The Gaming of Professional Development

Last month's Techknowledge Conference had great ideas on incorporating social media and gaming into professional development

Last month I had the pleasure of attending the American Society for Training and Development’s (ASTD) Techknowledge Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. While my background in education helps me deliver quality professional development related to service-learning the world of online learning is somewhat new to me. In college, I took a few online courses and some professors would use online spaces to support the in-person lessons but it is still different than what we offer through the Generator School Network (www.gsn.nylc.org). The conference had lots of fascinating workshops that will help me improve our webinar’s appearance, function, participation, and cognitive load. The plenary speakers were fantastic, such as Stuart Crabb talking about how Facebook functions with its Y-generation workers, but my favorite was from Jane McGonigal.

Jane’s plenary session was based on gaming and at first I thought it would be hard to relate to but I was quickly proven wrong. One of her first startling facts was that there are 8 billion gamers around the world and our stereotypes of “gamers” are quickly dissolving. The next stat that changed my perspective was that in the U.S., 99% of boys under eighteen and 94% of girls play video games regularly, on average 13-8 hours a week. These are the students we are working with; no wonder they do not feel engaged by text books and worksheets. In the virtual they can use their imagination and creativity, they can fail, they can forecast the future, and they can be change makers. As a teacher, I need to utilize technology as an engagement strategy just as I use service-learning.

In some ways Jane McGonigal has already started down that path. Jane directed and helped create Urgent Evoke with the World Bank Group as a way for young people all over the world with a focus on Africa to use creative solutions to solve urgent social problems. Participants solved missions in a game that looked like a comic book (sounds like a video game) while solving these missions participants create a business plan without knowing it. At the end of the game the World Bank Group helped fund some of the business plans creating entrepreneurs all over Africa.  For more information about Jane McGonigal or her book “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” go to http://janemcgonigal.com/.

The conference had great implications for my practice in my role here at NYLC and future roles I will hold in the classroom. My next steps are to implement best practices in our webinars by making them more interactive, search our more youth who are using technology to make social change, and get reading on Jane’s book.

Attending this conference inspired Lana to get started using Twitter, you can find her there as @LanaRPeterson.