This morning’s Inside Higher Education includes a breathless column by two professors of entrepreneurship about the relevance of computer games to education. I link to it partly because it’s further evidence of what some of us have been arguing for a long time – that if you want people to learn voluntarily and enthusiastically, it’s a good idea to observe and benefit from the patterns of eager learning they already demonstrate. But more, the giddy rhetoric reminds me of Victorian travel prose: “You’ll never guess — they wear t-shirts from previous conventions!”
I’ll try to decide whether I’m more satisfied that some faculty have begun to open their minds in this direction, or more frustrated that so vast a proportion of profs decline even to consider these ideas.