Review: Portal 2 as a learning tool

 You can put down your lame sodoku puzzles because there is now something much more brilliant, stimulating, and interesting out there.

I noticed that a couple people posted reviews on their blogs about video games as a learning process and video games as a potential interactive learning tool in school, one review is here http://socofedufaubert.blogspot.ca/ . I find this to be quite interesting so I did a little research (by that I mean I googled it) on a specific game that I found to be beneficial as it had a lot of critical thinking involved. This game of course is Portal 2 and I was not the only person to believe this game was an educational tool, CLICK HERE for a link to an article that does a small analysis of the game and here are a few more: LINK 1  LINK2  LINK3.

Portal 2 won many awards and is critically acclaimed for its very original story, gameplay and of course the dry humour. Behind the amazing story is a revolutionary puzzle game that will stimulate your mind for hours, resulting in a feeling that you have truly benefited from a video game. The game throws you into numerous complex situations driven by the plot where you have to think your way out with the portal gun and your environment. As you progress, and you really feel like your

Another South Park review

This review is on episode five, season 12 of the animated series South Park. Click here for an in depth look at the plot. This episode, like most, has a couple plots which deal with a variety of social phenomenon. For the purpose of this review and blog I will be looking at the education aspect of the episode where Eric Cartman is granted the position of temporary teacher while Mrs Garrison is away. As a result of cheating the class gets very high test scores and Cartman is assigned to be a teacher for an inner city school. This episode deals with issues around race, poverty, and the problem of standardized testing.

Cartman thinks he is going to have a great impact on the inner city students when the character Kyle interrupts and points out that the students won't want to listen to a “middle class white boy”. This

brings up themes from George J. Sefa Dei and his article “Schooling as Community: Race, Schooling, and Education of African Youth” and the idea of Afro-Centric schooling, which would be an education system built around African identity and curriculum that is representative of their history, relevance and so on, so that black individuals are not to be alienated, which occurs in schools with Euro-Centric curriculum's. The idea of this type of school would also be applied to people of other

Review of The Wire on education

If you have not checked out HBO's The Wire then you must! Check out the wikipedia page HERE. Pick this show up or download it.

This review is on the parts of The Wire season 4 that deal with education. Though education could be generalized to many aspects of the show, like learning the “drug game” from starting on the corner of the inner cities of Baltimore, Maryland to other positions, I will be focusing on the public education system portrayed throughout this season. HBO's The Wire has become part of many discussions among social science publications for its illustrations of issues in inner city schooling, it has also picked up some critiques for not portraying this phenomenon realistically. I'm not debating whether the show is realistic or not because that has no relevance, the fact of the matter is that it brings up the issues and enables discussion and awareness.

There would simply be too much to cover if I were to focus on every theme within the study of education that's included in this show, for that reason I will focus on key aspects covered in course material, that being Afro-Centrism and traditional methods of teaching. It is clear that many of the