How does gaming fit into the future of education? Will Wright and E.O. Wilson
Yesterday, I awoke, as usual, to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on my clock radio. Sometimes, I manage to snooze through the stories, but my curiosity was piqued by the interview on Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, with Will Wright, creator of “The Sims” and “Spore,” and E.O. Wilson, Harvard biologist and Pulitzer-prize winning author of “On Human Nature” and “The Ants” (with Bert Hölldobler).
Wilson’s interest in bringing together the sciences and the humanities, his development of sociobiology as a new subdiscipline in biology, and his ability to make his research accessible to laypersons should certainly interest University Scholars. Indeed, a discussion of his work would have fit in quite well for our symposium on “Two Cultures: 50 Years Later” in 2009. Which brings me to Will Wright, whose “SimCity” was an installation project at our USP symposium on “Cities in Evolution: Imagination and Reinvention” in 2006.
What really piqued my interest in the Wright-Wilson interview was their conversation on the role of games in education, which made me think about our discussion at the USP retreat on “Educating the University” as a symposium topic this year. Here’s an excerpt from the NPR story:
“So the first question he asked Wilson was if he saw a role for games in the educational process.
“I’ll go to an even more radical position,” Wilson said. “I think games are the future in education. We’re going through a rapid transition now. We’re about to leave print and textbooks behind.”
To listen to the whole interview, go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112203095
We have a lot of folks at Duke considering this very proposition, including some of our grad school Unis like Allen Riddell, Whitney Trettien, and faculty like Cathy Davidson, Kate Hayles, and Tim Lenoir, among others. Cathy Davidson is co-founder and director of HASTAC (incidentally, this is Whitney’s 2nd year as a HASTAC scholar) and co-author of “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” She was also crucial in the creation of the University Scholars Program back when she was Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke. Kate Hayles is a professor in the Literature Program and ISIS and is interested in electronic literature. Here’s a link to a Duke News article on her work. Tim Lenoir is the Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair New Technologies in Society and works on history of science. Certainly, they’d provide a rich source of insight for continued discussion on the role of new media in higher education.
~Tori L.
