Tag Archives: learning

The Benefits of Gaming

Games are everywhere aren’t they? Never before have games had such a high profile or generated so much debate. I enjoy playing a lot of games but I’m equally interested in the psychology of gameplay and how we can benefit socially, emotionally and intellectually from play. Although I am concerned that without additional support (or […]

Google Glass in the Classroom

Here’s an interesting infographic about the educational potential for Google Glass from the good people at informEd. We live in an age when progress is not driven by need but opportunity: it’s always exciting to see what we can do with new technology.  Google Glass, like the growing list of technologies delivering real time information […]

Learning stories

If we believe that learning can be a profound, life-changing experience, we cannot merely scratch the surface of a subject but must burrow deeply to its core. No question worth answering is easy.  It takes time and effort. Increasingly many learning providers seem scared of expecting this level of commitment. Many people mistakenly believe that […]

Reflections on learning

The brilliant educational thinker, John Dewey, argued that “the purpose of education is to bring meaning to experience,” but discovering and embedding that meaning is not always straightforward. All too often, our ‘learning’ experiences are superficial and temporary: we learning something for a specific purpose, it’s “just in time” and then forgotten.  Learning becomes a […]

Real things games teach

As you may know, I’m a great believer in the potential of games to engage and stimulate users. I’m more skeptical about their ability to deliver learning entirely on their own so I was intrigued to discover this Tumblr site: Real Things Video Games Teach You. It proposes transferable skills that you can acquire by […]

Who’s winning with game-based learning?

This week the UK’s National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) released a study examining the latest research about game-based learning. The main findings in the NFER report were: The literature was split on the extent to which video games can impact upon overall academic performance. The studies consistently found that video games can impact positively on […]

Deeper digital learning

I saw this interesting infographic over at Getting Smart the other day. I think it makes some thought-provoking comments about how digital tools and techniques might make learning more profound.  I think the explanations are a bit little superficial (although that doesn’t mean that they are not accurate) so it would have been good to […]

Let the children play, it’s good for them

I read this fascinating article by Alison Gopnik on Smithsonian.com and I wanted to share the main thrust of it because I think it reiterates the importance of play. “Walk into any preschool and you’ll find toddling superheroes battling imaginary monsters. We take it for granted that young children play and, especially, pretend. Why do […]

Constructivism and Games

Continuing my series on the relationship between the various learning theories and games, this post explores the idea of constructivism. From the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response phenomenon as described by Behaviourism, rather it requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction[1]. In constructivist theory, the learner takes an […]

Cognitivism and games

In this, the second part of my series on examining how learning theories relate to game play, I’m looking at the theory that suggests learning is dependent on mental capacity – cognitivism. Cognitivism replaced Behaviourism as the dominant learning paradigm in the 1960s[1]. Cognitive psychology proposes that learning comes from mental activity such as memory, […]