My eight-year-old son loves computer games. Eli’s first question upon entering my apartment is always, “Can we play video games?!” While we enjoy playing board games, there is always a special excitement when we get to sit down at the computer and check what’s new online.

I was the same way when I was his age. My first video game experience was with the Atari 2600 system, back in 1983. I have fond memories of playing Donkey Kong on that system — in spite of the fact that I could never get past the second level. As I have grown older, I have continued to play video games on several different console systems and, especially, on my PC. Over the years, my coordination has improved quite a lot, and the last time I played Donkey Kong I made it to the third level (in my defense, it is actually one of the most difficult games ever designed).

While there has been much controversy about the negative effects of gaming, it cannot be denied that gamers have received many, many hours of pleasure from video games. Whether blasting aliens, saving the princess, or even bouncing a pixilated ball around the screen, they are an important part of our culture, and their influence is only growing. According to the Web site “Ars Technica,” total video games sales last year were $18.85 billion. About half of that went to actual games for consoles, PCs, and hand-held devices. The other half was spent on the new generation of console units.

What accounts for this phenomenal popularity? Steven Johnson, in his best-selling book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter offers an interesting theory. He writes, “A strong case can be made that the power of games to captivate involves their ability to tap into the brain’s natural reward circuitry.” He further explains, “If you create a system where rewards are both clearly defined and achieved by exploring an environment, you’ll find human brains drawn to those systems, even if they’re made up of virtual characters and simulated sidewalks.” In other words, gaming’s reward is found in the journey, not the destination.

Simulation games like Electronic Arts’ SimCity are being used in some classes already. This is an interesting video about what one school board in Orange County, California is doing with games.

It will be interesting to see how games evolve in the next few years. I hope that they can expand into the world of education and become a useful part of some curriculums. I am sure Eli and a lot of other kids would like that.

All three fifth grade classes went — P.S. 9’s G&T and Renaissance programs. After a planning meeting with the teachers and other chaperones, I ended up being a little stressed out about my chaperoning duties — each parent was responsible for a group of four kids, and there were a lot of do’s and don’ts that we had to keep in mind. Most involved ways to maintain order, centering on potential pitfalls at the museums, the restaurant where we’d have dinner, and our hotel. The teachers mentioned it would be very exciting for some of the kids, since it was their first overnight trip and would also be the first time some of them had stayed in a hotel.

The kids were loaded onto two buses, Bus A and Bus B, and we were on Bus A. A lot of the kids have DSs and PSPs (handheld game consoles) and that kept them quiet and occupied on the bus trip to Pennsylvania. I’m willfully oblivious to the whole world of video games, and it was interesting to find out that they’ve advanced enough so people can play games with each other wirelessly — one of the kids said that if the other bus was close enough, they’d be able to play with students riding along behind us. It was kind of amazing thinking about the total cost of all of the electronics on the bus, including the iPods and cell phones. I brought a deck of cards to play with, but it didn’t get used on the whole trip. The bus was also equipped with a DVD player, but no one remembered to bring movies (G-rated only!) in our group, and I was content to read the New Yorker and look out the window.

It was another parent’s birthday, and his wife supplied donuts which I helped to hand out as the bus bounced along. By 9:30 am, some of the kids had already started working on their brown-bag sandwiches for lunch. We were in the back, sitting near the bathroom, and early in the trip one of the girls threw up all over the aisle and the side of the bathroom door. The teachers and chaperones sprang into action and the mess was cleaned up in no time. William doesn’t like riding in vehicles where the windows don’t open, and it was enough for him. He moved to the front of the bus for the rest of the trip to Gettysburg.

The teachers had given us packets of material for the trip, including the itinerary and worksheets for us to do in the museum at the Gettysburg National Military Park, but since the museum has been renovated and expanded recently, we quickly discovered that the worksheets were out of date. The museum featured chronological videos about the battle of Gettysburg on big screens and interactive computer activities along with more traditional exhibits, so I don’t think the kids missed much by not being able to fill out the sheets.

After touring the museum, we returned to our bus for an entertaining guided tour of the park, and we’d get out from time to time for a group activity. In one spot, our guide showed us how soldiers would have to move to protect their flank and how important the flag bearer was; at another stop, he showed us how cannons were loaded, aimed and fired (without ammunition). One of the highlights was our trip to the summit of Little Round Top, with its amazing panoramic view of the battlefields. It was such a beautiful day it was hard to imagine it was the scene of so much violence a century and a half ago.

We returned to the museum gift shop, where a lot of the kids rushed to buy souvenir toy rifles — no school rules had been established about buying them beforehand, and some parents didn’t think it was a big deal, while others said there was no way they’d buy one for their own son or daughter. The teachers made the kids keep the toy guns on the bus, rather than allowing them to take them to their hotel rooms or into other places, which I thought was very wise. Throughout the school trip, the boys in my group – William, Cass, Omar, and Eleazar – were great, though they were a little difficult to keep track of sometimes.

Another personal highlight of our trip to Gettysburg was the next morning — a visit to the American Civil War Museum, which I imagined would consist of more historically important rifles, swords, and uniforms, but turned out to be a fantastically creepy wax museum with one life-size diorama after another of scenes from the Civil War, ending up in a big auditorium with a narrated slide show and a giant pit filled with wax figures that would move and be lit up, one after another, illustrating various battles. We were seated in a big row above, closest to the goriest scene — General Sickles having his leg amputated. At the end, amazingly, a zombie-like animatronic Abe Lincoln rose from the floor and delivered the Gettysburg Address as a group of wax figures looked on.

We had time to spare before eating lunch and going back on the road, so the teachers walked the kids over to a huge grassy field and let them do pretty much whatever they wanted to as long as they didn’t tackle each other or wander off beyond certain boundaries. At one point, the kids in all three classes spontaneously joined hands and formed a gigantic circle, running around in a ring. It was a beautiful moment, like something from a Winslow Homer painting.

For the Teaching & Learning Celebration Producers Showcase, I’ll be showing two video clips and then briefly describing aspects of the production process. The first clip is the opening six minutes of PHARMACISTS: UNSUNG HEROES which is a history of pharmacy in this country. The program makes a case for the extremely critical roll pharmacists play in our health care system and the fact that we have a shortage of pharmacist in the United States.

BOWFIRE is a high-energy string ensemble from Canada that WLIW is introducing to PBS audiences across the country. I had to shorten and re-arrange the songs in their original two-hour concert to make a one hour show for programmers. I then create an opening segment, transitional elements between the songs and finally a behind the scenes segment for the group’s DVD. My presentation will take about 25 minutes and will be followed by a Q & A session.

Visit the Thirteen & WLIW21 Studio

As you enter the Celebration’s Exhibit Hall, be sure to stop by The Studio where you can . . .

* Hear short presentations from top public broadcasting producers and receive free DVDs and other materials
* Go on camera yourself to offer comments about public television, education or the Celebration
* Have your picture taken with lovable public TV characters Digit, Piggley Winks or Snook
* Get more information and valuable materials from Thirteen and WLIW21

My name for this proposed media system was Home Interactive Television. I typed up a one-page summary and told my adviser at Teachers College, Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, and she recommended I talk with professor Robbie McClintock about my idea. When we met, he described the bandwidth limitations of telecommunications at the time, and we agreed that Home Interactive Television was an interesting concept that didn’t seem practical. Professor McClintock told me about some promising things going on with computers and education then, including Learning Link, Thirteen/WNET’s online resource for teachers (the text-only grandparent of our current Web site for teachers, EdOnline).

Now, in 2008, YouTube is transforming the way we experience television. One of the significant non-technical differences between the way I imagined Home Interactive Television in 1988 and YouTube today is the importance of user-generated content on the site. Rather than YouTube making centralized, top-down decisions about the videos that can be seen by visitors, all of its videos are uploaded by its members. YouTube is exciting because it not only includes professionally made films, television programs, and other content, it also includes non-professional video like home movies and material that exists in a kind of grey area — professionally created rehearsal footage or outtakes that were never intended for public distribution, experimental film, student films, fan-created concert videos made with cell phones, and parodies that combine footage from tv programs like Yu-Gi-Oh with satirical soundtracks.

Grassroots videos like home movies are available alongside commercial movies; entire musical performances from old movie shorts or segments from TV programs that would never make it into documentaries are there, too — even old children’s shows and commercials. Remember that old anti-smoking ad, “Like father, like son—Think about it”? You can see it again and find out if your memory is accurate. Want to go on a drive through your old college town? Someone’s filmed it for you, and it’s waiting there. YouTube helps jog the collective memory.

All of this content is provided to YouTube at no cost to them, and the average creator of this material isn’t paid, either. It’s very much in the spirit of tape trading (pre-CDs, DVDs and MP3s) among Bob Dylan and Grateful Dead fans. The basic idea is that we all benefit from sharing content — the artists get publicity for the work they are selling through official channels, and the fans get to see footage that was either buried in an archive somewhere or other video that offers much more than the “official” releases of record companies, broadcasters, and film distributors. Non-professionals get a chance at online fame or notoriety, or at the very least get access to a way of distributing their work to a potential audience of millions.

To a certain extent, YouTube is democratizing the availability of video beyond what most people thought possible (or even potentially interesting) in the 1970s and 1980s. There were similar hopes for public access cable in the 1970s, but most of the programming on public access TV is almost uniformly unprofessional looking, and it’s easy enough to surf past when going through viewing options. YouTube is interesting partly because it offers a shared experience that’s different from the more passive one of sitting and waiting for what programmers have pre-selected.

While YouTube is a great innovation, there are a number of unresolved issues that could potentially render it less exciting in the years to come — there are copyright and contractual issues that could eventually make the site remove some of its most interesting material, though for now it seems that a large number of people understand that the site’s benefits outweigh both theoretical and real losses in income for individual and corporate rights holders. While the potential is there, YouTube also doesn’t provide an educational context for material on the site — which is what we do for public television programs here in the Education Department at Thirteen, including projects like VITAL (Video in Teaching and Learning).

Still, I’m grateful that YouTube exists, and feel it’s a fantastic educational resource — it’s more than an online library or museum, since it offers users opportunities to share their creative work with anyone who’s interested. From my friend Gregoire Melville’s autobiographical video slide show to excerpts from Bill Moyers’s public television programs; from classic silent films to Bob Dylan rehearsals, YouTube is helping to expand the possibilities for communication and learning around the world.

Amy Winehouse’s problems with substance abuse also make some people worry about the effect that she is having as a role model. A select group of self-destructive artists are cultural archetypes. From Vincent van Gogh to Kurt Cobain, there always seems to be a public appetite for portraits of the artist as passionate, misunderstood geniuses, the closest things to martyrs that our secular culture has. Their problems make for entertaining (and marketable) stories. At the same time, most of us wouldn’t want our kids following in their footsteps.

What makes the chaotic (and sometimes, tragically short) lives of these artists so fascinating? To some degree it may be because it’s evidence that their work is authentic, that their creativity is emerging from places most of us have to repress or are unable to explore. Rimbaud is famous for promoting “the derangement of the senses” to reach new heights of poetic inspiration, and let’s face it, there’s an element of craziness that makes art interesting. At the same time, most people dealing with addiction or psychiatric problems don’t end up being famous artists. There is some leftover romanticism about mental illness and creativity, and perverse pleasure in the spectacle of celebrity train wrecks like Brittney Spears’s recent career. Unfortunately there are times when both the cultural world and the mainstream entertainment industry seem like marketing arms for recreational drug traffickers (both legal and illegal). Natalie Cole was disappointed that Amy Winehouse was rewarded with Grammys this year, saying her colleagues in the music industry were sending the wrong message about substance abuse. Some might say it’s sour grapes, but it’s not a completely unreasonable reaction.

In the best of all possible worlds, Natalie Cole’s disapproval would be misplaced. In the real world, it’s hard to know what to think. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was blamed for a number of suicides after it was published in 1774, so there’s a history of the arts — even fictional characters — having an effect on what some young people do with their lives. Fortunately, most artists and performers don’t self-destruct, but a few doomed celebrities live out their lives like cautionary tales, lighting up the world through self-immolation. One of the lyrics that Amy Winehouse sang that lodged in my memory is, “I cheated myself like I knew I would,” and while I enjoyed hearing her sing “You Know I’m No Good” and “Rehab,” I hope she’ll keep out of trouble and stay inspired. She’ll be helping more people than herself.

In these days of No Child Left Behind, testing is on a lot of people’s minds, since so much depends on the results of high-stakes tests — not only for students, but also for teachers and schools. While test scores and evaluations can be useful ways of seeing how people are doing, it’s important to keep in mind that any kind of test has limits. Test scores and grading can create an illusion of scientific precision. Grades are useful as a kind of shorthand, but multiple choice questions really can’t deal with problems that have ambiguous or complex answers, and one teacher’s C could be another teacher’s B or even A. Now that schools in New York City are being graded, many of them are feeling the same pain that students are traditionally expected to endure.

When I was in graduate school at Teachers College (a few years before the Web), Ernest Rothkopf introduced us to an interesting framework for thinking about the settings where education takes place, in the context of considering when educational technologies should be used — he divided them up into informal settings like museums or public television stations (the “arcade”); formal educational settings like schools (“contract”); and training programs in the military and businesses (“closed”). His argument was that education is most efficient in closed settings, and the least efficient in informal settings, where people are under no compulsion to learn, aren’t tested, and can spend as little time as they want thinking about something. His idea was that it made the most sense to use expensive educational technologies in closed settings because of the efficiencies they offer.

While he had a point about the forces that might make education providers most efficient, it’s hard to imagine that military or business training programs are best suited for what we normally think of as the most important goals of education — for example, helping learners grow as individuals, or producing critical thought. Each educational setting offers learners opportunities to increase their abilities and capacities, and it’s worthwhile to remember the roles that each can play in what and how we learn.

Public television has a lot to offer people who are interested in learning, both inside and outside of the classroom. Beyond the sheer pleasure of providing entertaining and thoughtful programs, it can provide some relief from the relentless impulse to quantify everything, the idea that every aspect of learning has to be measured and graded. There’s up-to-date information in documentaries that can’t be found in text books, and individual voices and points of view that may not surface in other educational settings. Educational materials like the NATURE comic book we published recently are both fun and thought-provoking, and also give kids a break from the cycle of test prep and evaluation. One of the reasons I like working in Thirteen’s Education Department is that we help teachers bring a little more of the unpredictable outside world into schools, and that what we do helps to expand the possibilities for learning both inside and outside of the classroom.