What makes the videogame generation different?

I've suspected for a long time that it wasn't videogames. But to a growing contingent of educators, policymakers and parents, there is a growing concern that videogames are making kids, well, if not stupid, at least different.

To my mind, the people who talk about revising curriculum to keep up with the demanding and supposedly short attention spans of the videogame kids always strike me as the sort of folks who haven't spent much time around kids. At least not listening to them.

The argument they make, as I see it, is this:

Saturated in information, weaned on the immediate gratification of Google and videogames, kids these days lack the mental discipline to learn using traditional methods. So, either you attack the problem at the systemic root--try to teach kids the old ways, or you update your pedagogy to reflect the videogame lifestyle of the average videot.

When I look at the videogame generation, I see something else. Sure, something is going on and the next generation looks to be shaping up differently than those preceding it. But it’s not videogames, cell phone and the Internet per se. I am now thinking it might come down to a little cognitive pysch concept called metacognition.

Welcome to the world of the metacog kids.

To give credit and a little background on this concept, I head a speech last week from Douglas Mann, a psychology PhD from Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine.

He was presenting at the Colorado University "Training with Technology" conference, and offered a fascinating look at learning theory from the perspective of the cognitive psychologist.

Among his many great points was the difference between cognitive function and metacognitive function. Basically, one is about how we think, cognition; the other is about how we think about what we think, metacognition.

In his notion, metacognition is important because these are the skills that help us evaluate what we are doing. This is the little voice in your head that says, "Yeah, I am good at flying a plane. Give me the controls," or "I took a first aid class, but I can't remember the Heimlich. Scream for help!” In my own words, metacognition is the system that keeps track of the relationship of the state of our mind to the state of the world. When people are not metacogitatively developed, they can be overconfident and have a poor picture of their abilities versus the reality.

In the past, education was obsessed with data retrieval because it was a survival skill. You had to remember good berries from bad or you might die eating lunch. The modern education system is very much built on the notion that there are a lot of facts and concepts you need to tuck into your head to function in society. Or, back to my description, traditional education is focused on improving cognitive capability by drilling facts and fact relationships as the foundation of knowledge.

I don't think Mann has a perspective one way or the on whether this is good or bad. But a reaction to presentation from Sun Microsystems on how computers could be everywhere and provide data to anyone--like a doctor wearing some visualization goggles that would recall a picture of some anatomy while the doc was busily slicing away at the patient--was telling. Mann seemed impressed with the idea that a computer could tell a doctor what the right dose of a drug should be or show the precise place to insert an IV, but pointed out such systems: "Replaced cognitive load with metacognitive load." In other words, if the computer could remember the details, then the doc needed to be very good at assessing the situation--was this the right information at the right time?

So, as I put the piecse together, traditional education is designed to teach us to think like a computer, storing facts and data and relationships. Ubiquitous computing, that is, computers everywhere, gives us the opportunity to offload a bunch of the cognitive burden onto a computer. Thus, we have a need for better metacognitive skill development. Traditional education is not so good at this and so metacognitive development does not get the attention it needs.

Kids who have grown up in the information culture have a basic sense of this. They complain that memorizing is useless when the world of information is at their fingertips. In most cases, I don't even think they gripe that much. They have self-taught skills that allow them to rapidly shift mental constructs around, load in data as needed and then dump it out.

In fact, this is a skill they learn from videogames.

I would guess that videogames encourage the sort of metacognitive function that Mann describes. As I watch kids play games, it seems clear to me that they are willing to dive into any new game system, and quickly adapt to the modes and models of the game world almost instantaneously. While they play they become quiet auditors of their own actions. While their hands throb away on the buttons, their minds slip into a calm state, assessing the stream of data on the screen, making zillions of calculations and risk assumptions on the fly.

These are the metacog kids. They know how to learn, but don't seem to care much about learning anything particular. They are developing information management skills long before they develop information maturity. They think about what they think about, not just about what they do.

Over-generalizations? Certainly. But the theme is hard to deny. And I would argue that videogame may be helping teach our kids something, but it isn't violence. It's metacognitive survival.

So, should we force kids to learn in the old modes? Probably not. Or at least, they are going to be very resistant to that approach. Should we teach kids with stuff that looks like videogames? Well, sort of. We just need to remember it’s not the games on their own. It how games handle learning and information. That’s what we need to model.

We need to carefully remove the metacognitive training from the medium of games themselves. Kids, for example, are not obsessed with learning history by shooting at things in a historically accurate first-person shooter. They just don't want to waste the time packing their brain with dates and places that they can Google in 4 seconds. We need to learn to teach kids with 100 times more information that we have used in the past and hold them 100 times more accountable for the decisions they make with that information. Instead of spoon-feeding them a few facts at a time, we need to hose them down with data and information and help them develop the skills to cope.

Want to know what the classroom of the future looks like? Every kid has a laptop connected to the Internet. Every test is open laptop. How would that change the day-to-day of education? It's hard to say. But it would be different, that's for sure.

And I believe the metacog kids will approve.