Every time I start to get on board with Huizinga, this issue of play as divorced from ordinary life comes up and I get lost again. I can’t get a fix on what he considers ordinary; in so much of the text here, he’s using word play, riddles, and rhymes to talk about education and proliferation of information, certainly ordinary topics if ever there were any, even if that information is draped in dreams, riddles, and imagery. In Play and Poetry, what we’re seeing is history, much as we’re seeing religion and codes in Playing and Knowing, and with Mythopoeisis, I’m almost there with him, as these ideas come together in notions of created worlds, beings, and tales to explain the world around us. But it just doesn’t jibe with my sense of play and I’m finding it so hard to wrap my mind around. Yes, it’s imaginative, but that’s our perspective, from a perspective of “knowing” about things (like diseases and their causes, for instance). Earlier people were trying desperately to find a sense of order in their universe. Is that play? Perhaps; when we play plenty of games, we look for order (sorting things, cataloguing, collecting information). And perhaps that tendency to dream answers is play. I’m talking myself out of my argument as I type it. But when I’m reading the text, it’s so difficult for me to take things their creators thought as very serious, even essential, and label them “play” — and I very much believe in the power of play!

I’m all in on play in philosophy, though, so long as we call them headache-inducing forms of play….

The second section got me pondering all these different words and connotations for play. English, despite its complex web of possible connotation, is sometimes not as pointed as other languages, which can offer very specific words for very specific feelings. I starting thinking, for instance, maybe we (read: “we” as “some people/general we”) don’t take the potential of video games seriously because play is the verb we use, as in, we play games. Maybe if it was engagement! But we take football seriously, and basketball, and all the things, despite playing them. And what’s wrong with play, anyway? It’s more active than watch, on the face, at least, or listen. So it’s not the word, then, or its connotation, but just the way we treat games. Fair, but what to do?

Something else that I wondered about while I was reading this was how many things in my life I’ve learned through play, and how much I’ve struggled when there’s no element of play — if I’m “playing” when I make many of my vehement margin notes, or if I get through things I’m not as interested in only because I set reward benchmarks that usually involve games or thinking about games. But I’m also wondering about play-in-work scenarios for others. This semester, I did offer some games as optional “readings” for my students, and many opted out, despite being gamers. Because it wasn’t their kinds of games, or because it doesn’t feel like work to them? I wonder about the latter because often when I tell students to just “play around with [something],” they resist. Work is straightforward, linear; play in that sense is not.

Really interested in hearing the discussion on this one.

I found the Rickly piece interesting first because of reasons she states up front — our own anecdotal evidence about gender divides in the classroom. I’ve taken a lot of online classes, particularly creative writing classes that depended on a message board structure for critiques, and taught classes as well online as well, in which I’ve used chat rooms as well as message boards, and because I’ve often paid attention to the gender breakdowns of student respondents in online discussions, I was very interested in the comparisons I could draw here. Particularly revealing was the notion that women who were classified as more feminine were quietest, which matches my perception of and experience in all class types, but also what she said about women helping conversation along rather than actively participating. I’d really like to see research on that in message board settings, particularly with multiple replies to one thread — true conversation, replicated there as best as it can be — if women are responsible for most of the posts help revive conversation that is limping.

As for the other study, oh did I have questions and thoughts. First, that women were less likely to respond to opposition bears out in other spheres (women are less likely to resubmit to a creative journal that rejects them while asking for another submission, for instance), but I wondered about women receiving multiple answers to open questions. I wanted the quality of those responses analyzed, because I wonder if there were any dogpiling effects.

*Also, Sam, note that Dale Spender is mentioned here. We should have known!

I was really surprised to read in Sullivan about fragmentation in writing being a particularly feminist notion, but it also made a great deal of sense in keeping with everything I experienced in the creative writing sphere, and while working for literary magazines and observing trends there and in workshops. There is so much resistance for and against particular types of narratives, and while I’m not sure we’re still within the breakdowns Sullivan offers us, there is still a lot of tension between the stripped-down narrative (often masculine) and more structurally experimental narratives. Before I start listing and categorizing writers, because I can think of dozens of exceptions as I type that, let me instead consider my experiences in teaching narrative of multiple types to students. Right now, my students are writing memoir, and one student in particular, a young man, is struggling to braid two narratives and it’s so hard for him to see how that looks on the page because he wants to write one unified piece… but his story isn’t unified. It’s not the first time I’ve seen this, but as I look back, particularly in thinking about my creative writing classes, I have observed more willingness to move around in a narrative from female writers than from male, who stick more closely to the linear progression (regardless of who is making the “better” choice for their work). Thinking about where that comes from is particularly useful for me now, as a number of my students dabble in code and similarly structured hobbies and pursuits. Relating a moving, shifting narrative to web browsing or something similar, or even the creation of web content (next time!) offers some very interesting ways of thinking about how to break that down in relatable ways for students. I wonder if I can have them track their own web behaviors and what we might learn if we do. Off topic, I think, but today’s readings definitely have me thinking.

My reaction to Chapman here was immediate, and visceral: “oh, bullshit, Chapman; change is not inherently bad!” But I’ve been trying to explore my strong reactions lately (in the hopes that will temper them?), so I re-read the beginning and tried to position myself in his perspective. Because, see, I remember the shift to web-based research. When I was in junior high and high school, I performed traditional library research for most projects. Web sites at the time were far less useful, and it wasn’t until I had LexisNexis access for my college debate team research that I understood the power online databases brought to the table. For someone trying to pull quantity to sift for quality, it was a boon.

But I never had to take a comp class, and by the time I got around to teaching one, this was just the way things were. Print-based library research had become the realm of specialists and scholars. And what Chapman says here, about students defaulting to the easiest sources they could find, whether or not they were better? As true then as now. But is that inherently a problem with the change in research types, or have we not found a way to teach students to manage time? Let me ask it this way: pre-Web and online databases, would a student have waited for a better book through Interlibrary Loan unless they were an advanced scholar? The problem, I feel, has remained the same; only the way Chapman demonizes it is different. His assumption that books and print materials are going to offer the better information speaks to his prejudice in favor of print, and what we gain in access seems, to me, to make up for any loss.

Speaking of how some things don’t change, though, the Aschauer reading just makes me tremendously sad. This was written when I was still a teenager, hinging on research from before then, and so little has changed in many ways. I can’t even make sentences about it yet.

I was a little surprised at first when I was assigned to the game group on Tuesday, but quickly realized that while I could see easy applications for both Second Life and MOOs, I couldn’t really come up with anything for a game like Neverwinter. Lesson: never doubt Sam, I guess. Someday I’ll learn that one.

This week I’ve been confronted with a lot of interesting ways to think about games in the classroom. Though I’m obviously very interested in games, it’s always been a little difficult for me to see beyond the most basic applications of games in class — narrative structures, for instance, characterization, presentation, design, but after someone else got me thinking about how games can teach failure (and thus revision), I was in a really good place to open up to all kinds of angles Tuesday during class. Listening to Sherri talk about different uses for Neverwinter, and to Ashley talk about SLS students and language acquisition got me doing some new thinking about how we approach games, how quickly we pick up the language unique to it (or create our own), about how we learn and begin navigating what can be a completely foreign space, and how that correlates to class. And wow, this all feels so basic, like obviously I should have been thinking about this, what an idiot am I, but I have to keep reminding myself that I’m new to this. That these connections aren’t always obvious, that they do require thinking and study.

I guess what I’m saying is I’m grateful to be here. Oh, and Sam is pretty much always right, mostly, usually.

UPDATE: because my post posted without everything, somehow, I guess (sigh):

Today in my 106 class, we were having some conversations about this, about how we use language and how that language shifts between groups/classes/contexts, and as I was trying to get them to think about purpose in a rhetorical sense, I noticed that my co-instructor in Tech 120 had left a template on a board on the other end of the classroom: [USER] needs to [USER’S NEED] because [INSIGHT/BENEFIT] or something similar, and despite possible missing words, I turned their attention to this simple template. Consider that, I said, for your papers. What do YOU need to do and for what reason? What do you want? What do I need you to do, and for what reason? If you’re writing a resume, why are you doing it? What reason does that document have for existing in the world? I raise all this because these repetitive questions reminded me of repetitive actions, too, in games, in code, in so many forms of creation/interaction. All the crossover we’re pushing in 106E is bleeding into other modes of my life and I am learning as well.

It’s funny… I do a lot of writing using similar methods to what Derrick describes with Dosequis, using Google docs and a buddy, but several times during the article, I found myself shaking my head. Yes, human interaction is helpful, but how is computer literacy not essential? It was a different time, I suppose, with different expectations. While his exercises rang true to me (and did not seem gamified at all), the way he talked about it was not my experience on either “side” of the classroom.

I also went into the Haas and Gardner thinking: how on earth would a LAN MOO be any use in the classroom? Why not just talk over and around the computers, or move the computers, or something else? But as I read, I thought about my students’ research forthcoming research unit, and the eternal struggle of teaching strong proof for claims, and I thought about students in collaborative spaces, like the aforementioned Google docs, or a chat room, in which they could quickly exchange ideas, quotes, sources to get ideas and feedback. What Ashley said last class period got me thinking about sharing my own process with my students, and this may be one way to do it, particularly if it’s a persistent resource they can access at any time they are working on the research. It may help the research process, and may disrupt it, but since my students this semester are part of a small group and will be working within a pool of research topics, I might now test something like that out… though again, it doesn’t seem gamified to me, but maybe that’s because I played too many MUDs and MUSHes and have pretty particular associations with games versus purely social/communicated spaces (maybe it wasn’t supposed to seem gamified? I dunno.)

Finally, as I read Daisley, I think I have come to understand that I don’t see games in these readings because what is described is my baseline normal. I am irreverent and silly even with the things I do take very seriously (well, most things) and in that sense, I guess my classroom tends to be a very playful place. But I want to establish comfort and engagement and for me, that’s one of the easiest ways to do it, or maybe I mean most natural.

Lots to think on.

I asked about space because I’m gonna ask my students to redesign the physical computing space today! But that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. Still, I think navigating around monitors and equipment can present a challenge.

In other ways, I like to have my students do quick research in the classroom for mini-debates during research units, asking them to perform all the normal checks on sources (vetting as best they can) in very short windows with the goal of gathering as much evidence as possible. (I hope) it makes them think about the way they read information online and how they evaluate it.

(but lots of other things too because dangit y’all all listed multiple examples and I was just doing one and now I feel like it’s not good enough o man)

It’s difficult to imagine the classrooms that inspired these articles, not only because I embraced technology from an early age (considering my now-advanced age, anyway), but because I never experienced a class like this, either. By the time I was in a class that leaned heavily on computers, and in a school with the money to do so, most students were past these challenges, and instructors, too. So what I fix on instead is Christine Hult’s description of the “inexperienced” writer versus a more professional writer, and the differences in processed described. In this, it seems, little has changed for student writers, who too often see “revision” as a mere rewording exercise.

This is something I spend a lot of time working on in my classes, and yet it remains one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced, even with trying multiple methods (some similar to those discussed here; Moran’s, for example, looks different today but similar exercises are possible with content management systems like blogs and Blackboard, or with collaborative apps). In creative writing classes past, we tried multiple methods for getting ourselves out of this, too, down to rewriting drafts by hand, from scratch (looking at the pre-typed manuscript was cheating!), and in the classrooms today, I work through all manner of exercises and prewrites and look for other ways to help students develop their own processes, the ideas that work best for them, and yet so often, they struggle to actually revise their thoughts and connections. I don’t know how I feel about the relation between screens and thinking in pieces, since we’re also likely to look at units of writing in pages, but something certainly causes students to think more often than not that each paragraph is a discrete unit, and that proofreading is the sum of editing, and it’s a trend that continues.

One thing that surprised me about these readings is how unsurprised I was by some of the content. In the Moore piece, for example, he noted his surprised that most of the students had some typing education and that they had so few problems using the computers. We see so many of these same assumptions about students these days, but in reverse: we assume students know basics and we can skip them. These continual assumptions, I’ve found, can be damaging, and I wondered if Moore’s attitude was apparent to the students, and if so, how that impacted their performance. After all, as we say in Dinana et al, that fear of failure (which I read as judgment) impacts students, something I continue to see in my own classes as I teach programs and methods that are unfamiliar to some. While the Moore piece was short, that question and others plagued me as I read the other two items. I want to go back and ask him, well, what about it? What did you really learn? What did your students learn? We see some of this: they learned technical skills they didn’t have before, maybe (we didn’t get a full breakdown of more than which students knew how to type), but as he pointed out, there was little impact on the writing… despite the use of techniques that remain useful in writing (particularly creative writing, as I well know!), such as hand-writing early drafts and editing in different modes until a final draft is created using a computer. I wonder if, in piloting this instruction, maybe other items got missed.

But, briefly, back to assumption. We assume, today, that our students are “digital natives,” but I’ve run into students of all ages who were unfamiliar with many aspects of computing beyond simply searching the web and using some rudimentary social media. We shuffle these students into labs and require e-mail and content management systems and more, and while I’ve wondered before how to better support those students besides through in-class instruction, tutorials, and peer aid, I find myself wondering now if that is impacting instruction.

I have much to say on this reading alone; I’ve eaten all my words, but I’ll have more for class. Lots to think about.