Motherboard

My buddy David, a writer for the Economist just shot me over his latest and greatest journalistic rocking…. a cool piece on how it’s becoming closer and closer to a reality: Xboxes instead of PCs or even textbooks in the classroom for learning.

“SINCE the beginning of mass education, schools have relied on what is known in educational circles as “chalk and talk”. Chalk and blackboard may sometimes be replaced by felt-tip pens and a whiteboard, and electronics in the form of computers may sometimes be bolted on, but the idea of a pedagogue leading his pupils more or less willingly through a day based on periods of study of recognisable academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics, history, geography and whatever the local language happens to be, has rarely been abandoned.

Abandoning it, though, is what Katie Salen hopes to do. Ms Salen is a games designer and a professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, in New York. She is also the moving spirit behind Quest to Learn, a new, taxpayer-funded school in that city which is about to open its doors to pupils who will never suffer the indignity of snoring through double French but will, rather, spend their entire days playing games."

Continue reading the story on the Economist

I included a video about her MacArhur project…. in her own words.

Will this get messy when kids start learning WoW clan territories rather than the 50 states?