Now and then Kristine over at Ask in Game finds time to drop by and peg up some tidbits. She’s a busy lady – posts don’t appear often but they always pique my interest, so I keep an eye out.
A couple of weeks ago she dropped by on what looked to be a flying visit and ran something very positive up the flagpole: proof that games are inching towards a good reputation in education with added academic reading. Which I got far too excited by.
Anyhow. Kristine says that she went to the Games+learning+society conference [pullquote]“learning to play a game … is a new form of literacy”[/pullquote]where she was privy to a presentation about a project that’s working with select teenagers to improve their literacy skills – by playing WoW together. I admit my first thought was “Wow, lucky nitwibblers, they didn’t teach us like that in my day.”
Once I’d wrestled the jealousy back into its box – and put my feet back on the ground with a couple of random dungeons – I realised that Kristine is right to get excited about this. So excited, I might add, she’s asking for partners to set up a similar project in Norway. The beauty of the project is that in acknowledging WoW’s traits of competition and natural progression both as individuals and peers, the project’s developers have managed to [pullquote]emergence … of literacy practices that are an indelible part of progressing through WoW — for example …[debates around] specializing one’s virtual character … and making sense of online networked resources …[/pullquote]utilize them as tools – educational aids – with tangible results. This can only be a good step for the teenagers benefiting from the project and for games’ reputation as a whole.
Ayup, it’s a slow process; the stigma around gaming has been fashioned with epic amounts of steel and ire. Chipping it away is taking some time. But reports like this make me all fuzzy inside, with a dim hope that one day games will be recognised as tools which can be used for growth rather than as a substitute or manifestation of some defect of reality.
Quotes taken direct from the paper based on after school program by Constance Steinkuehler, which Kristine links to – pages 2 and 4 respectively. I heartily recommend reading the whole thing.
Ask in Game’s homepage, meanwhile, can be found here.
N.B. I’m contacting the project’s developers – I have their guild name and server (ooo, learning really is hip and with it mon, these days), so hopefully we’ll hear updates from them on this and similar projects in the future.