James Gee on learning through video games

The takeaways from the video (bullet pointed for expediency):

• “A video game is just an assessment.”: One major insight for educators is that video games don’t separate learning from assessment. It makes assessment fun and gives players constant feedback on their performance.

One quibble about Chris Nodder’s UX Fundamentals course

[For Rob] All in all, Chris Nodder’s User Experience Fundamentals for Web Design course on Lynda.com was very helpful for getting me to think about how I would like to approach building a web-based product/service (more on that later). But one bit of advice Nodder mentions twice over two hours bothered me enough that I woke up this Saturday morning irked by it, so permit me to get this off my chest.

Did you catch how he buttresses his tip to keep web copy short and simple by citing “the Oppenheimer study”? Apparently, the study proves that readers tend to judge authors who use complex language as being of low intelligence. As someone highly sensitive to matters of language (and who knows that there are studies and then there are “studies”), I looked up the article. READ IT. Really.

Of course: websites that are trying to get visitors to take action in some form or another should be clear and concise. And I agree that academic writing should not be pretentious or stilted. But please let’s not cite the Oppenheimer study to argue these points.