Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere

by Will Richardson

I look at how he’s learned Minecraft and totally understand why school is becoming more of a struggle. First, he has a passion for learning the game. That’s crucial. He creates his own, constantly updated curriculum based on what he knows and needs to know next. He cobbles together his own multimedia texts using YouTube videos. He finds his own teachers, both local (his friends who tutor him via ooVoo) and global (the other players he interacts with on the Massively Minecraft server, hosted in Australia). He’s engaged in assessing his own work, scrapping it and starting over when something fails, building or refining when he gets new ideas, and offering feedback to his peers on a regular basis. Contrast that with how his study might look in a classroom operating under the assumption that Minecraft content and coaches are scarce. He would receive the same text as everyone else, be assigned the same readings