Game-based learning expert Jordan Shapiro has spent much of the last year traveling the world and talking with educational leaders from Latin America, Europe and Africa and he has come back with a new perspective about games and learning.
“I think games have this potential which I think everyone can see to level the playing field around the world.”
“We’re discussing whether it is a good or bad thing whether people read on a screen versus paper and they’re going, ‘What? We’re just trying to get people to read. We don’t care how,’” Shapiro said last week in a conversation with gamesandlearning.org.
Since appearing at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai last March, Jordan Shapiro, Forbes writer and Temple University professor, has been attending international conferences and has come away seeing games as a way to implement major educational reforms in many of these places.
“The adoption is so easy and so cheap,” Shapiro said of technology in education. “If you suddenly read John Dewey on education and you wanted to institute Dewey’s ideas across an entire nation, you are talking billions of dollars and probably 40 years of training before you have effectively made that transition. But you can have a game in every classroom next week.”
The following is a partial transcript of our conversation.
gamesandlearning.org: So how would you describe what you have seen and heard about what is going on in game-based learning outside the U.S.?
Jordan Shapiro: To a large extent they are having very much the same conversation we are having in most places. Whether we are talking about the most developed countries or the undeveloped countries in the global south the conversation is not that different. Now what it means to innovate education or to bring technology into education means very different things in all those places, but I think they are all having this conversation about how to use technology to bring 21st Century skills … I mean literally.
I think games have this potential which I think everyone can see to level the playing field around the world. And it’s leveled to such a degree because they are cheap. I mean, we don’t think of them as cheap. It costs a million dollars to make a game, but a million dollars is nothing when you consider how many kids can be reached by one game.
gamesandlearning.org: So some countries are making major investments at the national level to achieve ambitious policy goals. Are things happening more quickly in other countries?
Jordan Shapiro: I think you might be seeing faster adoption in some countries and I am not sure that is a good thing. I think you and I have talked in the past about this before that there are lots of days when I go, “Thank God we are so slow to adopt because some of these things are horrible and this company has the muscle to have gotten adoption if there wasn’t this terrible bureaucracy in the way.” And I won’t name those companies, but I am sure we can think of some because many of them are giant and well-known.
I think what you are referring to is there are certainly countries that are in such a rush that they seem to be adopting faster. To be able to say “I want to take something from A to Z or even A to G” is a huge jump and I think that feels possible to a lot of places. So it appears that things are happening really fast. Whether that is a good thing or not, I don’t know.
gamesandlearning.org: Are there any countries that are doing it right?
Jordan Shapiro: No. Certainly not.
(laughs)
I mean, certainly there are small things I hear here or there where I think, great job. But I can’t think of anything I’ve seen, that’s not to say it’s not out there, but I cannot remember seeing anything where I think they just did everything just right. I think everyone is working within similar bureaucracies each one with its own characteristics. …
In some countries you hear that the swings or the vicissitudes are so strong that there is so much collateral damage in that switch. I can’t think of anybody who is doing this the right way. I think everybody is in the same place as the U.S.
It used to be that we said we wanted personalization and project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, although we didn’t use all that language then, but it used to be that all those things were there and everyone said, “That’s great. That’s just not feasible when you have to deal with 70 million students.” It suddenly seems feasible to bring project-based, inquiry-based learning through interactive software to all of these people. Everyone around the world is starting to say, “We can have the kind of education system they have in the U.S.”
What’s interesting is I haven’t heard much from Japan. I haven’t heard much from China. I don’t know if that is just they aren’t at the same conferences I am at or do they not think about education in the same way. I’m kind of looking to find people who can tell me what’s going on there.
gamesandlearning.org: How should game developers approach foreign markets?
Jordan Shapiro: I am guessing it is a case-by-case basis. I think part of the reason we are even having this conversation is we are a country that is so – that this idea of localized or regional education is so strong, we are seeing this fight in the Common Core here. We barely want to look at the whole nation as one thing, so the idea we would look at a global thing – we really almost don’t know how to approach it.
I don’t think that is true so much in other countries. I don’t think the rest of the world, to the same extent, has the fear of nationalized education that we do. They don’t have our Civil War history. They have their own history.
So, I think for developers it is going to be at the government level at this point.
gamesandlearning.org: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Jordan Shapiro: I don’t know…
I’m all for tiny, localized communities and local cultures and they, of course, disappear once you nationalize things. And again, we live in a very different world. We live in a global world and I don’t know if small, local economies and local education systems can really function in a world that is global…
gamesandlearning.org: It seems like a daunting challenge for a local community to build an educational system that prepares a kid for the global world. Can games actually help this by creating common experiences across cultures?
Jordan Shapiro: Not only in this sense that games have this networking possibility but also in the sense that since games are essentially simulations it’s possible for us to have this information immediately contextualized. If I need to understand 6th Century Japanese history to win the game, suddenly that makes sense and now I am motivated to learn.
There are two different issues I am making here. What I am really talking about is motivation. The motivation for a kid to learn because I know that when I was 14 I could never imagine that I would be standing in the middle of Qatar talking with Islamic scholars. So I certainly wasn’t paying much attention when they were teaching what was going on in the Ottoman Empire. I had to learn that all later. Now it is a relevant fact for me. If I had had to learn it for a game I might have already learned it.
I think all of education, to some extent, is tricking kids into having immediate context so it matters to them so they can learn the things we know will have context for them when they are adults.
gamesandlearning.org: Do you think one of the challenges of that is the people who need to know that that context is necessary for a student are still learning those contexts themselves?
Jordan Shapiro: Oh yeah, I think that is why it feels like we are in a place where things are not moving right now because we are all trying to where to move and to get on the same page.
gamesandlearning.org: You mentioned almost in passing the potential of networking. Have you seen any games or any ideas where this is happening?
Want an example of the future of networked play? “This is the example we all pull out for everything because for every question it is always going to be Minecraft. That’s the games that is sort of two steps ahead of everyone else.”
Jordan Shapiro: You are definitely already seeing it – this is the example we all pull out for everything because for every question it is always going to be Minecraft. That’s the games that is sort of two steps ahead of everyone else.
My kids are playing with – the majority are UK and U.S. – but they will be playing on a UK server. That’s sort of the exampled I think we will be seeing more of. As people get used to Minecraft and used to games like this and they start to trickle into a classroom where this is no long a gimmick, or a novelty. This is just life.
gamesandlearning.org: We have started to see developers compete with almost different models of education through games. We are almost seeing educational approaches debated. Is that something we are going to continue to see?
Jordan Shapiro: You actually made the point I was trying to make earlier better than I did which is exactly what I think is happening. That the games are becoming the place where it is suddenly possible to compete on a whole educational strategy. I’ll use the UAE as an example. The UAE is all these Islamic countries that want to become progressive and they are kind of overnight going from old Islamic fishing villages on the Persian Gulf to these developed western nations and they want to put an education system in place that does that. Well, that sounds like a really daunting task to go from 0 to 60 and the games allow me to say, “Let me try on these different strategies. In fact, I can put them all in at once. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s fast. We can see which one has the most impact.” I think you are going to see a lot more of that now. The adoption is so easy and so cheap…
If you suddenly read John Dewey on education and you wanted to institute Dewey’s ideas across an entire nation, you are talking billions of dollars and probably 40 years of training before you have effectively made that transition. But you can have a game in every classroom next week.
gamesandlearning.org: What has most surprised you in your foreign travels?
Jordan Shapiro: The first big international trip I took was I went to the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai last March… One of the things that was really, really surprising was this trip really shifted my perspective because I started to talk to people like the Education Minister from Pakistan, I think. You start to hear the different kind of questions being asked.
I was trying to explain to him what I do and basically I said I write about game-based learning and digital media and try to show people the good side of that because in the U.S. there is kind of a traditionalist stronghold that is so afraid of anything that is new that I say fears are fine, but here are some good things and he said, “See, I don’t get that. What we are doing is we have managed with Nokia flip-phones to get people who did not even know how to spell their name, we have a curriculum where they can learn how to read. They’ve never read, no generation has ever read and they are suddenly learning how to read because of a Nokia flip-phone. It’s your privilege that gives you the opportunity to worry about whether technology is a good or bad thing.”
We’re discussing whether it is a good or bad thing whether people read on a screen versus paper and they’re going, “What? We’re just trying to get people to read. We don’t care how.”
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