Jenkins - et al Summary

Children and young adults may not be exposed to more media than in the past, but this new type of media is the kind that invites and expects active participation. Young people collaborate, engage in complex social interactions, and create / shape new forms of media.

This isn't without problems, and many of these problems can be addressed with a pedagogical shift. The "participation gap" can be addressed by ensuring access to lower-income / opportunity students. By normalizing the digital experience, educators can try to shrink this gap. The "transparency problem" - that is, individuals being unable to shift their thinking from the rules of the game to other, more "real" environments - might be solved by furthering education on evaluating information - not only as true, but as relevant. The "ethics challenge" might be addressed by teaching students to reflect on choices made through media and the impact that these choices might have on others.

Reflecting on Learning through Gaming

I wanted to separate this reflection because it's only tangentially related to the reading, but it's more of a personal experience relating to Gee's 6th property - the one that deals with "player-enacted stories or trajectories" (75).

When I was younger, my favorite game series was The Legend of Zelda. I played through parts of the original one at a friend's house got Link's Awakening for my Game Boy, and got Ocarina of Time for the N64. I played through all of them and enjoyed myself, inserting myself into this fantastical story of heroes and goddesses and legends. It was all pretty standard storytelling stuff - be the hero, defeat evil, know sacrifice, all very standard. Without realizing it, I was recognizing standard thematic tropes, stock characters, and plot structures. This isn't to say I didn't love it.

So when I bought Majora's Mask, I expected more of the same. Instead, I got this strange, Groundhog-esque type game. If you aren't aware of the basic plot, Link - the protagonist, is searching through the woods to find an old friend from Ocarina of Time. His horse is stolen by a masked imp, and he gives chase, falling into a hole. When he awakes, the imp transforms his body into this strange plant-monster thing. (A deku scrub if you're familiar.) Chasing the imp, he arrives into this world that's a distorted version of the one he came from. The locations are all different and strange, but the people are doppelgangers from his home. They all act differently though, with unique personalities.

Through some evil magic, the imp has caused the moon to start hurtling toward the earth, threatening to destroy the town, and everyone in it, in 3 days. Through some strange time-manipulation, Link is able to relive the same 3 days over and over, accomplishing tasks, learning about the people and their routines, acquiring items, and discovering the history of this world.

Now, I really engaged in this sort of memorization. I followed each NPC to discover everything they did and said over these three days. Some characters had complex story lines, spanning days and multiple interactions that could go differently based on my actions. These "people" lived their lives while facing this threat of Armageddon. Some ignored it, some laughed about it, some fled the town as the moon approached. All "lived" these three days whether or not I interacted with them.

As games go, Link defeats the great evil, saves everyone, and all these people breathe easier. There is redemption, loss, and all those other familiar adventure things.

The strange thing that happened to me didn't occur until years later.

I have strong memories about this game. Real, visceral memories of interacting with these people, this world, in a complex and real way. I remember dark, twisted things happening in the game - people losing hope when I failed to deliver messages, people cowering in corners, watching people cross each other for money, hold grudges. I remember the history of a desert place being blood-soaked and tragic.

The weird thing about all these things? Most of them weren't actually in the game. I created most of these elaborate backstories and personal conflicts. These interactions could have happened - in fact, many of them probably would have been included if the hardware was more sophisticated.

But this where the 6th property comes in. This game allowed me to enact my own trajectories - to fill in plot points and social interactions. I don't know if this game taught me to "look deeper" into stories - to not assume that people are telling the truth - but it certainly stuck with me. Even now, I prefer games, movies, and books that make me "work" to figure how everything and everyone fits together - something very helpful in my ordinary social interactions and in my managing skills.

Again, I'm not sure how much I buy into the argument, but I can see it.  

Gaming and Learning

While I'm not sure I completely buy Gee's argument, there's a lot of interesting stuff in it. He states that digital games can be used to teach different things in different ways. Instead of focusing on the "trivia" type games - games that encourage memorization of facts and concepts, Gee instead "seek[s] to use games for the creation of deeper conceptual understandings and for problem-solving abilities that go beyond being able to pass paper-and-pencil tests" (65). In here, Gee makes an argument that gaming can promote different ways to approach problems, leading to a deeper complexity.

Gee then goes on to present six properties of digital games that "achieve powerful learning effects" (66) Combining these properties I find a general sense of Gee's argument to be that video games teach this sort of intricate problem solving by modeling an avatar around a set of experiences - which may or may not apply directly to "the real world" - that the player then adopts into his or her own working knowledge.

A quick reflection on this.

Lingering Questions

A few questions and concerns I have about the project.

I'm still not quite sure how I want to pursue the project. I have this idea that's big, and that will take a lot longer than the time left in the semester, but I want to have some sort of functional preview thing of it ready for the presentation. So I'm having a hard time narrowing down which aspect of the utility to focus on - what would most applicable to this class?

So most of these are concerns of scale and a sense of impending failure to address all the concerns I have.

Connecting the reading to life in general

My initial reaction is to either say that:

A)     I’m adopting everything I’m reading into how I’m thinking about teaching.[1]

B)      I’m adopting nothing.[2]

Or I could say that I’m not exactly sure. Every now and then I feel twinges of things as I’m standing in the classroom – like Farman’s notion of digital space – when I see a student check his or her phone, thinking I can’t see them. I consider how using phones in the classroom might be helpful, useful, and enjoyable. But then I remember the practical reasons that I got strict on my cell phone policy.

I think about how I think it’d be fascinating to adopt Shipka’s ideas of a non-traditional portfolio / project. Then I remember the goals and the portfolio reading, and I wonder if encouraging this sort of difference would interfere with passing portfolio review.

It’s easier to adopt some of these ideas into my own scholarship, because I’ve made it through those “hoops” in the past, and am now allowed to try new and different things. Which is a weird thought to have in general. With the Nakamura reading, I’ve started thinking more about access, and how even though we try not to, we limit access.

---

[1] The suck-up answer

[2] The being-difficult-and-acting-like-a-child answer

On Shipka's Process Compositions

While I can appreciate Jody Shipka's suggestions toward a class in which students composed non-alphabetic texts only, I can't help but see the drawbacks to such a class. But before I become all negative and start sounding hoarse - what with the constant cries of "get off my lawn" - I want to talk about a few of the things that I find valuable in the reading.

I think that the general idea of having a composition classroom that explores different ways of "writing" is valuable not only at the theoretical level, but also at the practical one. By imagining a classroom that doesn't prescribe to the "freewriting, draft, revision" formula, we can address the notion that it's possible to compose differently. We can isolate each step and examine if there's a different / better way to go about it.

Example - If we isolate the process of revision and look at it through a non-alphabetic filter, we might discover useful strategies and assignments to enhance our own understanding of revision.

Because I wonder what a ballet-shoe revision looks like. Or a revised video. Is a revised video the same as a differently-edited one? Or does the composer go back to the field to take more footage? Is that a feasible thing to do? Maybe that moment for making the video has passed.

Can a moment for revising an essay pass too? Can it be "too late" to go back into the field and get "more footage?"

I don't believe this to be true, but perhaps it is for some students. Once they are "finished" with an essay, going back becomes this incredibly difficult endeavor. And maybe it's more than just being lazy -- maybe there's something to this complaint.

--

Sorry, I got a little off topic. 

I also believe that multimodality should be taught in a different sort of class than a FYC classroom. Otherwise, we run the risk of multimodality as just being this "container"  that content can be poured into. And the thought of teaching to each individual medium while still addressing the needs of some of my students who are struggling with academic writing makes me wonder if this multimodal approach should happen later in a college career.

Because there is some value in what we're teaching now, right? Even if it's hard to pinpoint places in the "real world" that well-formulated essays come into play, there is value in teaching students to write to certain specifications, utilizing certain styles that they may or may not have to use later in their lives.

So I'm conflicted on the whole issue. As much as I enjoyed reading about all the different projects that students really took to - engaging the material in a way that makes sense to them, I worry about some things that we lose. Though the interpretive dance project was probably spectacular to watch and academically rigorous, do we lose the sense of communication that writing seems to rely on? What did the students watching the dance think while it was happening? Was it confusing and disorienting? Does that matter at all?

And with all the successes of the program, what about the failures? How did Shipka judge that a particular presentation wasn't acceptable? How do we take away some of the subjectivity of grading? Or does that not really matter in a whole composition course?

--

How technology shapes writing and how I'm supposed to feel about that

Does anyone write for themselves anymore? I’m sure people do, but I don’t really. I used to. I used to journal in notebooks, in word documents, write little scraps of poetry on little scraps of paper that wind up torn into little scraps in my wastepaper basket. Now it seems like everything I write, I write to produce for someone or some purpose. Those one-time poetry scraps make it into my online journal that 3 people can read. Same with my rambley journal posts about personal things. Three people can read them. In a way, it’s like having a journal / diary that you leave unlocked on your desk in your middle-school bedroom. For whatever reason, you want SOMEONE to read it, even if you say you don’t.

For this reason, I keep coming back to the Martin reading. I’m not sure if it was purposeful, but I kept seeing this theme of writing as a social activity spring up through the text: libraries become useful for conservation of knowledge, Cuneiform develops as a way to keep social contracts, Luther promoting literacy so individuals could develop their own understanding of scripture, the Koran written in classical Arabic to keep a sense of Muslim unity, and indecipherable writings on Roman statues leading others to invoke magic.

It’s all interconnected, and I don’t want to start sounding sappy, but writing seems like a way that we as people connect to other people, and technology shapes how we do this. It’s easier than ever to have others read the things that I write. If once I left poetry in library books or lying on floors, hoping people would read it, now I disconnect that uncertainty entirely and watch as my blog-visit numbers climb.

So these new writing / publishing technologies open others up to this same experience. Even if the writing comes through social networks, it’s still this open sharing of words that others read, and our instant-posting technology allows this seamless transfer between thought and distribution.

In class, we talked about how writing things out by hand slows us down, making us consider each word, and might lead us to more thoughtful writing. We also posited that typing is much faster, and allows for a better stream of thoughts to paper. I’m sure that this phenomenon changes the way we communicate through writing.