I mean that with a wink an a smile, of course.

Still, this piece in Ed Week this morning caught my eye.  It’s about various game-based learning sites that help students learn about financial literacy.  This seems to be becoming all the rage: Quest to Learn opened a few months ago, which is a NYC school in partnership with NYU’s Institute of Play–the whole model blurs lines of traditional learning and is built on various gaming theories.  Florida Virtual School has a course that gets a lot of press in which students learn about history by playing a role-playing game.  Even NYC’s School of One, written up as one of Time Magazine’s 50 greatest inventions of the year, sought to automate and differentiate learning by creating daily “playlists” for students. 

It’s worth considering voices like that of the UK’s David Buckingham.  In contrast to the ra-ra cheers of James Paul Gee and Marc Prensky, Buckingham notes that the scholars in greatest support of game-based learning don’t really scrutinize it.  They just give it the old homecoming cheer and dance. 

Quite a lucrative game of their own, you might say.

Related posts:

1. School of Games
2. Why Education Won’t Fix the Economy
3. Preparing Students to Make Money