February 12, 2005

Mid-Winter

As I wite this in mid-February I keep thinking: Can Spring be far ahead? This Spring promises to be a wonderful reawakening for me, with a new son and a lovely new home at the edge of the Hudson River!

I'm also detecting, finally, an awakening on many levels to the needs of our Digital Native learners.

This awakening is finally happening, I'm happy to report, in many of our K-12 schools -- I have been speaking to superintendants, principals, tech coordinators and teachers around the country, and each time I talk they want others to hear the message. And the message is getting applied: "After your talk I had a great discussion with one of our language Arts teachers in which she began to see how to impact levels of engagementby adjusting lessons to have a "gaming" element, simply by approaching the premise of her activities differently." [i.e. by putting engagement BEFORE content]. This summer I will be conducting educational gaming workshops for both teachers and students.

In the corporate world, some very well-known "vendors" (can't we find a better word?) who have had great success in the past, are thinking about how to readjust their offereings to deal with the Digital Natives' influx into the workplace. If you haven't already done so, the book "Got Game": How the Game Generation is Reshaping Buisness Forever" by Beck and Wade is worth a read.

The military training world, always ahead of the curve, is making even greater strides in areas such as language learning and force protection. However it, too, is still struggling with the problem of easy distribution and access.

May this Spring bring new answers to all our tough issues and be a wonderful time for all of us!

Best,
Marc

Posted by Marc at 01:27 PM | Comments (11690)