surrounding games. And it has to be a circle of no consequence: What you’re doing in here doesn’t matter outside it, so it’s okay to fail. You’re forgiven. One of the problems with standard pedagogy is that it all matters too much, there’s a pressure to succeed. And that turns off a lot of learners. Pressure situations are difficult for some people. (32)
Later, Koster discusses remixing, which was very in vogue at the 4C’s conference this year:
What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to each kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blogs are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (39)
Wasik, Bill, Jane Avrich, Steven Johnson, Raph Koster, and Thomas de Zengotita. “Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games.” Harper’s Magazine (September 2006): 31-39.
