Can Playing Games Help You Get a Job?
11.11.09 | “When you think about what the teenagers are doing on ‘World of Warcraft,’ they are building worldwide virtual teams,” a vice president at IBM said in a recent “Frontline” interview. “Very sophisticated teams with very sophisticated skill levels in a very complex teaming environment. …That’s exactly what we try to do when we work with our colleagues in India and China.”
Constance Steinkuehler, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been making this very same argument in her work - that participating in these virtual communities can help kids learn how to collaborate, ask critical questions, make arguments, build social skills and even learn math.
The IBM interview is part of Frontline’s Digital Nation, an open-source PBS project that explores what it means to be human in a digital world. Scheduled for broadcast in winter 2010, the Digital Nation team has been posting rough cuts online. Watch great interviews with authors Henry Jenkins and James Paul Gee. In another video, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks about cell phones in the classroom.
Plus: More evidence kids are picking up skills online they’ll need to be competent citizens can be found in a book out this week from the Digital Youth Project. “Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out” reports on how young people are living and learning with new media and finds that through self-directed learning, young people are picking up the social and technical skills they need in the digital age. (Download the free online version [pdf].) Authors, including danah boyd and Mimi Ito, blogged about the project’s findings on Spotlight last year.
Photo by: king2009_12
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