This book is associated to a web site where can be found indications about how to use commercial off-the-shelf video games in education:
The book is intended to a large public. But more specifically to parents and teachers who might be afraid that their children are spending too much time (or just spending their time) at playing video games. Prensky wishes to reassure his readers that video games are not bad at all for the mental health of young players. For doing this, he largely draws on James Paul Gee’s work, and on his own observations concerning what children do when they play a VG. The message that parents are intended to take home is: playing with VG is a positive rather than negative activity for children, a learning activity aimed at non-curricular but useful acquisitions, and this is true even for non-education, even for violent games.
“But the kids, it turns out, are right! You’ve been bamboozed into thinking all this game playing is bad! Kids ought to be playing these games and you ought to be encouraging them (within limits, of course) to play! Why? Because they are learning! Not only that, but almost all their learning is positive. IN fact, I claim that your kids are almost certainly learning more positive, useful things for their future from their video and computer games than they learn in school!” (p. 4)
It must be said that Prensky seldom cites hard evidence in order to ground his observations and tenants, rather preferring anecdotical evidence:
“Want your kids to grow up to be surgeons? - Let them play video games. Dr. james Rosser, the doctor in charge of laparoscopic surgery training at New York City Beth israel Hospital, found that doctors who had played videogames earlier in their lives made almost forty percent fewer mistakes in surgery!” (p. 7)
Here are listed some of the reasons Prensky advances in order to defend his position about the learning advantages of playing VG:
- kids love to learn when it isn’t forced on them! (p. 5)
- they’re learning things they need for their twenty-first century lives (p. 5): collaboration, strategies, management of complex situations, making decisions quickly…
- “Certainly one of the most interesting challenges and opportunities in parenting and teaching Digital Natives is to find ways to include reflection and critical thinking in their learning, either built into the instruction or through a process of instructor-led questioning and ‘debriefing’” (p. 37)
- “A game is a series of interesting and important decisions, leading to a satisfying conclusion” (p. 61): decisions, meaningful to the player, that help him or her achieve their goals, feedback is always clear and generally immediate
- “Games, of course, are designed to challenge players. But one of the best parts of today’s modern games … is how they are able to taylor those challenges to each player’s ability, almost always without ever letting the player know it is happening. this is why the same game can often be equally challenging for … everyone form a complete beginner to a seasoned expert.” (p. 91)
- “group habits, which are developed … in multiplayer games that require players to work together toward a common goal” (p. 114)
- modding (modifying a game)
- disintermediation, which simply means eliminating the middleman… In education, disintermediation means eliminating whatever comes between the learner and what he or she wants to learn. In many educational areas - although certainly not all - it is the wave of the future. … while we certainly won’t be eliminating our teachers corps in the foreseeable future, their role, and what they teach, will certainly be changing. And anything that can be thought by a game (or a cell phone, or other technology that kids want to use), should be, and soon will be. … Now I am not claiming … that all kids can, or will be able to acquire complex thinking and evaluation patterns and skills easily or entirely on their own. Learners of such things do need, and can benefit greatly fro, a process designed to help them learn. But this process does not always have to include a live teacher in a traditional school. ... What if we created a school with no teachers at all, as we know them today, but rather with the same number of empathetic learning counselors - people who have no required academic training in subject matter, but have great skills in understanding and helping kids ? These learning counselors and their administrators could do the following : Give the kids objectives and goals, and require them to self-organize to reach them. Make sure the groups they form are multi-player, creatie, collaborative, challenging and competitive. Measure students’ progress by letting them evaluate each other through tasks they have to do in public (say in co-op programs), through projects and games they complete, and through how much they help their peers. Control outrageous behavior though per pressure, and, when necessary, student-led attitude reforms. (pp. 198-200)
If most of the book is aimed at parents (play with your kids, learn their games, talk with them about what they do like in games), one chapter is more specifically addressed to teachers, with advices about how to use games in the classroom or for the curriculum, and with the suggestion of web sites of creative teachers who actually use VG at school:
There are different ways of using VG in the classroom, says Prensky:
“1. Bring games played outside of class into the classroom through questions, discussions, etc. 2. Use the principles behind good, complex games to make some or all of your teaching more game-like, and therefore more interesting and engaging to students. 3. Play in class a game specifically designed for education. 4. Play a commercial, off-the-shelf game that was not specifically designed for education… (p. 189) “If you do get into playing games yourself, you’ll be able, in many instances, to give kids assignments based on game playing” (p. 190) “The easisest way for you and the class to play the game together is with the game projected at the front of the room… and some newer educational games, like Making history and the MIT mod revolution … are designed specifically to fit into class periods” (p. 192). “And if you have the skills (or the help), you can join Mark Greenberg as one of the many teachers around the world who create their own games, specifically designed to their own kids’ educational needs” (p. 192)
Prensky discusses (and criticizes) those who, in the US, have built their image and career around the demonization of VG (the naysayers): Jack Thomson (lawyer, who has sued several VG creators for commercializing dangerous weapons that push teens to violence); David Walsh, who has created the National institute of Media and the Family (ONG), and who exploits the researches of Craig Anderson (well-known for his studies on violent video games and their effect on the triggering of immediate violent behaviors, with no proof concerning long terms effects; these researches are, moreover, criticized by other researches, such as Jeffrey Goldstein).
Prensky’s best known idea is the one of digital natives vs digital immigrants.
“In the past, when adults talked about children, the phrases “when I was a kid” … and “kids these days” came up regularly, usually as part of an attempt to describe just how different children of that generation were from those of previous generations. Up to now, however, these changes were mostly stylistic - incremental changes in clothing, language usage, body adornments ,music and lifestyle. But for anyone mid-twenties and younger, the differences go far deeper, and are largely driven, i believe, by the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology … I call it a digital singularity - a shift that is so fundamental that there is absolutely no going back”
“Digital technology has been an integral part of our children’s lives since birth, and an important result is that they think and process information in fundamentally different ways than we, their predecessors (who grew up in a much more analog world) do. These differences go much further and deeper than most parents and educators realize, likely affecting the organization of kids’ brains”. (p. 27-28)
It can be objected that we cannot talk so vaguely about brain plasticity (it is not so clear what does it means that young people have a different brain!), and also that not anybody younger than 20 has the same digital literacy: some 4 years old have a computer, iphone and maybe a tablet, but this is not at all a common situation. It is more easy to accept that:
“Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach” (p. 30): Digital natives communicate differently, share differently, buy and sell differently, exchange differently, create differently, meet differently, coordinate differently, evaluate differently, game differently, learn differently (Digital natives are very much aware of the fact that if they actually want to learn something, the tools are available online for them to do it (p. 48), evolve differently, search differently, analyze differently, report differently, program differently, socialize differently, grow up differently.
Still, there are degrees and some technologies are more diffused than others: every teenager has a mobile phone, but not every teenager is capable of programming a video game. It cannot be denied that digital technologies are a real presence in the life of younger people (and also of elder ones, nowadays); also, that these technologies trigger an attitude which is more active, social and creative than classic media, such as tv.