James Paul Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prominent author on the New Literacies. Professor Gee’s approach of studying communication in its cultural setting has been widely influential over the past two decades. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990) is a founding text in the formation of the New Literacies studies, the interdisciplinary field studying language, learning and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social and cultural contexts.  His latest research and books, including the seminal work What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2003), explore the role of video games in language and learning, including how games produce better learning conditions and can assist in the thinking about the reform of schools. Professor Gee has a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University.

We face a paradox and a crisis. The paradox is that often today children engage with more complex learning in their popular culture than they do in their schools. In many cases, seven-year-olds see more complex language on a Yu-Gi-Oh card than they do in their school books, and eight-year-olds deal with more complex problem solving in the real-time strategy video game Age of Mythology than they do in their science lessons. Furthermore, video games and related technologies for many kids are serving as an initial gateway into tech-savvy identities and skills, while many schools still languish behind in technology. The crisis is related to the paradox: in our global world, developed countries won’t be able to survive on standard skills, high or low, radiologist or call-centre operator - these will be outsourced - but will demand a populace that is able to innovate and is comfortable with technical learning. Yet we face a wave of standardisation and basic skills pedagogies in our schools. I will argue that video game technologies hold out great promise here. Good video games already incorporate cutting-edge learning principles and have the potential to reform how we teach and learn in and out of school.