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?

One of the reasons I have my ICAP students do a rhetorical analysis of games is because of the rich visual/aural/mechanical languages games tend to use to convey meaning to their players. Because most games start with tutorial levels and are designed to scaffold information in an accessible way, games provide an interesting space in which students can quickly become privy to the design language being employed by the developers. Because the teaching of how to interact with a game is part of the game itself, analysis of how the game communicates with the user can be a great jumping-off point for having students critically examine other visual mediums that are not so inherently didactic. It’s also a great way to talk about internal design grammars among genres of games. If a game expects the player of a platforming game to run to the right and press A to jump, these are internal design grammars that are inherent to the genre. Students who are less familiar with games will recognize these assumptions as breaking points, where the in-game instruction fails to consider novice players’ lack of knowledge about these conventions. By talking about how designers make assumptions about what their players know, we can start to identify assumptions that designers in other mediums make about the literacy of their users.

not having dates on these chapters made it a little hard to situate them in what little I know about the history of games studies. I figure that Gee was pretty foundational. he certainly spends lots of time carving out a place for games and pedagogy and all that in these books.

the problem of content Gee points out in the Semiotic Domains chapter seems so familiar to rhetoric, right? from Socrates it’s been debated–what are we really learning when we learn to rhetoric? there is no “content” to it– no unique substance– unless we say that the content is everything, which isn’t always useful to say.

maybe it’s that as Gee points out, “Critical learning, as I am defining it here. involves learning to think of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us (if I can use this term without necessary negative connotations) in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways.” (43)

I think that’s what we are hoping to keep learning about and teaching about as rhetoricians. so it’s okay for us to not have our own content…

and as people in the world, we can make a difference in whether this critical learning happens for everyone around us, not even just students. this snippet was sort of encouraging (though I do recognize that not everyone is into the endless picking-apart-of-things that we academics so often are): “If these people encourage reflective metatalk, thinking, and actions in regard to the design of the game, of video games more generally, and of other semiotic domains and their complex in­terrelationships, then this, too, can encourage and facilitate active and critical learning and thinking” (46-47)

how we do that is another question, and I imagine we all have our own ways.

I think that Gee’s discussion of literacy and video games in “Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a ‘Waste of Time’?” could be a helpful framework through which we might continue to think about video games as a pedagogical tool. Indeed, it seems important to note Gee’s argument that “[w]hen people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word ‘literacy’ is normally used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write. Why, then, should we think of literacy more broadly, in regard to video games or anything else, for that matter?” (13).

Perhaps one reason why we should think of literacy in regard to video games is that doing so might allow us to challenge the manner in which certain types of knowledge and learning are often privileged:

Important knowledge (now usually gained in school) is content in the sense of information rooted in, or at least, related to, intellectual domains or academic disciplines like physics, history, art, or literature. Work that does not involve such learning is ‘meaningless.’ Activities that are entertaining but that themselves do not involve such learning are just ‘meaningless play.’ Of course, video games fall into this category. (21)

This resistance to types of so-called “meaningless play”—play that, Gee notes, video games often come to encompass—also brings to mind Huizinga’s discussion of seriousness and play, and it also makes me think about the fact that it seems that it’s not just certain learning activities (i.e. the more “serious ones”) that can be privileged but the disciplines as well, for even though Gee lists physics, history, art, and literature as examples of important domains of academic knowledge, perhaps some of these domains are often viewed as being “more important” than others.

As such, Gee’s discussion of games, here, is making me think a lot about the hierarchical nature of the ways we think about knowledge and learning. And I think that Gee’s presentation of an alternative perspective to knowledge production could be helpful too: “The alternative perspective starts with the claim that there really is no such thing as learning ‘in general.’ We always learn something. And that something is always connected, in some way, to some semiotic domain or other” (22).

As I was reading Gee this week, I kept thinking about building worlds. I appreciated the care with which he framed the Pikmin example in particular — and the paths he took in explaining everything necessary to come back to it — as I am still very new to learning about how to view games as learning mechanisms and I appreciate these very clear breakdowns. It’s sometimes hard for me to see beyond 1:1 ratios, because that’s how I learn a lot of things (math, for example: I have a very hard time deviating from examples): through repetition and mimicry, so instead seeing how something can be practiced and modeled in one world (and then leaping to how it could be translated in another) is helping me see past my own inherent limitations. But I have been replaying some State of Decay lately, and thinking about the Sims and Civ, all games in which we build in various ways. In SoD, we construct survival; in the Sims, homes, neighborhoods, and more; in Civ, whole populations. In each case, different knowledge is necessary for the most basic methods of play, but then they branch based on player-created scenarios. We’re not just building the worlds, but building approaches to them within those worlds. I don’t like to play the Sims, so I only build for purity of design; on the occasions when I do decided to “play” for a while, my houses are much different, designed to allow my Sims to meet their needs efficiently, but the houses I prefer to build are elaborate and beautiful, and I don’t care if it takes my Sim three hours of gametime just to get outside. I’ve set different conditions that required reading the situations differently. Just as Gee moves through contextual definitions of words, the game context changes for me as I play in various ways.

I’m very fascinated by all the ways in which we create our experiences, from those intended (as above) to those that are not particularly essential (assigning personal narrative importance to arbitrary things in order to beef up a lacking story, for instance), and I’m often frustrated with games that impose a lot of limitations because there’s so little of that flexibility. But I’m getting off track; what I wanted to say was that I appreciate that Gee spends so much time thinking about all these different ways we operate in the game space, and what it can mean for us.

p.s. man, does Gee have a knack for picking some occasionally eyebrow-raising examples.

I have read Gee before, but not his chapter SEMIOTIC DOMAINS: IS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES A “WASTE OF TIME”?.” In the chapter, he develops a rich definition of critical learning and its relationship to semiotic domains.

For active learning, the learner must, at least unconsciously, understand and operate within the internal and external design grammars of the semiotic domain he or she is learning. But for critical learning, the learner must be able consciously to attend to, reflect on, critique, and manipulate those design grammars at a metalevel. That is, the learner must see and appreciate the semiotic domain as a design space (40).

The definition of critical learning considers active learning as an elementary consideration of the types of learning possible in the classroom. Although video games may not be the medium in which I have students engage in critical learning, I appreciated how careful Gee is in his definitional work. The five principles that he closes the chapter with are especially helpful when considering other opportunities for learning with visuals. I could imagine using these to design a class on new media, print media, and document design.

This week I am fascinated by the fact that Huizinga ends his book with a discussion on time. I found this curious because my small group last week felt that Tony’s first question on Homo Ludens required an analysis and a discussion of the time in which the book was written. Within the first paragraph, Huizinga states, “A mind historically focussed will embody in its idea of what is ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ a far larger section of the past than a mind living in the myopia of the moment” (195). His point? Our past is always our present. Mic drop.

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.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ViURnzhwYFyw3fD5tsrMo6nliWHmS2JcxBYRspCRKMY/edit?usp=sharing