EVO Minecraft MOOC – Week 1 Reflection #evomc16

I’m reading one of the suggested articles: Kuhn, Jeff. (2015). Meaningful Play – Making Professional Development Fun. TESL-EJ 18, 4:1-8. Available: http://tesl-ej.org/pdf/ej72/int.pdf and http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume18/ej72/ej72int/. I’ve also been thinking that gaming literacy is something many of our teachers have been neglecting. Inhabiting a virtual world such as Second Life or Minecraft helps with this, too. Learning to move and interact with people and objects in a 3D virtual environment is becoming a life skill.

Kuhn writes, “Good games and good learning are hard to tell apart.” Unfortunately, many, many games used for educational purposes are didactic, for the sole purpose of teaching some learning objective(s). This is analogous to didactic children’s books, most of which do not deserve the label “literature.” Students have learned to mistrust “educational” games as ways to manipulate them into learning something inherently boring.

This quote from Vance Stevens resonates with me, too: “the nature of the game changed for me once we got a community into the mix.” When I started playing Minecraft, I started out in singleplayer creative mode, then moved to the VSTE Minecraft server in creative mode; then singleplayer survival mode, followed by a survival mode server with some friends from Second Life. Being able to interact with other people and their creations inworld makes all the difference in my engagement with the world.

As the librarian in my school, one of the best ways for me to influence the curriculum is through offering professional development for our teachers. In my experience, teachers have a lot of difficulty giving themselves time to play. I led a Minecraft 101 concurrent session at our most recent VSTE conference (Virginia Society for Technology in Education), and as soon as the initial talking and setup part of the session was over, most of the people left rather than play. In the US, there seems to be a prevailing attitude that play is a waste of time. It’s hard to know how to overcome this, but I think it’s a crucial part of promoting games in professional development.