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Today's workforce is quicker, sharper, more visually oriented, and more technology-savvy than ever. To truly benefit from the Digital Natives' learning power and enthusiasm, traditional training methods must adapt to the way people learn today. Written by the founder of Games2train, this innovative book is filled with examples and information to meet the demands of both educators and employers.
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Every corporate trainer and school-teacher in America, if not the world, should take a break right now and devour these fascinating and disturbing 50 pages.
From the Author
I wrote this book as a hands-on guide for anyone who has ever had trouble getting people (adults or kids) to learn things. Digital games are now being used to teach babies the alphabet, to help kids monitor their diabetes and overcome ADD, to teach both practical and tactical skills to the military, to teach financial derivatives to auditors and to teach CAD software to engineers, among many other things. And this is just the beginning -- ANYTHING can be taught more effectively through Digital Game-Based Learning.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, consultant, visionary and innovator in the field of education and learning. Considered one of the world's leading experts on the connection between learning and technology, Marc's professional focus is on designing better pedagogy and curriculum for the digital generation. Strategy+Business magazine calls Prensky "That rare visionary who implements."
Prensky focuses on education from the perspective of the students, rather than the providers, offering solutions for how to teach and motivate today's students and for how to motivate and reinvigorate their teachers as well. Prensky promotes a new form of "partnering" between teachers and students. Through his writings and talks, he helps educators learn to adapt their pedagogy in ways that are far more effective for the 21st century.
Marc also focuses on how to teach future-oriented skills--including problem-solving, partnering, collaborating in online communities, video-making and programming--as an integrated part of all curricula. He is a strong partisan of teachers' knowing and using students' individual passions as motivators, and of students' participation in the design of their own education.
In his talks around the globe, Marc initiates and conducts unique educator-student dialogs about the teaching and learning process. His innovative combination of pedagogy and technology--including digital game-based learning, where he was an early pioneer--is becoming increasingly accepted and used by educators worldwide as the wave of the future.
Marc has published scores of essays and articles, and is the author of four books: Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2001), Don't Bother Me Mom - I'm Learning (Paragon House, 2006), Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning (Corwin, 2010) and From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom (Corwin 2012). He was graduated cum laude from Oberlin College, holds Master's degrees from Yale University and The Harvard Business School with distinction, ran a charter school in East Harlem, NY, and has taught at all levels, from elementary to college.
Marc also performed on Broadway and at Lincoln Center, worked on Wall Street, and spent six years as a corporate strategist and product development director with the prestigious Boston Consulting Group. After his wide variety of experiences, he is thrilled to be back working in the field of education and learning.
Marc is a native New Yorker, where he lives with his wife Rie, a Japanese writer, and their son Sky, a thriving first-grader in the New York City public schools.
This book reads like a wired magazine article. Its envagelical tone betrays a decidely unacademic agenda. At times it feels like you are reading a brochure for Prensky's company rather than an objective evaluation of the capabilities and possiblities of Game-Based Learning. It rarely considers contrarian points of view and when it does, only in passing. That being said, it does contains some interesting ideas. Unfortunately, there are not enough ideas to warrant the book's heft, and the few ideas that it does contain are elaborated and repeated ad naseum. Prensky is unabashed by this and readily admits it in the intro: "You will find thoughout this book that many of the key ideas are repepated and illustrated in different ways and examples. This repetition is deliberate. Winston Churchhill counseled that "if you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-- a tremendous whack ". It appears that this quote is more of a justification though than a reason because he later ironically criticizes such reduncacy in corporate training materials: "There was at one time a company that specialized in reducing the length of corporate tapes so they could be listened to more easily. They were typically able to get an hour's lecture or speech down to 10 or even 5 minutes of real content." I feel that the same could easily be said for this book through more aggressive editing. Furthermore, the various chapters often feel disjointed as if they were constructed as atomic articles (or pieced together from such), rather than as parts of an integrated whole. And I am generous in attributing the original source to articles. My suspicion, based on Prensky's copious overuse of bullet-lists, are that many of the chapters had their odious origins within powerpoint slides. He also too often relies on quotations as support for his views when the people being quoted are not credible academic authorities but rather people running companies with a similar agenda to Prensky.
When I first got this book, I was hoping to find a much needed argument in favor of the learning and educational benefits of games. Instead I found a lackluster series of marketing-like evangelisms that have neither valid science nor learning theory to back them up. By using a sales-pitch approach in an attempt to convince the reader, this book can do more damage than good to the field of educational videogame design and research. If one really wants to find out about what games have to tell us about learning, I would recommend Jim Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy book instead.
The content would make a good magazine article because the author does make some good observations and recommendations -- but there isn't nearly enough content here for 400+ pages. I hope the games the author writes/produces aren't as boring and repetitious as parts of his book.
There are only a few poorly done illustrations, which I found puzzling given the visual nature of games. Instead of a lot of verbal hand-wringing about all the unwashed who "just don't get it" when it comes to the teaching power of games, a few compelling examples would have more impact.
Having built games for teaching and research in the corporate world, I wish the author had spent more time on how to build and maintain good games for really complicated topics. There are a few examples in the book of multi-million dollar military simulation games, but a lot of the other examples seem trivial when applied to genuine corporate needs.
Most striking about the examples from the corporate world, however, is the small number of successes and miniscule number of repeated successes. Those few souls who have built successful, non-trivial corporate training games appear to have a hard time repeating that success. This is not a good sign, but it's the hidden (and certainly unintended) message in the book.
