gaming update

Interesting that my quasi cynical post pre midnight last night was relegated to blog darkness of pre-dawn rambling. Neither I nor the computer I was working on at the time thought it was 4am ... mysteries of the ether continue ...
Gaming would be an excellent tool for encouraging incremental (and perhaps concurrent) learning in the young (and not so young) as they work through levels of a game, but I do doubt that current gaming lends itself to evaluative learning. (I wait to be corrected here ...). Evaluation seems to be the ability which causes most apprehension and hesitation for students acquiring information literacy skills. Teresa Neely ('Sociological and psychological aspects of information literacy in higher education' published by Scarecrow in Lanham, Maryland 2002) underlines "evaluation" as the skill that marks proper development of information literacy (p.8). She points out that this skill is the thing that bridges the gap between finding and using information. Being able to evaluate information is the key for lifelong learning as well as academic success.
Like many parents and grandparents I have seen this hesitation to evaluate kick in on school project attempts. Time was, doing the illustration was the focus and writing the text a subsequent struggle, now it seems that identifying useful websites, importing information, even setting up impressive powerpoint displays ... all this is easy compared with evaluating and processing the information for "a good fit".