Room With A View

My direct access to Edublogs has been blocked for well over a year but now all .Mac accounts are blocked too!! Grrr….

Hopefully it will open up again once the Olympic hoopla is behind us.

A study commissioned by the US Department of Justice is discussed on CBC’s May 1st episode of Search Engine. Some people may be surprised by the study’s findings. It’s well worth a listen but here are a few key points:

• there is not a simple relationship between violent video games and violent behaviour
• boys that don’t play games are more likely to get into trouble at school
• kids like the complexity of games not the violence. It just happens that the violent games tend to be the complex ones.
• kids are acutley aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. They know that games are not real. That’s why they like them.
• youth violence has gone down in the past 15 to 20 years. The reporting of violence has gone up.

Here’s a link to the study’s homepage.

Grand Theft Auto IV was released recently week. CBC’s The Q has a good story on it. For those not familiar with the game the player earns points by stealing cars, running people over, killing cops, and pretty much doing whatever is totally evil. Obviously, it’s controversial and it makes money–lots of it. It’s estimated that it grossed over $500 million in its first week. That beats out all other entertainment releases ever. The number one grossing movie ever was Spiderman 3. It made a little more than $150 million in its first week. What does this mean to education? It challenges us to look at what kids are learning in games like this and how they are learning it.

We need to look at what they are learning so we can challenge students to think critically about what they are consuming and what effect it might be having on them and society.

We need to look at the how they are learning in games so we can figure out what makes some games so captivating so we can weave these same techniques into our pedagogy.