With tomorrow’s webinar with Karl Kapp, “Communicating with Today’s Generation” fast approaching, and much of the information that Karl will speak about will be in his book Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos for Learning. I asked Karl a few questions and below are his answers.

What inspired you to write Gadgets, Games, and Gizmos? I know you said your kids, but has it helped you communicate better with them?

Well, of course my gamer boys were a huge influence. However, another influence was my dual frustrations with current pedagogy and the incredibly negative perception of video games. To me, video games and electronic gadgets have awesome potential as tools to enable learning but all I was hearing was the negative aspects of video games and gadgets and I wanted to be a voice that said “hey, these things have educational value…they aren’t all bad.” The book was an attempt to convey that message which I thought was of particular importance because current pedagogy of lecture-driven information exchange was not (and is not) adequate in today’s fast-paced environment. We need to teach the kids to think on their feet, process data in new ways and leverage the information available to them on their computers, handheld devices and even in their video games. The book was an attempt to reach educators and others and describe to them the positive aspects of these items.

Did your wife ever roll her eyes when you told her the game the kids was playing was actually teaching them something?

She does roll her eyes on occasion when I tell her “games are good.” But she rolled them the most when I told her that I had to buy the PlayStation3 because I was doing “research” for the book.

Did you have a hard time selling the idea of your book?

Actually, the publisher did seem a bit hesitant at first. I had to provide a detailed content outline and the first chapter for them to consider the book. However, once they understood the concept, they were willing to stand behind the book and didn’t ask me to cut any content or concepts that I covered in the book. I think they had a sense that the topic was important and needed to be written about.

Your book has been very popular, taking you on a blog tour, tv, radio, and conferences – did you think the book would have as big of an impact as it has?

Of course every author hopes that his or her book will be influential but I never really thought the book would garner as much interest in as many circles as it has. This has been extremely thrilling to me. For example, the blog book tour was a great experience which let me leverage some of the technologies that I wrote about in the book. I had approximately 20 different “stops” on the blog tour where authors of different blogs wrote about some aspects of the book and I found that to be extremely gratifying to know that others were using the book to help design and develop instruction. The television appearance was fun. I had never been interviewed on television before and I was really impressed with the news anchor and his depth of questions. Yes, I was surprised by the level of interest, in fact, my minster even asked me to lead an adult class about some of the topics in the book. It really has had a much wider appeal than I ever imagined.

Thanks Karl! We have a lot of participants for tomorrow, make sure you register so you can gather some great information.

Mark Viquesney