these results challenge the conventional notion that immersion in online communities are distracting or socially isolating and, instead, highlight the potential civic benefits of non-political participation in online communities.
What about political participation as well?
is not meant to signal an individual or innate quality; we see interests as cultivated through social and cultural relationships and located within what we call an “affinity network” of commonly felt identity, practice, and purpose.
affinity networks can easily have the problem of turning into "echo chambers" of sorts, bouncing ideas both positive and negative.
a form of learning that mobilizes young people's deeply felt interests and identities in the service of achieving the kind of civic voice and influence that is characteristic of participatory politics.
Just how powerful would this connected voice of a participatory group be though? What could it achieve?
they can “geek out” together by swapping ideas, techniques and critiques related to projects that tap their deepest interests and aspirations (Ito et al., 2009Ito, M., Baumer, S., Bittanti, M., boyd, danah, Cody, R., Herr-Stephenson, B., … Tripp, L. (2009). Hanging out, messing around, and geeking out: Kids living and learning with new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]).
Geeking out leads to incredibly versatile affinity members within a short period of time.
This vision of teachers continually modifying and publishing docu-ments as an integral part of their professional practice suggests a radicallydifferent role for information technologists; it suggests that informationtechnologists might be in the business of maintaining knowledge-aggre-gating tools, creating and supporting knowledge-building communities,and providing tools for teachers to identify and organize usefulresources.
Incredible summary of the idea that teachers and schools need to innovate to stay viable.
Because games are by definition associated with fantasy, many educa-tors quickly move toward highly fictionalized contexts for producinggames
Games don't have to be fictionalized, this is inside the box thinking and limits creativity.
Few students investigated the environment itself forclues. On occasion, students literally walked through piles of goose drop-pings (almost stepping on live geese in the process) because they were sofixated on the PDAs.
This is amazing, it shows how powerful of a focus-tool digital learning is.
How do we provide students sufficient scaffolding that theyneed to engage in effective inquiry, while still giving them some agencyor sense of control over their actions?
Games do this pretty well in my opinion.
Research on people who self-identify as gamers suggests that prolongedparticipation in game cultures may lead to a more active, problem-solv-ing orientation to learning.
This explains why many gamers seem to take on engineering careers .
the over-whelming majority of activity was dedicated to social knowledge construc-tion.
This shows that people are inclined to help people within their participatory groups without much "Gate-Keeping"
projective identities—identities that are a melding of ourselves andour game identities, possible selves that the game invites us to inhabit.Second, digital media are deeply participatory
The interesting part to me is how people create these identities sometimes without realization, and take on specific rolls within that community
In the meantime, although many students are alienated from school, other data show that their uses of digital media have increased
If learning about DML has taught me anything, it's that these two things (digital media and schooling) are not mutually exclusive, or they shouldn't have to be.
Youth are increasingly engaged in informal online communities that define themselves around shared interests and that often center around expressive activities
When I think of "formal," I think of textbooks, classrooms, assignments, things of that like. And I believe that that's the approach that this writing is taking as well. But a lot of the informal approaches seem to stick with people a lot more because they're interest-driven
For example, DREAM activists have established multiple websites and networked organizations to build these connections. DREAMactivist.org was founded by students who only met in person several years after the site was established. It has grown over the years to become a coalition of 30 organizations that sponsor activities such as a new media intern program as well as campaigns such as the National DREAM Graduation, petitions, and fundraising (Zimmerman, 2012Zimmerman, A. M. (2012). Documenting dreams: New media, undocumented youth and the immigrant rights movement. Los Angeles, CA. Retrieved from http://dmlhub.net/publications/documenting-dreams-new-media-undocumented-youth-and-immigrant-rights-movement [Google Scholar], pp. 22-23)
"Openly-networked"
What supports enable young people to move along a pathway towards learning connected civics? Three supports have emerged out of our research, which we take up in the following sections, centered on: 1. What young people produce when they engage connected civics (hybrid content worlds), 2. How they work together (shared practices), and 3. What conditions (cross-cutting infrastructures) render their activities increasingly sustainable and poised to achieve learning effects at scale
Civic practices, in a sense, are a participatory culture that is rooted from affinity-based interests
Much of this research is concerned with the relationship between in-school and out-of-school learning, puzzling over: how classroom learning gets applied (or not) to everyday life (Hull & Shultz, 2002Hull, G., & Shultz, K. (2002). School's out! Bridging out-of-school literacies with classroom practice. New York: Teacher's College Press. [Google Scholar]; Lave, 1988Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]); how children's home and peer cultures inflect school achievement (Carter, 2005Carter, P. (2005). Keepin' it real: School success beyond black and white. London: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]; Goldman, 2006Goldman, S. (2006). A new angle on families: Connecting the mathematics in daily life with school mathematics. In Z. Bekerman, N. Burbules, & D. Silberman-Keller (Eds.), Learning in places: The informal education reader. Bern: Peter Lang. [Google Scholar]; Varenne & McDermott, 1998Varenne, H., & McDermott, R. (1998). The Farrells and the Kinneys at home: Literacies in action. In H. Varenne & R. McDermott (Eds.), Successful failure: The school America builds (pp. 45–62). Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google Scholar]); or how educators can intentionally design digitally-rich, production-oriented communities that bridge divides in access to robust learning environments (Barron, Gomez, Pinkard, & Martin, 2014Barron, B., Gomez, K., Pinkard, N., & Martin, C. (2014). The digital youth network. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]).
A lot of the DML projects we've done are meant to be "media rich" and one of the aspects of the framework for connected learning is that it is "production-centered"
Commentators bemoaning youth apathy worry that digitally-mediated, expression-based forms of civic activity will make young people less likely to take part in institutionalized politics (such as voting), but recent research has indicated the opposite. Involvement in participatory culture
Participatory culture, another one of the big words we discuss in DML. It makes sense that participation, and being encourage to participate in any form, can carry over to civic duites
It involves imagination. It means investigating the world of the game and feeling the frustration, flow, and excitement that goes along with playing it.
I'd say that play falls into the "messing around" category. It's about experiencing the game, experimenting with it, finding what works, and discovering the mechanics of the game itself
Access to a network of both peers and mentors who can model what it might mean toparticipate in a gaming space affects kids’ entry into games and learning.
The peers and mentors who do shape a kid's entry into gaming may have certain ways they want to do it, what they think is the correct way. This means they might serve as gatekeepers to what the child can and can't do when discovering gaming
participation genres
As we've discussed in DML, there are many different ways to be involved in a participatory culture. Thinking of them as "genres," we can figure out what genres speak to us and how we use them
how meaning emerges collectivelyand collaboratively in the new media environment and how creativity operates differently in anopen-source culture based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing
What examples of this can we point to? How have we seen people engaging in "new media environments" to collaboratively make meaning of things? Do we sometimes see collective meaning emerge that later ends up being wrong?
young people were findingit increasingly difficult to separate commercial from noncommercial content in online environ-ments
What does this phrase lead us to understand about this Transparency problem?
focus on negative effects of media consumption
What do we make of the "screen time" debate? Is it about more/less time with screens? Or is it more nuanced than that?
Empowerment comes from making meaningful decisions within a real civic context: we learnthe skills of citizenship by becoming political actors and gradually coming to understand thechoices we make in political terms
What is this saying about EMPOWERMENT? How might you rephrase it in your own words?
highly generative environment
What examples of this can we think of from what we've experienced/observed in the Affinity Spaces that we inhabit?
Participatory Culture
Participatory Culture defined.
While to adults the Internet primarily means the world wide web, for children it means email, chat,games— and here they are already content producers.
In today's society, how does the definition of "The Internet" vary by age group (and other demographic groupings)?
We all need to be cognizant of what we share, how we share, and to what extent that sharing dramatizes preexisting racial formulas inherited from “real life.” The Internet isn’t a fantasy — it’s real life
Since I first read this 2 years ago, it's been on my mind every single time an app suggests a GIF. It's changed my behavior. If I decide to use a GIF featuring a Person of Color, it is now intentional and only after asking myself these questions.
If there’s one thing the Internet thrives on, it’s hyperbole and the overrepresentation of black people in GIFing everyone’s daily crises plays up enduring perceptions and stereotypes about black expression
What feels like merely expressing a reaction in GIF form can also be a larger act of perpetuating harmful myths and stereotypes. This is especially true when we consider that though we are individuals, our sharing is actually a collective act (such as contributing to the learning of algorithms that suggest the top GIFs).
Fieldwork
You will be doing this for your DML Case Study
To evaluate membership to a community of practice by educators on Twitter, McLeay (2008) used three terms defined by Wenger (1998): mutual engage-ment (the negotiations among the members of the com-munity and how this participation binds them together), joint enterprise (the shared understanding of their goals), and shared repertoire (a set of communal resources used to reach the goals of the shared enterprise)
Community of Practice criteria. Interesting
he concluded that the #MFLtwitterati feel they are part of a large group of like-minded colleagues where they can share their classroom experiences and be supported when experimenting with new ideas; can reflect on their own practice through informal discussion with others and feel they have become better teachers as a result, always open to new ways to improve; find it eas-ier to keep up to date with the latest resources, national news, government documents, Ofsted initiatives, links to useful blog posts, etc.;
List goes on. These are important Community of Practice characteristics. For INTE2500, examples here align with discourses exhibited within affinity spaces
participatory skills and norms
Does the Internet change along with the norms?
here is simply too much apathy and too much ignorance.
I feel like this is pretty accurate regarding today's problem with younger generations needing to be encouraged to vote. A lot of people old enough now to contribute to voting no longer have a want to do so, or may be uneducated in terms of you is running for candidate positions.
Researchonpeoplewhoself-identifyasgamerssuggeststhatprolongedparticipationingameculturesmayleadtoamoreactive,problem-solv-ingorientationtolearning.BeckandWade(2004)surveyed2,000employeesoflargecompaniesandfoundthatgamersweremorelikelythannongamerstobelievethatchallengesweresolvable,weremoredri-ventoaccomplishgoals,weremoreconfidentintheirabilities,caredmoredeeplyabouttheirorganizations,preferredtobepaidbyperfor-manceratherthanbytitleorsalary,reportedagreaterneedforhumanrelationships,believedthatconnectingwiththerightpeople“gotthejobdonemorequickly,”andpreferredcollaborativedecision-makingtoindependentproblem-solving.BeckandWadewentontoarguethatevenifeverymemberofthemillennialgenerationisnotagamer(justaseverybabyboomerwasnotatWoodstock),thesebasicvaluesarecom-montothegenerationandareamongthosethatdefinethem.
Because these basic values are seen across the entire millennial generation maybe there is more to gaining these values than gaming or gaming culture. #dillajam
person,” a way of taking on a certain sort of identity. In that sense, each of ushas multiple identities. Even a priest can read the Bible “as a priest,”“as a lit-erary critic,”“as a historian,” even “as a male” or “ as an African American”(priest, literary critic, historian, or ethnic group member)
It's only half because Hypothesis Is lame. But I enjoy the concept that People take on different identities as they read different material, even reminds me how people take on different personalities when speaking a different language. #dillajam
We humans have goals and purposes, and for some goals and purposessome groups’ ways of reading and thinking work better than do others.
I like this quote, as it expresses that people have different strengths due to their diversity, and sometimes even think about the same thing in different ways.
Games, of course, reflect the culture we live in—a culture wecan change.
I agree that this is changing, and more realistic views on the female persona in video games are coming to light. Time will tell if the change actually comes about.
But they are very much there, nonetheless.
Maybe its important to, instead of mindlessly consuming the content on the screen, it may be more beneficial for the user to glean learning principles from it.
I predict that shooting will be less important and talkingmore important in many games, even shooter games.
And I think your prediction is true today. Video games now a days (depending on the game) have balanced this out more.
gender
https://www.headstuff.org/topical/female-representation-in-video-games-history/
violence
multiculturalism
"the presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society."
we can learn a lot from thoseyoung people who play games, if only we take them and their games seri-ously.
Good idea! If only the generation gap would pause for a moment and allow both generations to learn from one another.
potentialofvideo games.
This is very forward thinking of Gee. This book was published in '03, meaning before VR and today's technology.
clear and explicit
So we can LEARN!
right wing of the political spectrum, will findthis idea absurd.
So politics does have a lot to do with it?
they think best when they reason on the basis of patterns
This is interesting to consider. I always knew humans were pattern/routine seekers but I didn't know we rely on them in even logistic or abstract principles. How does this effect our thinking?
“political”
Is it because people who study New Literacy are more attune to what is happening around them?
often distrust psychology more
Why might this be? Because psychological theories have been inaccurate in the past?
New Literacy Studies
Very fitting considering the idea of "new literacies" present in today's society, I'm glad people have devoted their time to trying to understand this concept.
thinking as tied to a body that has experiences inthe world
This is a good concept to touch on in this book. I think it is extremely important to situate people's learning/study in the world itself. In an ever-changing and advancing society, a lot of social/cultural/economical factors go into each person's cognition abilities.
36
Damn thats a lot of principles!
don’t much like school
Because we've only been exposed to the same type of learning for years on end? Yes I think so.
cognitive science
"the study of thought, learning, and mental organization, which draws on aspects of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer modeling."
principles oflearning
Vocab! (#INTE2500)
Marx called the “creativity ofcapitalism,”
Oooo! Interesting connection between thought and economics! Capitalism driving learning is a good theme to explore. Does it help or hinder learning when compared to economic systems such as Socialism?
the company that makes it goes broke
Are companies these days more concerned with money or providing players with good experiences?
both frustrating and life enhancing
Isn't this the state of all engaging new learning?
baby-boomer ways oflearning and thinking
I think this is an important point that Gee makes here. It is interesting to see the difference in "ways/types" of thinking over generational gaps. He's right though, us Millennials and after understand video games because we were kinda born into them. Older generations may struggle to connect because they have a larger learning curve to tackle.
profoundly difficult.
Do video games have to be difficult in order to learn from them?
“Wouldn’t it be great if kidswere willing to put in this much time on task on such challenging material inschool and enjoy it so much?”
hmmmmm...
high-tech
There's that connection to technology I was waiting for.
even if he choosesto privilege one way of reading—one identity—over another.
This is an interesting concept, especially since sometimes we do it without knowing. Like if I think about a concept on my own, I will have different ideas than if I were to talk within a group and take a different perspective. Thus, do we eventually learn more and get more out of ideas or texts when we approach them in this way?
ac-tive inquiry and deep conceptual understanding
Definitely this is something schools are missing out on/lacking these days. I agree that the standardized tests mentality is one schools seem to be stuck on. How could we implement new processes in education that help foster more "active inquiry" and critical thinking on a deeper level?
psycholinguistics
"the study of the relationships between linguistic behavior and psychological processes, including the process of language acquisition"
There are no “private minds” either.
This connects greatly to the theory that whenever we learn new information we tend to inject it into anything we create. For example, sometimes authors writing a novel will subconsciously put in ideas or writing styles that they have seen in the past. I do this sometimes when I create films without even realizing. Thus what i think to be my "private thoughts" aren't really such.
Different people can read the world differently just as they can readdifferent types of texts differently.
Dang this is accurate. We live in such a society today thats driven by how people "read" the world around them, especially in regards to things like the #MeToo Movement and police incidents.
Litmus Test
So: -#1 = "Can I try?" (intrigue/interest) -#2 = "Can I save?" (investment in the game) -#3 = "Reflection/Interpretation
This field of music just broadened my ideas to come
Musical literacy is a convoluted idea. I think that the debate about it being a literacy lies in the emotional connection one feels in relation to music. It does take a type of literacy to be able to read musical notes and turn them into a beat, but is there a literacy in regards to how humans emotionally connect with music like Kendrick's?
nationwide police-brutality protests and the subject of countless online think pieces and hot takes.
This is definitely a form of literacy! In regards to the world around us, its important to be literate in terms of news and world events. Without this type of literacy and thus comprehension, people like Kendrick couldn't analyze world events and then provide social commentary on them through his music.
But if I'm challenging myself in the studio, I want to challenge you as well.
@inte2500 As consumers, readers are historically aware of creators attempts to push them, to challenge them, to grow them in some direction. How might pushing this intention across borders to other mediums like music, gaming, etc, reflect the "new ethos stuff" of New Literacies?
The Internet is where young peopleget much of their political information.Half (50 percent) of 18!29 year-old Internet news consumers say their voting decisions are influenced by what they learn online and 37 percent of those ages 18!24 obtained 2008 campaign information from social networking sites, compared to only 4 percent of 30!39 year olds.
That is a crazy amount of people of my age to be getting our information from the internet but that is very true. All I use is mostly facebook and I see so many things on facebook that I don't even know if it real.
having all students select an online game, app, or learning module from a pre-determined list is not really student choice—after all, someone else curated the list. While it’s a step in the right direction, allowing students time to explore and make choices for themselves bears a stronger connection to personalization
How do we reconcile student choice to make learning personal with frequent need to scaffold choice (in this case, through curation) for learners who are still in effect learning how to learn and need support?