It's Not Just Me!

I am a serious fan of Zoe Branigan-Pipe, a teacher in the Faculty of Education at Brock University in Hamilton. I have been a fan ever since she and I were on a "team" sharing web 2.0 tools and the different ways they can be used for teaching and learning. She made a great blog post about her sons and gaming today. It's clever and reflects what I see in my own house - kids learning and not even realizing it, because they aren't forced to do it. It's fun. It's rewarding. It's interesting. Today, her kids were planting sugar cane in Minecraft to make paper. Today, my family members were:

• re-starting their Pokemon Heart Gold game ("I didn't get far before but now I know what to do") - before doing this, my girl researched online how to delete her game file off her DS and did it; she startled the heck out of the adults in the car with a lusty triumphant yell after defeating Gyrados
• watching a Lego Universe game play video on YouTube (we didn't renew our subscription but the boy was reminiscing) and telling us all about the upcoming Kirby Mass Effect game coming out on Monday
• playing Plants vs Zombies after a long hiatus and examining MMORPG statistics (hubby left WoW relatively recently after playing it solidly for five years but he still keeps abreast of news and WoW's subscription has dropped from 12 million to 11-point-something million which concerns Blizzard [the company] but still dwarfs every other MMO)

I posted my comments to her blog there. Another big influence of mine, Melanie McBride, has taught me that there is a danger of educators co-opting games, misunderstanding and cannibalizing them for their own aims. I hope to find that happy middle ground, where games are respected for what they are and also embraced in education.