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Serious Games Summit: McDowell, Cannon-Bowers, and Prensky on The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design

I spent the final session of the summit at McDowell, Cannon-Bowers, and Prensky's panel discussion on The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design in Serious Games. This turned out to be a debate between Cannon-Bowers and Prensky moderated by McDowell. Apparently McDowell had the idea following Presnky's comments at then GLS conference which incensed so many teachers (and instructional designers, like Cannon-Bowers). At this point in what were a very long two days for me I sort of gave up on note taking and enjoyed the entertainment value of this session. We all laughed often, mostly at Prensky - or thanks to Prensky I should say - though Cannon-Bowers was a great sport about it. She argued for the use of sound instructional design when creating serious games to teach, and Presnksy advocated simply creating a good game, and he made frequent use of his "game developers suck the fun out" quote. The session was a blast, and I'm afraid you just had to be there. If you are interested though, you can read Dennis' reflections on it here.

This concludes my (belated) coverage of the summit, though I'm sure these thoughts will resurface here often in the coming months.

Now what were those other blogging topics I felt so behind on before I left? Or, better yet, where was I in my KAM research?

-Mark

UPDATE: For those who were there and will laugh, I want to say "Function F7." :)

There are a few other gems I found in an email I sent myself from my blackberry... I'm pretty sure these were all Prensky:

"Mouths making promises their brains couldn't keep."

"In the UK it's against the law to say 'you will learn.'"

"So, I'm for intelligent design."

In the end, it made me want to be funnier in my own presentations. :)