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The Public Diplomacy Blog is intended to stimulate dialog among scholars, researchers, practitioners and professionals from around the world in the public diplomacy sphere. The opinions represented here are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School.

STATE OF PLAY 5 (IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL)
SEP 26, 2007 - 12:08PM PDT
Posted by Joshua S Fouts

I’m just back from the State of Play V conference in Singapore. Congratulations to Dan Hunter, Beth Noveck and Aaron Delwiche for having the vision to host State of Play in Singapore, and the perseverance to keep it there despite the challenges of fundraising for and coordinating a conference 8,000 miles away. Thanks to the MacArthur Foundation for supporting it financially. As with previous State of Plays I came away intellectually enriched. Moreover, I learned something new and unexpected—and not necessarily from the sources I anticipated. Thanks to the generous invitation of Drs. Chee-Kit Looi and David Hung, I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technical University and see a demonstration of their current research projects on innovation, virtual worlds and games. Singapore has approached the rapid growth of the gaming culture in Asia head-on and is trying address, embrace and understand what it means on a fundamental, cultural level. Most importantly, they are trying to understand what it means for the future of education and learning in their society. David Hung piqued my interest by telling me that while Singapore feels that it’s done a solid job of teaching kids how to get excellent grades and ace standardized tests, they have not focused enough on facilitating innovation and creativity. As such, their focus now is on supporting and understanding the roots of innovation. And they see games and virtual worlds as a gateway to this. Supporting innovation through games I found this particularly resonant. Having a child in a U.S. public school under the “No Child Left Behind” curriculum, I am acutely aware of how retrograde our education system is. Or, as Connie Yowell lucidly put it on her panel at State of Play 5, “The U.S. education system is doing a great job of preparing our children to enter the 1950s workplace.” A personal example: At the end of the school year this past June, I asked my son, who had just completed kindergarten, if he was excited about summer vacation. “Daddy,” he said, “I don’t want to go on vacation. Vacation means more work.” What he was referring to was the fact that each and every “break” he got this year, he was sent home with some 40 books to read. The notion being that by hammering him with reading assignments, he would learn to read. Instead, I learned that my son has an astute capacity for memorization: He could recite all 40 books without even looking at the pages. More importantly, in kindergarten, he is beginning to associate and internalize a negative image with learning. We need to find a way to bring back the fun in learning. There is an untapped opportunity in the rapidly growing U.S. world of games—specifically games and virtual worlds that emphasize the freedom to explore and play. NIE has a number of interesting games that they have designed and are introducing experimentally into the classroom. One game, sort of an analog…... FULL TEXT
 
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