ATHENS, Ga. – James Paul Gee, a renowned linguist and author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, will speak at the University of Georgia College of Education on Tuesday, April 27, at the Learning and Performance Support Laboratory’s (LPSL) 2004 Spring Symposium.
Gee has attracted national attention for his work advocating the use of video game environments to derive fundamental principles of language, literacy and education. His presentation, titled “Power Up: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy,” will be held in G-5 Aderhold Hall at 12:30 p.m.
Gee began his research on the teaching capacity of video games two years ago when he began playing the games to better understand how his then six-year-old child played games.
“It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning,” said Gee in an interview with Game Zone, a Web site devoted to video gaming.
“Many of these principles could be used in schools to get kids to learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning,” he said.
Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading in the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Over the last decade, his work has been published widely in journals in the fields of linguistics, psychology, the social sciences and education.
Gee’s Web site is http://www.soemadison.wisc.edu/edpsych/facstaff/gee.htm.
