Human Worth- my first attempt at a digital artifact

What is the worth of a human?




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Minecraft and World Builder

Minecraft and World Builder

The short film "World Builder" that we watched for week 3 of the EDCMOOC made me think of my 13 year old son. For him, the ability to create a 3-D world like the one in the film is something that he currently engages with for hours each day as he plays the game "Minecraft" on the computer.

Minecraft

In case you're unfamiliar with Minecraft, it is a massively popular game with teens and pre-teens. The main objective in either Survival or Creative mode is to build a world out of blocks of various substances. It's more difficult than it might sound. Recently I read that schools are using Minecraft in the classroom to teach various problem-solving skills.

 Minecraft in Education

So for my son, imagining a scenario where someone could create a town like World Builder would be nothing extraordinary. He does that all the time.

This film got me thinking about what it means to be human in this context. In the film, the man creates the town for his wife. It's unclear if the woman we see walking around is a memory he has of her, or if she is able to participate via technology even though she is in a coma. If she is engaging with it, then why wouldn't he interact with her? That is unclear.

Back to my son, in the Minecraft game there are no other people with whom to interact. In some settings there are 'villagers' but they are basically unable to communicate and they just walk around. Unlike other games on the X-box or other platforms, he doesn't join in with friends to build this world.  So essentially my son is building and living in a virtual world alone. What does that mean for him? How will he view humanity? Or how would he define what it means to be human if as parents, we didn't also engage in various other settings; school, sports, church.

One final thought. For me, being human is defined by our creativity. We are able to create various items, some practical and immediately useful (chairs, houses, cars) and some imaginative (novels, movies, theories). Will my son be more creative in the rest of his world after spending hours on Minecraft? I don't know. But I do know that as he engages with this game he is engaging in a creative process. 

Everything Bad is Good for You

The book, Everything Bad is Good for You, should be on every teacher's reading list. Johnson raises themes that I saw mirrored in the film Sight

With this title, you would be justified in thinking it’s a book about drugs, alcohol, or free sex, but surprisingly it’s a book about popular culture and how people learn. The primary premise of Steven Johnson, the author, is that far from making people dumber, popular culture is actually making us smarter.

Using examples from the arenas of video games, TV, film and the web, Everything Bad makes a strong case for the mental complexity of popular culture today as opposed to 20-25 years ago.

For example, Johnson talks about video gaming’s “dirty little secret”- that a lot of time spent playing games is not fun at all. He points out that many gamers will spend hours trying to solve a puzzle in a particular section in order to advance to the next level. Johnson argues that far from turning his or her mind off, this person is doing a lot of thinking.

He states on page 182, “Think about it this way: if our brain really desired to atrophy in front of mindless entertainment, then the story of the last thirty years of video games... would be a story of games that grew increasingly simple over time.” Johnson demonstrates that the exact opposite is the case; games have become much more complex. Just compare yesterday’s Pac Man to today’s Halo.

Throughout the book, Johnson identifies different types of intelligence that video games provide and stresses that in the areas of problem solving skill, gamers score very strongly. Even though he has a good argument (in many ways I think he’s swinging the pendulum far to the opposite side), I think he misses one very important “intelligence” that does usually suffer through popular culture.

Earlier this week I was having lunch with a youth pastor and was telling him about Johnson’s book. He was quick to tell me about a 16 year old young man from his church’s youth group who, it seems, has lost his zeal for life, spending all his time playing video games. We talked together about Daniel Goleman and the “other” intelligence that he made famous, the idea of Emotional Intelligence. In this boy’s life, this appears to be stunted by playing these games.

I don’t believe that in Everything Bad Johnson is 100% correct. However, I do believe a book like this is important for all of us in education to be aware of and to wrestle with the issues it presents.  

 #edcmooc