What makes two smart but small and decidedly non-athletic middle school boys want to risk life and limb to try out for the school football team? Their teacher Bill Ferriter was shocked at their answer. “”We’re going to be great at football,” they replied. “We completely dominate in Madden 2008 on our PlayStations. No one can beat us!”
These two boys who had never played an organized sport in their life—-let alone an organized sport where physicality is essential for success and where brutal hits are commonplace—-had convinced themselves that football was the right sport for them because of their video game prowess. In their minds, mastering skills with digital players on an electronic field in their living rooms translated somehow into an belief that they would excel on a real field wearing real pads trying to tackle 200-pound kids without breaking their necks!
Ferriter, a North Carolina teacher who writes the superb blog The Tempered Radical, is concerned about the “false transparency” created by video games. Kids claim to be good at playing the guitar because they’ve mastered Guitar Hero. Or they express an interest in becoming soldiers because “war seems fun” after playing Call of Duty. “Becoming more ‘realistic’ by the year, new digital toys seem to provide the ‘complete experience’for users who walk away believing that they ‘know’ just what it means to be a rock star, battlefield general, or super-jock,” Ferriter writes.
Deeply strange. And disturbing. Ferriter, who is typically bullish on technology-assisted learning, worries this false transparency is hurting kids.
I’m just starting to wonder whether one of the unintended consequences of easy access to electronic experience is that we’re raising a generation of children who have a flawed sense of their personal strengths and weaknesses? Are middle schoolers—-who love fantasy and imagination to begin with—confused, failing to find the line between fiction and reality when determining what they “know” and “can do?”
Interesting and provocative insights from one of our most thoughtful classroom observers.
(HT: Anthony Rebora)
Research in the U.S. and Japan indicates children who play violent video games show increased physical aggression months afterward. The study in the journal Pediatrics examined the content of games, how often they are played and aggressive behaviors later in a school year.
Craig A. Anderson, a psychology professor at Iowa State University said the study shows a similiar effect in both countries. “When you find consistent effects across two very different cultures, you’re looking at a pretty powerful phenomenon,” he tells the Washington Post. “One can no longer claim this is somehow a uniquely American phenomenon. This is a general phenomenon that occurs across cultures.”
The study in the United States showed an increased likelihood of getting into a fight at school or being identified by a teacher or peer as being physically aggressive five to six months later in the same school year, the Post reports.
“We now have conclusive evidence that playing violent video games has harmful effects on children and adolescents,” Anderson said.
Economic uncertainty has proven to be great for business at local libraries. In Haverhill, Massachusetts “usage is through the roof,” reports the assistant library director. The Boston Globe finds similar trends in libraries throughout its region.
People don’t have as much disposable income, so the library provides an easier resource for books,” says North of Boston Library Exchange executive director Ronald Gagnon, noting other materials, such as DVDs and CDs, that libraries offer. “It just flies in the face of people who say, ‘Who needs libraries anymore?’ Book prices are $25, $30 for hard covers nowadays, and people just can’t afford it. So it’s not that the library ever went anywhere, but people are rediscovering the services provided.”
Not everyone is weathering hard times by curling up with a good book, however. A recent NPR piece notes video games continue to increase in popularity since they offer more bang for the entertainment buck. “Though video games initially earned a bad rap for being something of a loner activity, gaming has become an increasingly sociable event,” notes NPR.
Book publishers are increasingly using video games to “extend the fictional world” of novels for young readers. By doing so, the New York Times reports, authors and publishers are hoping to lure gamers who might not otherwise pick up a book. And that’s just a start.
Spurred by arguments that video games also may teach a kind of digital literacy that is becoming as important as proficiency in print, libraries are hosting gaming tournaments, while schools are exploring how to incorporate video games in the classroom. In New York, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is supporting efforts to create a proposed public school that will use principles of game design like instant feedback and graphic imagery to promote learning.
“But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word,” the Times notes.
Mark Bauerlein, the Emory University professor and author of the recent best-seller The Dumbest Generation is not among those quoted by the Times. But it’s a safe bet he would cast a skeptical eye on the piece. In a recent essay he wondered whether digital literacy is reading at all. ”Yes, it’s a kind of literacy,”he cautioned, ”but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a Modernist poem, a long political tract, and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention.”
For publishers, the lure of appealing to gamers is obvious: enhanced sales and — as they say in marketing-speak — multiplatform merchandising. For educators? Proceed with caution.
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