Idea Sex – yeah the title got my attention too

Leave it to The Escapist for titles like this now eh? First from the article:

No.2 … Keep the classroom, but change it and everything around it. Make the money in education slosh a different way. Have schools, colleges, communities, businesses and all other parts of the education system talk to each other a little more. Look everywhere, starting with games, for new ways to operate.

No. 3: my big, mad slogan,: bring it all back to what learning’s for. Learning is about bettering and expanding lives in some way. If you cannot learn from the world around you, you are dead. And in this world we’re moving into so fast, the definition of basic skills is constantly evolving. We’re a long, long way from just food, shelter and thighbones.

It’s a bit of an odd article to read, but you can add Helen Anderson to the growing list of people who are looking at games in a different way when it comes to learning. Games are not something that are going to go away, and with the inability for the education system to adapt to technology in general is disconcerting, but the inability for education to change the way it thinks about something that has changed rolls in “the real” world is really quite disturbing. Games were seen as juvenile and education has yet to see that they are now “main stream”. I’ve mentioned this in the past as well – nothing in education is ever new… so this problem has been struggled with in the past already. How did things change in the past?

I’m not sure, but there was certainly something related to authority. Evolution entered schools because the academy picked it up as did many other ideas in Science and the Arts, but new ideas related to teaching don’t seem to have such a route. The only way that new ideas seem to come in is generationally. Unfortunately, a human generation will see many generations of technology and the volume of human knowledge will also grow exponentially. These two, in the past would not have been an issue, but we can now see that they are becoming a bigger and bigger issue all the time.