Euan’s Blog

Last week I attended the Handheld Learning Conference in London.   I attended a pre-conference seminar which turned out to be the most animated and interesting session.

Marc Prensky was presiding and he started by talking about how when trying to sell learning games ‘in the early days’  people argued that learning games were too trivial.    Prensky now agrees with these doubters ‘ yeah they were correct’..He thinks ‘complexity matters’ and that the problem with most of today’s learning games is that they are ‘casual games’. 

I asked him whether given the growth in casual games, the evidence from the gaming industry that post 25 year old gamers and women are adopting casual games which ’reward’ them that his argument flew in the face of the evidence.    He then said maybe what he meant by complexity was lots of mini games????  For mini-games I assume casual games…….he didn’t get much better, lots of waffle, no substance and some easily correctable factual inaccuracies (which he was called on)

I have seen other presentations by Prensky and always feel he isn’t particularly good value.  He seems to throw out ill informed ideas in the hope of provoking a response and while doing this he seems to revel in denigrating teachers and parents as the ‘bete noirs’ and luddites of education.    Some great ideas in his first book…but since then I feel his ideas and arguments have become lazy, which is a shame, because whereas he was a wonderful advocate of games based learning, judging from comments of my fellow particpants he now may be doing more harm than good.

 But the session was  saved by Derek Robertson of LTS.  A hugely entertaining talk, about his work in Scottish primary and secondary schools and his development of the Consolarium a games based learning centre for teachers and students.  Derek takes existing commercial games and works them into the curriculum in the clasroom with the willing co-operation of teachers and children throughout the country.  Fantastic stuff, informed, authoratative and entertaining….everything Prensky wasn’t.  I would recommend that next time a conference is looking for a keynote they swap out Marc for Derek.

Check out Derek’s blog at http://hotmilkydrink.typepad.com/my_weblog/ which also has more indepth comments about the conference as a whole.   Also more about the session from Derek.