Libraries, Gaming, Equity Crisis

James Paul Gee. "Libraries, Gaming, and the New Equity Crisis."
--author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us.

Learning Available on the Internet, but Not at School:
Adaptive computer-based training, dynamic multimedia, hypertext, hypermedia, interactive simulation, intelligent tutoring systems, inquiry-based info retreival, animated pedagogical agents, etc.

Gaps
-- literacy: stopped progress, yet widened after 1984. Still essential.
--applications: most kids fail, while still getting A's.
--knowledge: simply handing over technology widens gap. No mentoring in place for poor.
--tech-savvy: no fear of technology. Can use it. Necessary.
--innovation: simple jobs outsourced, school curriculum kills innovation.

Kindergarten vocabulary -- predilector for success in 4th grade and beyond. School is in academic, not everyday English. We fail to realize that kids can hate this language, can't use it.
--------Yu-Gi-Oh cards contain 3 if/then clauses. It is hard to process one. This is academic English. Kids learn this readily. Just not in school. Which makes things kids are good at hard. With 10,000 cards, there is no limit to what a kid can learn.

Learning Principles
Learning is a passion -- Lower the consequences of failure. IDEO's credo, "fail early, fail often" is good to apply. Every failure event is an opportunity to map out the maze, make progress in new ways.
Performance before competence -- Like learning English! Learn while you do. With support and help. Works in life, not in school...
Players high on agency tree -- Your choices make the game what it is. Codesign the game.
Problems are well-ordered -- Education, organic, in a way that is neither progressive or conservative. In a rich environment, be sure there is a progression, to form "right path," useful for later problems.
Cycles of challenge, consolidation, and new challenge (expertise) -- problem leads to routine mastery upon repetition. Offer new problem where old solution no longfer works. Keep ratcheting up problem, keep ratcheting up intelligence. Stay within, but at outer edge of players Regime of competence principle -- where work takes over life, a state of "flow."
**poor kids get too little practice while rich kids rarely get challenged.
----We need leaders that can think big----
Players encouraged to think about systems -- gain empathy for a complex system (Sims, ex). Give verbal information "just in time" when players need and can use it. Or "on demand" when the player asks for it.
Situate (show) associations -- the meanings of words and symbols and show how they vary across different actions, images, and dialogues. Don't just offer words for words, definitions.
Modding Attitude --Modern games allow you to make characters, setting, equipment, etc (Civilization, Tony Hawk, etc.)

What We Must Do

1. Change attitude towards learning! Embarrass schools into changing. Schools produce serviceworkers; 3/5 of us, according to former Secretary of State Robert Reich's book.
2. Change attitude towards learning! Games don't have to be educational to educate.
3. Change attitude towards learning! Kids always say they learn more at home than at school, when they're privileged enough to have access.
4. Change attitude towards failure! Failure is a judgment on the game according to a kid, this is a healthy attitude. Failure in school is on their part? Middle class kids are starting to fail out for the first time.
5. Follow new models! ARMY trains by games, for everything. The kids they get are the ones school faild with. We need new forms of learning. Anime culture leads some kids to learn Japanese! Literacy, art, drawing, environment linked here -- supermulticultural.
6. Takes 10 years to become an expert, conventional wisdom. Start today!