https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Wog-34Kbb0

The readings for today were significantly “better” – in the sense that I appreciate this conversation on the integration/modality of sound/music in composition classrooms and the comparison of the processes of product creation. I wonder, though, why there wasn’t more conversation on music varieties/genres (in Rickert & Salvo’s piece), more about collaboration, and a little more discussion on this idea of feedback in music and how that relates to feedback in composition. Nonetheless, here are my thoughts:

1. I’ve never not considered music in the classroom, music in composition, music in language. Perhaps that has much to do with my upbringing: speaking two languages at home and “hearing” how they sound different – different rhythms and tones, and playing instruments singing. Writing/playing music are cousins, if not twins, in my eyes.
2. I’m very intrigued by this idea of feedback in music and how that relates to the composition classroom: turning something that was once perceived as “noise” into a value that can add to the overall process. I wonder if our efforts in providing feedback to our students could be aided by looking into this model a bit more.
3. Nothing about music is individualized: there is always some form of collaboration, or cooperation if nothing else, that is at play. I wonder how this perspective could inform our writing pedagogy. How can we scaffold more collaborative work into the classroom?

Levy’s article, which I found the least dry of the two, had me critically analyze my view of podcasting in relation to writing – since we do, at least I, often make the distinction between audio and paper.

I like to write, maybe that’s obvious, and I often listen to podcasts – less obvious unless you know me – and implement them into my instruction (in an ESL setting). But what I hadn’t considered before is this intersection between blogs and broadcasting and how podcasts negotiate that area.  Typically, in a pedagogical sense, I separate writing activities from listening activities (though all the skills are integrated): write a response to this reading, listen to this podcast and shadow the stress, intonation, & rhythm of the speaker. Sadly, I hadn’t contemplated, beyond the surface anyways, the benefits of engaging with a podcast with all four skills: reading, writing, listening, & speaking. And it has me wondering why more ESL instructors have also neglected this area – it seems to be a wealth of “natural” language use for students to engage with.  So while it seems podcasts are dying off these days (or making a come back), I’d definitely like to explore the idea of playing with language through creating podcasts – which I’ve done in a 106 setting, but acknowledge would look quite different in 106i or 620.

Bianca brings about interesting criticism in regards to the framework that Taylor employs when investigating the ways and purposes of how women engage with technology and games: we wanna just communicate over tea and donuts. Personally, the gaming community has been a source of self-exploration and an opportunity to shoot things and people and then to write about it.

What I would like to talk about is Gray’s study. I found it interesting that Gray intersected racial profiling and linguistic profiling within the gaming community. Though Gray isn’t a compositionist or a language instructor, I did think, given her experience learning “Spanglish”, that she’d at least highlight the differences between language groups within the gaming community. Linguicism is most prevalent in K-12 education, though, where students are sifted from district to district based on their linguistic backgrounds, where ESL student are not permitted to be in the same classrooms, or schools, as African American students because they don’t speak proper English, where instructors will say how it’s “easier” to teach the “white” ESL students than the students of color. So while Gray thinks that “marginalized communities have a variety of responses to the inequalities they face which since the earliest suffrage movements, some members within these groups have learned to resist”, students at the elementary age aren’t capable of resisting the inequalities they face as a result of linguicism and racism and their parents are likely ill-equipped to do so as well.

I realize my spiel about K-12 education may seem to be a mismatch to Gray’s conversation, so let’s explore what linguiscism and racism means today in a “post-racial” society where the influx of immigrants is at its highest. Imagine that these students matriculate through IN k-12 schools and then take a FYC where they’re expected to take play video games and engage in these online communities: what type of profiling do you think they’ll experience compared to their monolingual peers? What type of resistance are students going to engage in when these situations emerge (as they will)? Can we teach resistance in a classroom? Or do we teach complacency, head burrowing?

I suppose what I’m getting at is that many of these conversations need to be broadened to include other Others, especially when we’re looking from a pedagogical POV.

Delwiche’s article was, overall, an “interesting” read. My first issue, though, was that he didn’t branch out in his references to see what others were saying about the use of games in learning. And by others, I mean he left us SLS folks out and it seems Composition people to. Though his article was published in 2006, researchers like Thorne, Sykes, and Reinhardt in SLA were already looking at the use of MMOs in second language learning/acquisition. They were particularly interested in Second Life and WoW, finding high correlations between learning and playing. The other issue I had was his conception of “Safe” and saying that MMOs are non-harming environments, and contradicts himself by saying not all are created equal. It’d probably be a good idea to unpack what safe means for each student. There are, as we know, plenty of occurrences of harassment when playing MMOs, or any online game where people can critique behind their screens. Students should be at least made aware of these possibilities, especially if the classroom is where they’ll first be exposed. I do like the idea of having students conduct ethnography in a video game as a class project.

Moving on to my man Leonard:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KgpR9rtQJhOmabyaXQhaZwrrKKJpRkCG0tpUJPaYQDo/edit

In general, I’m enjoying this read – it’s allowing me to continue to look at aspects of learning differently, and as always in the context of L2 learning. These ideas of Facebook as a game and setting up a class as a game and avatars and identity are thought-provoking. While I’m still just ankle deep in understanding gaming studies, it was interesting to reflect on the ways I’ve used some of these approaches in an L2 context already; especially when thinking about Facebook and L2W instruction. Maybe I’m a bit more than ankle deep after-all. In the past, Facebook was in my classroom as a way to acquaint L2 learners with this idea of audience and the rules of engagement – it seems to me that the approaches Alberti discuss are similar. For example, he contends that:

Rather than a goal-directed game in the sense of working to achieve a predefined objective, Facebook represents a social-directed game whose goals are not singular but multiple, not linear but holistic: the sustaining of a viable, functioning discursive community. (p.11)

In the sense that my ideologies of writing are primarily rooted in sociocultural/socio-cognitive perspectives, I agree. Viewing writing fro this socially-directed perspectives may encourage students to reflect on the ways they already use writing: who are they communicating with? what is their message? how are they conveying it? are they successful in sustaining themselves within this community? why or why not? This leads to Alberti’s assertion that:

In Facebook and similar social networking sites, we find participants engaged in moment-to-moment rhetorical play and decision making that feels as meaningful in that moment as any other supposedly more significant kind of writing. (p.19).

Rather discarding what students find to be significant or valuable writing, engage with them using the modes they’re most familiar with and transfer those rules to the overall objectives of the course.

As a final thought, I love collaborative learning. Collaborative pair/group work has become a structural constituent in L2W classrooms as research continues to examine the effects of it on students’ language acquisition and written products (Bastone, 2010; Shehadeh, 2011; Storch & Wigglesworth, 2007; Storch, 2005). Situated in theoretical and practical application, collaborative learning is noted for creating student centered environments of exploration and application in which students share intellectual effort, mutually search for solutions, meanings, understanding, or create a product (Smith & MacGregor, 2009). What better way to promote this [collaborative learning/language acquisition/intercultural communication] than by implementing more “gaming” into the classrooms as Hodgson demonstrates. Of course I don’t agree with everything; but I like finding the areas where cooperation between disciplines can emerge.

Alright so these questions will be for our discussion at the end of the activities

1.  The most obvious question of all: What is literacy? What does it mean to be literate? Which literacies do we value most in the classroom? Which literacies do we disregard (knowingly or otherwise) in the classroom? How might our answers to these questions influence our students’ learning?

2. Literacy, according to Gee, is “any technology that allows people to “decode” meanings and produce meanings by using symbols”. If our students began to mesh-code as Anzaldúa does in the excerpt provided, would they be considered literate, or would they be considered as not having a grasp of the English language?

3. Gee uses video game communities as models for language acquisition because these communities tend to recognize a wide range of skills as valuable (from helping “newbies” to finding glitches, making mods, organizing strategies, writing guides, etc), allowing all participants to be part learner/part teacher. Is this a viable strategy for traditional classrooms? And, if implemented, how do you ensure that students who are still very new to the domain (such as SLS or first-generation students) get the help they need without the teacher’s voice silencing the overall conversation?

4. Gee talks about passing tests and real understanding: How often we see this with our international students who study for the TOEFL, “pass” in terms of achieving the score needed for admission, and then drown in their composition classes but they don’t have a true understanding of the semiotic domain they’re attempting to skate into (and others where the need for understanding now becomes the determiner for passing). As instructors, where is our responsibility? 

5. One of the main objections to using tech in the classroom is that it often requires teachers to instruct students in an entirely new language set that may never be used again outside of the classroom or “non-real” situations (ie: play rather than work). This includes things like students learning the recipes for Minecraft or the elemental balances of pokemon…etc. Using foreign/less familiar domains can be helpful for getting students to consider contexts they usually take for granted (fish in water syndrome), but it’s also time consuming and takes a lot of effort on the part of the instructor, while also taking some time away from content instruction. What are some practical ways that you have found (or have thought about) that help you create semiotic domains despite these time/content limitations?

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a bit out of my element; neither am I bashful about admitting to reading various articles (and Wikipedia) about Huizinga and his role in Game Theory. With that said, I’m starting to look at this whole concept of “play” a little more critically with a lot more questions. What exactly is play? According to Huizinga it’s everything yet nothing – it’s reality and fantasy, it’s poetry and war, it’s law and philosophy, it’s both work (if work is not serious) and leisure, it’s the precipitant of language and establishing rules among a group of people. I may be minimizing this 200+ page book on play, but is it another word for competitive interaction? If so, then I have some wiggle room for agreement. When we think about the most effect ways students learn, the need for interaction seems obvious, especially if you consider wanting an authentic context to learn a language in. There are plenty of SLA theories that look at this interaction from varies perspectives: one being sociocultural (focusing on real world events where collaboration occurs) and the other interactionist (much more cognitive approach, focusing on the input’s rule in acquisition). The idea is that learners are engaged in negotiating form and meaning.

…I still trying to piece this all together in my mind.