Euan’s Blog

Having spent a very enjoyable week delivering a fairly generic talk about games in learning and assessment to FE college lecturers last week at the SFEU I was delighted to have been the focus of my first letter of complaint (as far as I am aware) to the organisers  from one of the more vocal members of one of the audiences.  

The woman was adamant that games would be the harbinger of mass repetitive strain injury and that our youth were destined to a lifetime of long term illness.  (she had suffered herself from RSI).  Offering my somewhat restrained sympathy, I pointed out it is really is a question of the amount of time one spends on an activity.    I argued, somewhat reasonably, that parental responsibility and balance is necessary as in any other situation.  When she laboured her point, I carefully explained that everything in life has both positives and negatives depending on its application, indeed I pointed out that heroin in the form of morphine was  ’a great drug’ and prescribed by many doctors and appreciated by patients as a pain reliever but not so good when mixed with some dubious substitutes and sold on the street, that cars are not banned because people are killed in road traffic accidents and that in my day, many teenage boys found other ways to give themselves reptitive strain injury (this point being illustrated by the SQA speaker as also a cause of blindness in our generation).   But it seems she was not a happy person at all.

But why am I pleased…..the complainant sent in a reference from a recent medical report she had just read quoting that a high percentage of children had sore knees becasue they played computer games….and the august medical report cited? …..wait for it ….

….the Daily Mail medical columnist…..

I know I shouldn’t be but I really am quite proud.   :-)