Visiting lecturer to explore promise of video games as hot learning tool

Posted Dec. 2, 2008

School can be a real turnoff for some kids, but James Paul Gee knows that if anything can turn them on to learning, it’s the interactive, multi-layered fantasy world of video games-and he has put in the research and game time to prove it.

Gee, who holds an endowed professorship in literacy studies at Arizona State University, will speak on "Video Games and 21st Century Learning," at the University of Florida Jan. 14, 3:30-5 p.m., in the Terrace Room at Norman Hall (605 SW 13th Street). His presentation will mark the second installment in the UF College of Education’s "21st Century Pathways in Education" distinguished speaker series. The lecture series is geared to college and UF faculty and students, but the public also is invited.

Gee says the virtual realities created by game designers are more relevant to what today’s students will face in an increasingly complex world that revolves around global issues and conflicts. In "What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy," one of his books on video games and education, he calls virtual gaming "an alternative learning system that teaches more effectively than most schools."

Games and game designers, he says, put the pleasure back in learning.

In his book "Why Video Games are Good for your Soul," Gee writes: "Learning is a basic drive for humans . . . School has taught people to fear and avoid learning as anorexics fear and avoid food-it has turned some people into mental anorexics. The real paradox is not that learning and pleasure go together, but rather how and why school manages to separate them."

Gee’s early research centered on linguistics and literacy, with his own work providing the foundation for the emerging field of New Literacy Studies. Around 2005, he got interested in video games, those that interested him and the ones his then 3-year-old son was playing. Since then he’s been writing and lecturing extensively on the subject.

After hours and hours of gaming on his own, combined with research he and his graduate students have turned in, Gee cites several advantages the gaming culture has over current teaching methods:

• Verbal information in video games becomes available when it’s relevant, not before;
• Gamers ride the outer edge of their competency; tasks are challenging but doable;
• As skills are mastered, gamers move up to the next level of complexity, creating increasing cycles of expertise;
• Video Games motivate and encourage innovation by allowing gamers to try on virtual identities.

For Gee, it’s not just the games but the "gamer communities" that can reinvigorate contemporary education. While teachers struggle to get students to work together in teams, the online video-gaming world finds wildly diverse gamers collaborating on solutions of global, if virtual, proportions. That atmosphere of cooperative problem-solving, something Gee calls a "passion community," is how he sees education moving to the next level.

Gee is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. A member of the National Academy of Education, he received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University in 1975 and has published widely in linguistics, psychology and education journals His most recent work focuses on video games, literacy and education, including a recent essay collection, "Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning and Literacy."

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CONTACTS
WRITER: Renée Zenaida, UF COE News & Communications, rzenaida@coe.ufl.edu