Here’s an awesome find that was sent to be by South Orange NJ Public Library director Melissa Kopecky. It’s a 7 minute clip of a PBS interview with James Paul Gee, who is a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University. His most recent book is Good Video Games and Good Learning.

In it, he suggests that schools have lots of “competition” in the sense that students are “learning” in other places, and one of the “competitors” he emphasizes is libraries. This “competition” he talks about is using “smart tools for 24/7 learning“. On libraries et. al.: “You learn all the time, you learn on demand and just in time, and you’re learning 21st century skills. That competition has never existed for school before, and that competition is beating schools at its best...” “…that competition will break the current paradigm of schools that we have“. This is a positive change, of course, and will result in better student learning. We here at 8bitlibrary.com appreciate all our readers and the fact that everyone who both contributes to and reads the site are part of this positive change in education!

More great (tweetable) quotes from the video:

“Just learning a bunch of facts in school won’t do you much good.”

Solving problems is more important than learning a bunch of facts.

“Games marry words to actions, to images, to experiences, and to dialogue, so you understand them.”

Schools using games as a teaching tool are using “situated understanding” (vs. just giving students definitions).