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A Reflection on Gee's 36 Principles of "Video Game Like" Learning

I wrote the following in response to a particularly excellent post in our class discussion board...

Evelyn,

This is an excellent post, especially for a reply! It's both meaningful and well supported by research. Your reference to the four principles in "How People Learn and What the Technology Might Have to Do With It" were important to me... and were very much in keeping with the talk I heard last night from Professor James Paul Gee who wrote What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy and also Situated Language and Learning: A Critique of Traditional Schooling (and I could swear he said he had just finished a new book titled "Video Games will Save Your Soul", but I can't find it anywhere online - perhaps it's not been released yet).

Jim Gee (as they called him last night) talks about 36 learning principles that video games recruit when engaging students, but which traditional schools largely fail to leverage. Below is a link to a document that summarizes these principles (as presented by Marc Prensky.)

http://mindgames.msu.edu/FLC-mar2/36principles.doc

At any rate, as you can tell from the vision statement I've offered on this discussion board, I am very interested in learning that is in context, active, social, and reflective. Actually, on reflection I think my phrase of "context-embedded, inquiry-driven, and socially negotiated" learning does not capture the reflective element. Since I use this phrase often (in course descriptions at the OCDE, and as the tag line on my blog), I may need to reconsider whether I need to explicitly include reflection.

I suppose I have some reflection ahead of me myself. :)

-Mark