MUVE :: Blog :: Games Learning and Society Conference

So I'm here at day 1 of the GLS conference. James Paul Gees opening talk was interesting, it covered alot of the ground my talk tomorrow will cover (is this good or bad?). He liked the phrase 'Fail Early, Fail Often' which is what games allow us to do. This he argued was a good way to learn but that it would need a big shift in ideology for traditional education to see the value in faliure. He also talked about the problem that poor students failed and couldn't apply the little knowledge they had and that rich students passed and still couldn't apply the knowledge they had. He argued that games worked as situated learning and that in some cases the player designing the game was the game. This meant that game players were being encouraged to use their knowedge as an applied tool.

 Also an SL talk from a Linden (John Lester AKA Pathfinder Linden). He mentioned AjaxLife which is a browser based window onto the SL community invented by a girl who wanted to stay in touch with her peers even when she was on a computer that couldn't run SL. The power of 'belonging'...

 Dave