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Education Analysis

Your assignment: Choose one of the two education-related prompts below, then write a 2000 to 3000 word essay that researches background information, analyzes important factors, and proposes a detailed solution improve education.

"The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today." --George Siemens, Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

Web survey: what's it like being a student today? (View results)

Background
School sucks, say students. But why? You're surrounded by peers, you probably haven't got all the responsibilities most adults do, and you're learning stuff you're interested in, right? Well, everyone from senators to sociologists, soccer moms to students decry the myriad problems in America's education system. This researched analysis will allow you to weigh one problem involving learning and offer your own carefully constructed solution.

Option 1: Mario, Mages, & MMORPGs: A Video Game-Style Classroom?
Many people spend countless hours playing video games, dedicating mental energy to intricate tasks while navigating complex rules. But as soon as they step inside a classroom, they are less than motivated to do the complex thinking required by higher education.

The hypothesis: video games are entertaining partially because of a set of characteristics that don’t usually show up in the classroom: risk-taking, role-playing, customization, on-demand challenges, collaboration, production, and exploration.

The question: can schools exploit the video game paradigm (a fancy word for 'model') to enhance education? In other words, can a classroom allow a student to control the ‘joystick’ for the course, to risk a bad grade and be able to ‘restart the game,’ and to explore subjects at their own pace rather than memorize facts at the teacher’s pace?

Reading to incorporate
James Paul Gee, “Good Video Games and Good Learning

Your job in this option? Respond to James Paul Gee's argument about video games, exploring:
1. Whether or not you agree with his analysis of the problems in education
2. Whether or not you agree with his advocacy of video games as vehicles for learning
3. How education might be made more interesting, with or without the video game paradigm.

Note: this prompt is not asking you to explore whether video games are educational or whether we should make educational video games. Instead, you should explore how the classroom can feel more like a video game.

Option 2: Buy an essay! What it means to cheat
While it's nothing new, cheating in 21st century education has become more widespread, more sophisticated, more high-stakes, and (some might argue) even more necessary. But what does it mean for us if we live in a society that implicitly accepts cheating?

Readings to incorporate

35% of Teens Admit to Using Cell Phones to Cheat
Students and Performance Enhancing Drugs
A Cheating Crisis in American Schools
Google search for "buy an essay"

Compose an essay which does the following:
1) Researches just how common cheating is in school and how people go about doing it.
2) Researches what schools are doing to stop cheating.
3) Researches the psychological perspective of why we cheat (in school and in life).
4) Theorizes & hypothesizes what effect a cheating school culture will have on people in later life (will they have affairs? will they cheat at work?).

For either of the prompts, you'll want to accomplish the following things:
• Talk through (introduce, summarize, analyze) the indicated readings into your essay
• conduct additional research to explore the background and examples of your chosen topic
• use discourse-specific vocabulary (that is, use the language academics use when they're talking about learning)