BLC06: Mark Prensky, Engage Me or Enrage Me

I got here a little late, but I’m thrilled that Prensky is doing a presentation. If you haven’t heard of him, stop reading and go visit his site.

i’m not sure how he started, but right now he’s giving an overview of the Native/Immigrant theory. Those of us that didn’t grow up with the internet (myself included) have an ‘accent’. People who distinguish between online and offline. “Real life” is just as real online as it is off.

Teaching is not the same as learning. Learning takes effort. We’re not exactly sure how it hapens, but it can either feel like work or it can feel like play. It feels like play when you have engagement. Kids know what engagement feels like. Engaged learning is active and passionate.

Just using technology does not mean that the kids are going to be engaged. Students say “Whenever I go to school I have to power down.” “I’m bored in class 99 percent of the time.”

From Mark, “For today’s kids ot learn, engagement is more important than content.” There’s a charged statement. I can really get behind it, I’m just not sure I would have had the balls to state it like that.

“Content won’t help students to learn throughout their lives, but engagement will.” Mark seems to be the master of the sound byte, and that’s what his Powerpoint is.

It’s effective. The difference between analogue and digtal technology, is that digital is programmable. You can tweak it to do what you want it to do. So the question is, how do we empower students to do that sort of thing?

“Programming is the literacy of the future.” I don’t agree with that one. It’s not programming. It’s critical thinking and logical process. I’m not a programmer, but people think I am because I can think things through critically, experiment, analyze the results and adjust accordingly. If he’s talking about programming abstractly, then that might work for me.

Today’s students are not ADD, they’re just not engaged. Does an engaged child look like an ADD child? That’s an interesting idea. ADD students are the ones that aren’t engaged by the traditional methods of teaching. They aren’t engaged, and they’re ticked. Which leads to disruption.

When we say, “Stop playing and get started on your school work. You’re wasting your time, money and braincells”, it enrages the students. It doesn’t take the work they’re doing that appears to be play seriously. And often the work they’re doing on their own is incredibly deep and meaningful. After school, they get their real education in 21st century learning. During the day they get yesterdays education, after school they get future learning.

If technology is the new literacy, then many teachers are illiterate.

Disrespect is at the root of many of our problems. Students don’t think they’re respected by their teachers, and consequently they don’t respect them in turn. So what can we do about that?

1. Foster the message, we are all teachers and we are all learners. 2. Teachers should teach using tools that they can’t ever master. Technology comes and goes, don’t try to stay ahead. Just use it, even if you haven’t mastered it. Use unfamiliar tools. Don’t waste your time learning the stuff because the kids can do it!

Wow, this is fantastic. How do teachers use tools that they don’t understand and haven’t mastered. Wikipedia: Assign them to create an entry. Evaluate it for contenet, journalism, use of multimedia, and creativity, and then teach them about search vs. research, fair use vs. plagarism. That’s the lesson. The lesson for IM is about formal language versus informal language. Do you need to be a master of IM? Of course not, the students will figure that part out.

3. Learn from games.

Kids want the games, not just because their games, but because they’re intellectual stimulation that they don’t get from us.

Why is there so much negativity about games? Nobody seems to want to stand behind them. Why? When digital immigrants were growing up, games were trivial. They were casual, simple. Card games, dice games, etc. Minigames. And most educational games that are available today are Minigames. They don’t do much. They last a few minutes to a couple hours. AMEN. That’s not what the kids play. Kids play complex games. Games that take 8-100 hours.

Are sports important to school? Of course. Well, games are intellectual sports.

People say, what about the graphics? How can we create something that compares? We don’t have to. We aren’t fighting a war of graphics, we’re fighting a war of ideas.

Kids are learning to collaborate, they’re learning teamwork, to take risks, ethical and moral decisions, lateral thinking, persistence, scientific deduction, management, to master and apply new skills quickly, etc…

People who played video games as kids who are now in busines often cite it as a reason for their success. Doctors who played video games (a specific type of surgeon) commit 37% fewer mistakes.

There are four ways we can use games in instruciton: Use commercial games, use custom games made for education, talk about games in class (bring the conversation to class), use complex game design principles to create engaged instruction.

He’s going through a ton of games that are available on the market right now that fit for education perfectly. Everything from the Sims, to Civilization, to the Tycoon series to Typing of the Dead.

SocialImpactGames.com Lists them all on the site.

Here are the issues though. there are no curricular games yet. Yet is the operative word, they’re coming. The second issue is that classrooms are not designed for electronic games. Not just physically, but organizationally. How do you teach when your students are all at different levels and doing different things? Gotta be creative and inventive. You could have students play outside class and synthesize it inside class. Also, use complex game principles. Game designers have figured out how to engage kids. So learn from them.

Key things to take from game design: Engagement, goals, decision making, gameplay, leveling up, adaptivity, iteration

I’m a little distracted right now, just had another one of those “Might be brilliant, might be stupid” thoughts and had to get it down. Sorry I don’t have many details from that previous list.

Teachers are used to content first, students want engagement first.

Focus on the goals, focus on the decisions, focus on the levels kids go through so they can make themselves better, and focus on the iteration.

“What can you learn from a cell phone, almost anything!” Article of his, I need to look up.

No more battery life!

Had to quit there but there wasn’t too much left. Fantastic speaker though. You can find his site at MarcPrensky.com, and it’s definitely worth a visit. He definitely gave me plenty to think about. Great way to close off the conference.

technorati tags:blc, blc06, games, education, prensky

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6 Comments

Aaron Smith
7/21/2006

“If technology is the new literacy, then many teachers are illiterate.”

That’s a great quote. Is that from you or the presenter?

Beth
7/21/2006

I have to agree that games today teach a variety of skills. My son(age 9), daughter(age 12) any my husband all play “world of warcraft”. Two kids who would not talk to a stranger in real life are having conversations, starting and managing guilds and cooperating with people of all ages and from unkown parts of the world to complete tasks and missions. They are learning to compromise, give and take, do a little math, learn the value of different items, way risks and think about strategies. I love watching them play. They have such a good time, they do not know they are learning skills at all.

Janice
7/22/2006

Thanks for a great blog on Marc’s presentation. I appreciate your insights about his thinking. A group of our teachers just engaged in a presentation from Marc and Ian Jukes and I was trying to synthesize the information. You do it well. I’m going to recommend that folks read your blog.

David Warlick
7/22/2006

Steve,

Needless to say, I’m wishing I was there. As for gaming, this new focus on video games concerns me a bit. I’m afraid that our tendency is to see kids engaged by their X-Boxes, and in our zeal to make learning more meaningful, we will throw video games into the classroom and expect things to be better.

I believe that it isn’t the game that we should be concentrating on, but the experiences that students are having. Is it the game or is it a set of fundamental conditions that we might institute in classroom learning. The gaming environment is incredibly responsive to students. They generally invest something in the game. They communicate and influence other people. They gain something that, if it is not intrinsically valueable to them, at least it is something that they can talk about to their friends. I think that these and other qualities of video gaming are things that we might integrate into classroom practices.

Games would be fine, but by themselves they’ll just make us look foolish to them

Later, bro!

Jennie
7/23/2006

I don’t think that these “engaging games” are anything new. When I was in grade school, Oregon Trail was the game to play–it was *educational* enough for the teachers, but we mostly liked making sure our least-liked family members died of dysentry–and we were also bored, quite a bit. I don’t think students are any different today. What is different, and what I like about your comments, is that students expect a level of technological competence (or at least awareness) and often feel disconnected from a system that seems as divorced from the reality of life as a 1950’s movie. So many, many teachers draw the line even at emailing, let alone keeping up on the latest games or tools. You are right, this must change–what students can do has evolved, teachers need to as well.
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La Teacher » Teach the Teacher Collaborative Week 1
9/2/2006

[...] Next in our speaker lineup was Marc Prensky. Since my summation is getting foggy in my head since it has been two weeks now since I heard his presentation, I was delighted to find another blogger, Steve Dembo, whom I regularly read, who just saw his presentation at the recent Building Learning Communities in Boston. A link to his thoughtful summation of the presentation is on his recent blog post. I recommend you read this excellent post to find out about what Marc Prensky’s message is. (I found this while cruising Hitchhiker, a brilliant new tool created by David Warlick, which tracks the blogs and photos of all the latest technology conferences.) [...]

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