How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century

Source: Time.com
By CLAUDIA WALLIS, SONJA STEPTOE
There's a dark little joke exchanged by educators with a dissident streak: Rip Van Winkle awakens in the 21st century after a hundred-year snooze and is, of course, utterly bewildered by what he sees. Men and women dash about, talking to small metal devices pinned to their ears. Young people sit at home on sofas, moving miniature athletes around on electronic screens. Older folk defy death and disability with metronomes in their chests and with hips made of metal and plastic. Airports, hospitals, shopping malls--every place Rip goes just baffles him. But when he finally walks into a schoolroom, the old man knows exactly where he is. "This is a school," he declares. "We used to have these back in 1906. Only now the blackboards are green."
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School Matters: The Games Children Play

The UK is the world's third-largest market for video and computer games, generating sales of over one billion pounds a year.

This programme features two leading academics who support the use of games in education are Henry Jenkins, director of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jim Gee, professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

They look at a number of UK-based education projects using gaming technology, including an initiative aiming to help children author their own games.

Also examined are gaming addiction and the impact of violent images contained in some games. Mark Griffiths, professor of gambling studies at Nottingham Trent tells us 1 in 20 children play videogames for 30 hours or per week.