Quote from The Play Ethic

Pat Kane's The Play Ethic is a heavy book that I haven't finished. While looking for potential quotes and references about using games for education, I came across a passage that struck me, so here it is. (Some context may be necessary: he's talking about the educational system playing a role in developing the ethics of students growing up in their current hypernetworked society)

The moment of learning could be about forging a fully humane, yet fully contemporary student...children who are encouraged to express their moral, ethical, and reciprocal selves through the channels of the information age rather than use these media for actively destructive ends, or passively submit themselves to the external programming of others.

I should possibly leave it there, but to keep me from forgetting this moment, even though this was written in 2004 it seems to me to address fears about sexting and online bullying and Facebook oversharing and losing one's real self in a virtual reality. Which were not the top anxieties about kids online in 2004, but Kane seems to point a way to cope with these (and, I suspect, whatever the next panic will be).

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