On the True Promise of Technology – Teaching.

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On the True Promise of Technology – Teaching.

Remember when video games were just games? It turns out that they can help us with various things if actually applied correctly.   A simple hour of playing a First person shooter improves the ability to track moving objects and discern targets last for days … far better than swat team training (don’t get me wrong, swat training is great.). Infact the military and Swat HAVE adopted “game ” technology.  Both life size and in first person shooters (Army of One Game).   Remember flight simulator.  Now those same people who play that are flying pilotless drones in strange arab nations you’ve never heard off, from Virgina or some other state.

But now i shall speak of nonmilitary application.

If you have not heard of Guitar hero, or rockband, you are living under a rock.  I’m not ever going to link to them, you should just know what they are and go look them up.   To us here at the stormy present, they are the first in a line of things that teach us, and unveil the promise of  what technology is not taking away , or running amok.  Learning an instrument is hard and many of us don’t have the motivation to do so. It’s not.. fun. You can’t … share it.

Well, Rockband and Guitar hero are games where you play video games to real songs. Watching people play (especially on expert) shows that no matter the skill, humans can learn it.  Well, these games have started to transition into playing real instruments and soon enough it will be real instruments that are played. Imagine millions of people learning to play an instrument who would never have thought to do so, because they like the video game aspect of it.

It’s just an example of one of the ways technology can improve us; if we let it.

OceansOfThought @ July 1, 2008