Laura Devaney recently wrote an article titled "Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills". Within her article she discusses how "online gaming can help students develop many of the skills they'll be required to use upon leaving school, such as critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity". Games such as Second Life have been shown to help in creating mental maps, forming hypotheses and the ability to focus on multiple things at once. Claudia L'Amoreaux called Second Life "an engine for creativity". Using Second Life, students were involved in a recreation of Kristallnacht from 1938. Overall, the article showed students effectively using gaming as a learning tool. L'Amoreaux notes that "it helps kids get involved in things and use their own interests and explore a part of something they're interested in".
Although I mainly agreed with the information presented in the article, I do not want to automatically assume that all gaming helps children learn. There are definitely role-playing and strategy-related games that enhance a students learning experience; however, I would also contest that it can negatively impact a student. I, a non-gaming individual, would have trouble focusing on learning without being distracted by the images on the screen. Gaming should also not be a central point to learning because in my opinion, you need to be traditionally taught before you can experience new ways of learning. This makes me think about how my younger cousins are much more technologically fluent than I am, but that obviously doesn't make them smarter. Could the use of gaming help students learn? Most certainly. I just want to make sure we aren't giving in as educators and accepting all types of media as forms of learning for the hell of it.
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I agree with Dan in the sense that video games can, and most likely would, be very helpful to the classroom. However, I also think that online gaming does lack the exposure to actual human contact that working in groups would normally provide. I completely understand the positive aspects that gaming does offer. I love video games and have been exposed to them over my entire life. Although it may have several areas where students can be improved, I don't think that online gaming on the whole can provide all of the social skills that we learn in school alone. I would say that we would need to find the healthy balance of both, because with how things are happening today, it seems like a new method is becoming more and more desirable.
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