Why am I playing World of Warcraft? Besides the fact that it's fun and compelling. Oh...wait...that's a big reason. We know computer-based games exist in the popular culture of American youth. And we see that whether on cell phones, networked computers, or networked consoles, interactive, group gaming is hot in youth culture today. Cause it's FUN.
Why does that matter? Game/play/media/culture researchers and theorists know that dimensions of popular culture are a widely used source of metaphors, analogies, exemplars, and perspectives for the people who are engaged or immersed in media culture. But uh, not in school, not by teachers.
That is exactly the point, in a Luis Moll funds of knowledge kind of way. Moll talks about the marginalization of Latino culture in school and how it represents not only a lost resource for the teacher to plumb, but also a lost opportunity for an expansive curriculum.
So let's consider this. If, as Jenkins, Gee, and others assert, there is a formal, stable, recognizable culture around computer gaming (online, console, handheld, etc), and if the 10-20 year olds are deeply immersed in it, doesn't that mean that there is also a funds of knowledge issue here to exploit as well? Certainly we saw at the first Games+Learning+Society conference that guild master skills learned in WoW were directly applicable in the corporate world. Surely this must also hold for the classroom.
Teachers need to connect with the game culture. Integrate technology into instruction has traditionally meant, shove some piece of software into the curriulum delivery. It's been a miserable failure. Teachers are not, as a whole, native learners via technology. Why would we expect them to be teachers via technology.
But I'm thinking now that the argument is better cast as a cultural argument, especially since I am aligned with a socio-cultural theory of learning. Learning is not better when the learner encounters it in the context of its use (well maybe it is, but that's an argument for another day. I do think it's deeper learning, actually). It's easier; it's more successful. Why? School culture is piss poor, thinly contextualized. I suppose if you grow up in a household of educators, as I did, it's much more comfortable. I helped my mom put up bulletin boards before school started each September. I'd been to the EMB (educational materials building) to help her select books for her classroom. I'd been been in the teachers lounge long before most kids even knew there was one. So for me, school was a very comfortable culture. It had a lot of handholds. For others, it was a slick granite wall.
What can we borrow from games? The same thing we old farts borrow and rely upon from our experience of modern culture: language, metaphors, analogies, examples, viewpoints. I have a colleague here who is using pieces of the tv show, The Apprentice, to teach ideas about leadership. For my daughter, who is also in a leadership class in middle school, references to leading a questing party or a guild would be considerably more proximal to her reach (and yeah, that was a reference to the zone of proximal development.)
A few nights ago, I met James at the Ironforge to visit the warlock trainer whilst he visited the blacksmith trainer, and we stumbled upon the most amazing thing.
We was walking toward the forge with great purpose. James needed to do some smithing work. Fashioning himself his own armaments, he was. And I needed to find the warlock trainer. They be hard to find sometimes as they are not particularly welcomed. Folks find their ways strange and dark, even when the very selfsame folks are needed the spells these warlocks can cast. As we entered the center of IronForge City, our pace slowed. A great gathering there was. Beasts of all kinds and all manner of person upon them: tigers, lizards, horses, bears, and creatures I know not what they be.
'Tis a muster, said James. These people be assembling to ride out against some poor fools' homeland. We stood and stared. The cries and howls and barks and growls of a hundred beasts held us in our spot. We stood there for nearly a minute, in a kind of reverie we were.
James remarked as how this was a very special treat for us, an event not often witnessed. And then, we heard the call and watched as ranks of riders headed out the main door. It was awesome. A sight I shall not soon forget, if ever. I was ready to mount up right behind them, but of course I had no mount. And these folks would have no use for a level 8 gnome. So off we went to get some training, that we might some day ride off with a wild cry to hunt the enemy on their own home grounds.
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