RE: Edutainment (was Re: Open Book)

["Marshal Anderson" <marshal@marshal.co.uk>]

> >
> > "When I hear the word Edutainment I reach for my gun"
>
<SNIP>  If there isn't, then I guess it's edutainment unless we can
> come up with something better.
>

OK Doug - it's not the portmanteau word I'm objecting to - I no longer even
cringe when asked to de-plane :) It's the concept and the way it is sold.
The idea that something can be both educational and entertaining is not new;
as a primary school teacher (as was) I know the value of providing education
in an entertaining way and I'm sure we all drop jokes into the lectures we
give etc. I think my pejorative view - which you have suddenly made me
reflect on - comes from several sources.

1) There seems to be a feeling that edutainment somehow does a better job
than education - that somehow if we don't wrap up multiplication tables as
space invaders kids can't learn it, or can't learn it as well. At to very
least this is patronising to the learner and maybe suggests that learning is
somehow unpalatable. Which leads to...

2) The acquisition of knowledge skills and attitudes goes on every day
throughout our lives. The fact that some of use might choose and value
learning as an explicit pursuit is, I think, important. I also think it is
important to the community. Maybe edutainment devalues that pursuit, takes
the work out of learning. Now, I'd be the first to say that learning
shouldn't have to hurt to be good - it should not be a dull boring task. But
isn't the joy of learning something which grows out of the application to
and of it? To truly focus on learning we need not to be distracted by the
dilutant (is that a word?) of entertainment. Thus I think that making
learning fun, exciting, interesting, challenging etc. is very important.
dressing it up as something else isn't.

3) The 'edutainment industry' worries me deeply. Some very powerful media
organisations have used edutainment in an attempt to gain entry into the
education system. While education professionals have been quick to see
through and reject this, it hasn't stopped a whole bunch of this rubbish
getting into homes as parents are persuaded that they can somehow give
children a head start with Scooby Do Vs The Periodic Table Monster et al.

Hmmmmm, that's all stream of consciousness stuff and is rather poorly
organised. I think what I mean at bottom is that if you want to teach
something maybe the best way is to engage the learner via the innate
excitement or importance of the subject. Carmen Sandiego is a very poor way
to teach children the geography of the world - it throws them random,
unrelated facts. The coincidental skills it does develop are substantial -
database interrogation, guessing, trial and error, hypothesis testing etc. -
but these now seem to have been lost in the 'your kid can learn all the
currencies in the world' selling tag - a great subversion of a program
developed 10 years ago in which the content was largely irrelevant.

OTOH, a child using Logo will be exploring a mathematical landscape,
generating their own ideas etc.

In some ways this is not an argument about ICT, it's about leaning theories
and methods. I'm a kind of weak constructivist - I feel that children do
best when they build their own knowledge but accept that we demand so much
of education that there isn't always time for that. Edutainment is a quick
fix, there is no research that I have come across that suggests it is
effective - actually, there's very little research that proves the efficacy
of most IT based learning - but maybe we don't want to get to far into that
question here :)

Marshal