One of the great things about Orlando is the fact that so many conferences take place here at our Convention Center. Sure, there’s a downside (who likes the traffic or struggling with parking on I-Drive?), but that pales in comparison to seeing the latest and greatest that a variety of industries have to offer. One of the conferences that happens here yearly is the Florida Educators’ Technology Conference (http://www.fetc.org/) which took place just last week from January 21st to the 24th.
The keynote address given by Jim Brazell, President of ventureRAMP.com, was titled “Video Games for Learning and Human Development. For those of you who have been following my blog, you know that this is a topic very near and dear to me—I am convinced that people learn best when they play. (I’m not your typical educator, right?) Mr. Brazell’s presentation told the story of how video games snuck up on us as a culture, coming from pretty straightforward entertainment roots and finding their way into the high-stakes training worlds of the military and health care industries. Now, in addition to play, video games are gaining ground as foundation media for our learning and social interactions in society—they’ve come a long way from the days of Pong and Space Invaders.
It’s clear that as far as video games has come in today’s society, there’s a future that we’ve only begun to understand. Virtual worlds (such as Second Life) started out as game platforms only to find that having a more open-ended structure actually worked as a better model. Video games clearly are no longer about how people play, but they are becoming about how people conduct their lives on a daily basis. Let’s have a dialog about the future: tell me where you think we are headed!
- Hap Aziz