PacMan Cometh
In the aftermath of my Schoolhouse Rock awakening, I finally actually read Diana Oblinger’s seminal article Boomers, Gen-Xers & Millennials: Understanding the New Students. These are ideas that have been avidly discussed and adopted on my campus by an informal learning community of faculty, librarians, and administrators. (UMW has been blessed with an amazingly creative and apparently insomniac instructional technology team with a national reputation for innovation.)
Even before reading the article, I had pretty well assimilated the basic point about Millennials. Millennials are here. They’re connected. They’re comfortable with technology. Why not use their own tools in teaching?
What I hadn’t gotten before was what my Gen-X colleague, Jami Bryan, manager of UMW’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies library, had been saying in just about every conversation she and I have had over the past couple of years about teaching online library resources.
I’ve tended toward providing detailed step-by-step instructions for our databases. Jami has countered that students learn by noodling around. She has encouraged me to get them to the resource, give them a little demo, and then to get out of the way and let them play.
It was the “play” part I didn’t get until I read Oblinger’s assertion that “Learning is more like Nintendo than logic. Nintendo symbolizes a trial-and-error approach to solving problems; losing is the fastest way to mastering a game because losing represents learning.”
I am not a gamer unless kitchen table poker counts. The last time I played a pinball machine, it had mechanical flippers. And the only electronic game I have ever experienced (this is not a joke) is ancient, arcade Pac-Man. But I respect Jami’s opinion, so I’ve been trying something new. I can’t do it in research classes because of the laptop problem. But instead of hogging the computer during an individual research appointment in my office, I’m learning to roll my own chair away from the keyboard and let the students drive. I’m impressed at how quickly they pick up the mechanics of the search. Once that is mastered, they have more freedom to collaborate on the intellectual content. I’ll be doing a lot more of this in the future.
January 14th, 2007 at 1:38 am
I love Pacman. I got the high score at a retro arcade in Portland, OR not but two months ago - I made it to the third key and amassed 120,000 points. Boooyaa!!!
That being said, you’re on to something here - Pacman is not a game its an ethic. A series of patterns that you adhere to in hopes of navigating the maze effectively for as long as you can. The electronic world has always been malleable but the average persons ability to directly manipulate and interact with images on a TV screen never really occurred until pong, Atari, C64, Coleco Vision, the coin-ops, etc. After this, that screen no longer represented an unilateral relationship, for we learned then that it can be reciprocal. Little did we know just how much it could offer us in 2007 once millions and millions of people could use their respective screens to communicate with one another. Gaming is not a hobby nor a childish diversion, rather it is a way of processing media and navigating the representations of our world together -while at the same time laughing.
January 14th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
Boooyaa, indeed. More evidence of a misspent youth!
Hmmmm. “A series of patterns that you adhere to in hopes of navigating the maze effectively for as long as you can?”
Sounds like online searching to me.
January 16th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
As I was reading your post, Charlotte, it occurred to me that Maryellen Weimer might have called your inventive approach “Learner-Centered Teaching.”
In the preface of her book with that title (Jossey-Bass, 2002, Preface xviii), she suggests, “when teaching is learner-centered, the role of the teacher changes…Learner-centered teachers are guides, facilitators, and designers of learning experiences. They are no longer the main performer [sic], the one [sic] with the most lines, or the one [sic] working harder than everyone else to make it all happen. The action in the learner-centered classroom features the students. Teaching action expedites learning.”
Thanks for a really entertaining and enlightening post!
February 5th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Download Computer Games - Before Deciding To Buy One…
The Internet is not only a good source of information on about every subject. You will also find many sites that allow you to download new programs and other useful software that you can copy directly to your computer. It also offers files that contain…
April 25th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
[...] by my recent thinking about online gaming as a metaphor for Millennial learning and by enouraging comments from colleagues, I decided to try something [...]