demonstrating identity

James Paul Gee finds that “when people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” (13). He then outlines ideas of acquiring knowledge in games and learning knowledge in games and how those tie to literacy. Literacy is not just reading and writing, but a way of learning specific content within a specific context and being able to demonstrate proficiency with that knowledge. Ideas about literacy begin to include identity, and demonstration of identity within domains. In Gee’s version of literacy, identity and recognized identity within a context become the best demonstrations of proficiency with a given literacy. Instead of teaching history content and then testing students, their ability to speak the right words about History, and demonstrate their understanding by acting as a history student are the best indicators that learning has occurred. This is more common in college education, especially freshmen composition courses (ENG 101). Inherently, the course is a skill driven course; students are expected to learn how to write. There is no native content that needs to be taught to students in ENG 101. Grammar is not mandatory, but is not necessarily content. So the purpose of the course becomes teaching students to demonstrate their understanding of their student status through the college essay. The college essay isn’t just a way for students to write, it isn’t just a way to present content, it’s a way for the literature student to show their identity as a literature student. The correct use of the correct terminology is the best demonstration of understanding of the content of literature, it’s also the best way for a student to demonstrate to a teacher that they ‘get’ the material. So, as Gee discusses how videogames cause good learning through 36 learning principles he lines out, we in education can use them to see if our students can demonstrate beyond a test score that they understand the material by presenting the content in a way that is accepted by the community they wish to belong to.

what is winning

In things we call games we typically consider someone as a winner, there is a point where someone wins. in single player video games, traditionally there is a win, Mario saves the princess, you defeat all the zombies and save civilization, you complete all your missions, etc. there are now new games (some considered simulations) where there is no such win condition. no civilization is saved in simcity, the point is to create cities. no princesses are saved in Farmville, but you continue to harvest crops and grow your farm. in games like these, commonly considered casual games because they don't require as much time an effort, winning can best be defined as not losing. losing is clearly the opposite of winning. however, some casual games have losing, and no winning. in simcity your city can die, it can become overcrowded, it can go bankrupt. in farmville your crops can die, you can spend all your money. you can lose, but you can't win. so, why do people play games you can't win? what do people do with the games if they can't move toward winning?

technology is always already social

In many ways, new media is very social. Video games can be played online, iphones and facebook created apps that allow players to play and hang out and work together to play the game. Fansites have increased, technology in the hands of humans is very social. A classmate in my video game class mentioned that she got stuck for hours at a particularly difficult fight scene in a Zelda game. Eventually she mentioned to her 10 year old nephew that she was stuck there, he immediately told her all she needed to do was go around the corner. She had spent hours in the game, and hours online scouring websites trying to figure out how to win, when all she neded to do was talk to someone else playing the game. In Farmville on facebook a user sets up neighbors, and for xp and cash can be a farm hand on friends and neighbors farms, but if they don’t go through the exercise of making friends, they’ll never achieve the same goals. These games are inherently designed to require communication among members. So as my mom needing tech support deems me 1800.tech.support, she has a point beyond what she imagines. Technology in human hands has become inherently social, we can’t succeed in many tech adventures without being social, discussing our problems, our fights, our farms. We need to socialize about what we’re doing with technology, we need to share our iphone apps, we need to figure out how to open the email, we need to figure out how to defeat the shadow monster, or we need to figure out how to grow our crops. We’ve taken what many fear to be a solitary activity and designed it to be inherently social, so how do we create our 1800.tech.support network?

literacy or literacies?

If we rethink literacy (traditionally reading and writing) as literacies (meaning making in certain spaces) we begin to reconceptualize what education is, what learning is and where it all comes from. Traditional education focuses on skill and drill education, teacher delivers content to student, then quizzes mastery of content. The content is delivered in a classroom setting, removed from the context to which it is relevant (besides the classroom) so the mastery of the content is appropriate to the classroom but no where else. If we instead begin to see literacies as ways of making meaning in spaces, we’re always already looking to the context to situate the learning practices and the content. An example of this is you are sent to mars on a mission to teach baseball to martians. You can’t show video, you have no baseball tools, you have no pictures, you have no other human helpers, can you teach martians baseball? The point of this exercise is to see that once you begin explaining baseball and inevitably fandom to the martians, the game and the fandom will take on a life of it’s own. Do we define baseball without fans? Can we extract the rules of the game and still call it baseball, or is the rest of it (the uniforms, player, owners, fans, hot dogs, beer, bats, gloves, cards, etc) all a part of baseball? All that extra stuff adds a little something to our idea of baseball, and can be different for each individual person. We all make meaning differently in that context. For the uberfan, the score is super important and all the calls made by umpires affect their concept of baseball. For the fair-weather fan with free tickets, the ball park nachos are a part of baseball and add to their concept of baseball. So if we turn this on education, the teaching of science in an elementary school classroom is content that is out of context. Students experience science everyday, and experience rules of science everyday by falling off the monkey bars, but are forced to learn gravity in a textbook through text. Higher education is slightly better with the contextualization, but also dealing with students who have incorporated abstraction of content into classrooms as part of the entire schooling process. So, given this reconceptualization of literacy to literacies how should we be envisioning the classroom to help students learn both content and higher level learning skills? How do we move this online?

fear of writing

I’m reading my freshman writing text in preparation for classes next week. I’ve assigned the chapter introducing writing to students. There is an entire page devoted to dispelling the myth that writing is a ‘natural talent or gift’ instead of a skill to be learned and acquired. The teacher copy says to take a poll in class to see how many of the students believe writing is a natural talent, especially one they don’t possess. I can guarantee, without doing the poll, that most the kids in my classes would say yes to this question, especially being placed in the developmental class instead of 101. this idea began with romantic poets during romanticism in the 18th century. This was at the time of the industrial revolution, hundreds of years ago. We, in education, continue to value the writing and art from that time period in literature classes throughout high school. We also impart skills on reading for information, so our own valuing of these texts seems to be hurting our students writing skills in the long run. What do we do to change the opinion of writing in our current culture? We certainly haven’t embraced online writing as a skill, even though millions of people engage in that type of writing every day. Maybe, over time, that will change, and with that change the fear of writing may begin to disappear.

based on reading Foucault, what came first?

Foucault situates the idea of identity as a construction and function of current culture. As ideas of the body/mind duality have shifted, especially after Englightenment, ideas of identity have formed. When philosophers began locating the mind/soul/thinking center within the body, explanations of variation between people began to form, what we would consider personality. With ideas of modernism soundly rejecting ultimate Truth for truth within situations and cultures, environmental (nature) influences on the person’s character development began to be discussed. Darwin developed his ideas during this period. In literature, authors like Faulkner, Woolf and Hemingway began writing about the inner workings of character’s minds. Focusing on the idea of identity. Postmodernism reacted to modernism’s character development finding identity as a state of being, allowing for multiple identities depending on situation. Postmodernism is largely located Post WWII, and since we’re living the aftermath of postmodernism it’s hard to tell if we’re still postmodern, or if we’ve moved beyond (perhaps beyond labels). The idea here is wrapped up in identity, identity being influenced by current culture, and being postmodern, it varies across situations. This is most obvious with the increased usage of social spaces on the internet where a user can be, can electronically embody whomever they please. So, in a chicken versus egg type question, do we more readily accept the idea of multiple identities across cultural contexts because of the availability of play on the internet (meaning the internet heavily influenced postmodern ideas of identity even in the 1980’s when it was in its military form) or do we simply better understand and can identify identity play based on the space provided within the internet?

post-summer break post

i'm reading "everything bad is good for you" where the author explains the work an audience member puts in to follow modern television shows (even reality TV), the mental work and skill it takes to play video games, the mental work to learn new programs on a computer and on the web. essentially he's claiming that everything demonized by modern media sources as dumbing down americans, is actually making us work harder for our entertainment. what i found particularly poignant is a reference he makes to blogs as the proof that there is mental work outside of entertainment. johnson says "these diaries [meaning blogs] are, after all, frequently created by juveniles. But thirty years ago those juveniles weren't writing novels or composing sonnets in their spare time; they were watching Laverne & Shirley. Better to have minds actively composing the soap opera of their own lives than zoning out in front of someone else's." so as further proof of the increased amount of mental labor put into digesting entertainment, johnson points to blogs. even among younger generations, the amount of writing produced daily (he sites a study by yahoo that some 270000 blog entries are published every day) is astronomical. but, because it's in a medium that threatens the old medium (printing) mass public automatically fears it (lots of mcluhan here). so, in an effort to continue to increase the intelligence of american through mental work, cultural digestion, and increased text, here is my blog post.