The thirteenth article: Marc Prensky. Digital Game Based Learning.

Marc Prensky. Digital Game Based Learning.

I like Prensky's articles because he is so radical. Go and tell something like that to our teachers and they will certainly throw you with rotten tomatoes. By all means, this is only figurative, because teachers are intellectual by all means.
But now to go on with the article, Prensky does not feel ashamed to declare that it is the educators' fault that pupils feel bored at school. School does not provide them with a brand new content that they are used to, and he draws a good parallel that a doctor will not blame the patient for falling ill (p. 2). He adds that "people live in the world into which they are born, and do things of their time that appeal to them." He puts his thoughts into a very interesting context.



He poses a very important question: "Why is school and corporate learning so incredibly unengaging to today's learners?" His answer is that to most of the educators teaching is about content - what to teach - not why and how to teach. He also brings forth a cool term "shelfware" which means CD Roms that are put on a shelf and never used.
In the article it is also suggested that lots of learning has gone online. Yesterday I found a video of using Skype for teaching languages, and thought that this would be a good idea, but I bet that Prensky thinks that it is the same as classroom teaching, only by means of internet telephone. What he tells about current courses is that it bores the listeners to death when a person is reading the text from the PowerPoint's bulleted list and asks for feedback when nobody wants to tell anything, because it would slow down the leaving process. I think that in some lectures in Tallinn University this happens as well, where pupils have to listen to the lecturer's voice while reading the PowerPoint (and that is where the students take out their laptops to read current news or do some work or engage themselves with more interesting content). When you have to do a real task (either online or in groups) it is more interesting than just to listen to the theory. Probably it would be a good idea to devote some time to reality game development in order to give the content to students via putting themselves into the situation, it should not be the whole lecture, it can be only a part of it.
Another problem raised is the problem of engaging students who have grown up with twitch-speed films and video games. The content should be engaging for the learner not for the teacher.
Prensky elaborates on why tell-testing is the best approach now, and gets three possible solutions:

1. the teacher is just inexperienced,
   
2. the teacher just loves to stand up and talk,
3. the means of know-how to do anything else are lacking. (p. 6)

The author then elaborates on the roots of education and states that modern education is the product of the printing press (p. 8). With the Industrial Revolution school was turned to a factory which produces workers, as has been mentioned in the previous articles I have read as well. Interestingly, standardized testing was the result of WW I. To conclude, this test-tell education is less than three hundred years old (p. 9). This education has not changed throughout 19th and 20th centuries, not even with the invention of telephone, TV, and radio. I wonder why nowadays the Internet providers give people triple packets which consist of TV, Radio and Telephone cable provision, when most of the current generation use their mobiles and computer only. TV is viewed through the computer.
Today computers have come between this tell-test method and this is what has happened:

• written language has become less important,
• linear organization (reading from books, linear thinking) has been replaced by random-access (hypertext) organization,
• speed has increased (twitch-speed). (p. 9)
  

Education and training have not managed to keep up with such changes.A few people, according to the author, are thinking about changes in education for the "twitch-speed" generation.

Actually when coming to Tallinn University this time, it was totally different. Some academic nuances are there, but I felt the old and comfortable university feeling in the English Department's lecture. Handouts, repetition, taking notes on a paper and in the computer. Otherwise it seemed a totally different world with online lessons and lots of computer usage. I was really thrilled, although I am used to sitting in the classroom and listening to the teacher's voice telling us what to do. I must mention, I am kind of an "old" teacher myself, teaching the way I was taught at school and having learnt the didactics that are compatible with the older generations, the overall traditional education. But inside, I feel that these pupils nowadays lack something, and Prensky opened my eyes (a bit radically, but he at least gives a hint to what needs to be done).

The next issue is learning. Practice is important according to the author, but practicing can be made more interesting by thinking what adds to it, but nobody wants to practice. This is where games help. He also akcnowledges that learning has moved from classroom into computers, but it is no les tell-test than it was before.
The main reasons for education being the way it is, are the following:

• money issues (training is a cheaper and quicker way to teach compared to simulations and games);
• lack of knowledge of today's learner's needs;
• not knowing how to teach today's learners, because they learn without listening to us (e.g. this generation knows more about computers than their elders and they have achieved it without tell-test learning);
  
• the system is big and fragmented with a large number of learners and different teaching pace;
• the reformers are fragmented, education reform constantly changes;
• there is the need for infrastructure first;
• the system is holding back the changes, because it needs time;
• the system kind of works, it is not quite broke (e.g. Alcoholics Anonymous - if the problem is not admitted, there is no possibility of fixing it);
• retraining the staff is difficult;
• accountability for Game generation is harder than measuring test scores. (p. 18-21)

This is a really striking article in a way. It seems so true that pupils are disturbed in the current school system, but the change may take time and I kind of developed an interest in game based learning or in how to make learnin better for these generations. I might consider this as my Master Thesis.