Video Games, Affiliations, and Critical Optimism

This is the screen-worshiping zombie mothers across America are seeing in their children, young adults and fully grown children. This is the social stigma James Paul Gee is up against in his attempt to debunk the idea that video games are a waste of time.  In What Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, Gee cites three things involved in active learning: “experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning (24),” and adds that a meta awareness of the particular domain brings “active learning” a step further into “critical learning.”  I would like to discuss here the aspect of new affiliations in gaming.  “Since semiotic domains usually are shared by group of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices, we gain the potential to join this social group, to become affiliated with such kinds of people (even though we may never see all of them, or any of them, face to face(24).)”  Though from our perspective, the child in the illustration above seems to be zoned out to technicolor nonsense on the screen in front of him, he could easily be communicating with others across the world having the same gaming experience.  From our position as outsiders looking in on a semiotic domain of which we are not a part, we have little way of knowing with who or what the boy may be interacting.

While some parents may be concerned about the amount of time their children spend locked up in their rooms with their video games away from society, research in numerous fields has caught on to the community aspect of the gaming world.  Gee states: “Reading and writing in any domain, whether it is law, rap songs, academic essays, superhero comics, or whatever, are not just ways of decoding print, they are also caught up with ways of doing things, thinking about things, valuing things and interacting with other people—that is, they are caught up with different sorts of social practices (Gee 18).”  Similarly, in “The Rhetoric of Video Games” Ian Bogost presents the social world of gamers as a community of practice:

“We often think that video games have a unique ethos. Video game players have their own culture and values. Video game players often self-identify as “gamers” and devote a major part of their leisure time to video games. They discuss games online, follow new trends, and adopt new technology early. Video game play could be understood as a “community of practice,” a name Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger have given to a common social situation around which people collaborate to develop ideas. In this sense, the people who play video games develop values, strategies, and approaches to the practice of play itself (Bogost 119).”

My friend’s recent marriage proposal

is a great example of the use of he and his fiancé’s shared practice of play, just as their relationship is a great example of the possibilities of affiliations in the semiotic domain of MMORPGs.  (The two – a videogame tester and college student in California and a working mother of three in Kentucky – met playing WoW) It is interesting to note that he posted this image on his Facebook page with the caption “I do things nerdy,” followed by a picture of her physical engagement ring with the post “but I also do things for real.”  I think this distinction is connected to the meta understanding of our semiotic domains that Gee stresses, and is probably the main legitimate worry parents have in seeing their children retreat to fantasy worlds.  Can gamers connect their community values and practices with practices that will help them be successful outside of their niche communities?

This post on Gee’s blog in which he discusses truths about books and what they have to do with video games made me think about the dangers of immersion in fantasy in another light.  It immediately made me think about Richard E. Miller’s Writing at the End of the World “TheDark Night of the Soul” and his discussion of the idealistic literary immersion that led to Chris McCandless’ death in the Alaskan wild. I can’t help but wonder whether the domain of video games, especially with its propensity toward social interaction within an easily accessible community (as opposed to the unreachable authors McCandless believed in so fully) already exhibits the ideals of the critical optimism Miller argues for in writing.  Most importantly, how can we use this to our students’ advantage?

The Value of New Literacies in the Composition Classroom

We’ve all been there.  At least once in our academic careers we have spent the first 20 minutes of a class period watching the teacher or student presenter battle it out with the technology they were dependent on for that days lesson.  Does the occasional misfire of technology signal its unwarranted place in the classroom?  Are we wasting our time, or are we wasting the potential of the tools we have before us?

You have also very likely sat behind (and quickly learned to sit in front of) this guy:

who has been perusing his Facebook and email while typing a paper on the effects of Hurricane Katrina all throughout the lecture on poster propaganda in Berlin.  Bravo on the multi-tasking skills, but will he be fully present for the ensuing group work?  I’d rather not take my chances.

While these are two examples of many unfortunate drawbacks to technology in the classroom, they certainly cannot justify excising technology from schools.  Not only that, but they bring up very important questions surrounding digital literacy and our own agency.  What is the current role of technology in the classroom?  Is it effective?  Should we throw it out, work within it, or transform it to what we need it to be?

In “Students Who Teach Us: A Case Study of  a New Media Text Designer” Cynthia Selfe points out that English comp teachers are becoming more and more interested in new media texts because not only do they see more of them and have more access to reading and authoring these texts themselves, but their students are paying noticeably more attention to these texts as well.  Selfe argues here that teachers should be paying more attention to them, as well as using them systematically in the classroom to teach about new literacies.  In the chapter Selfe uses the technological and traditional literacy narrative of one student to explore how this contested landscape effect students working in specific English comp programs, the role new media literacies play in the negotiation of new social codes, and what English comp teachers must do with this knowledge to squelch the risk of composition studies becoming increasingly irrelevant (or politicized as such).

As hard as it is to believe that something so absolutely necessary for the educational (read: professional, personal, future) career of American students (read: communities, future leaders, country) as the critical thinking skills learned through composition could be devalued by anyone with the power to support it, the sub-topic of the use of technology in the classroom comes with a built-in debate which could serve to bolster a positive view of the necessity of comp studies or derail it.  David Buckingham explains in “Introducing Identity,” how the long debate on the impact of media and technology on children has always served as a focus for much broader hopes and fears about social change.  The idea that technology is transforming social relationships, the economy and sprawling realms of public and private life is recycled in popular debates, drawing on its long history of public opinion ranging from celebration to paranoia.

Research like that of Kristen Drotner, who believes that schools need to more directly address the new forms of competence needed today and is concerned with the implications of young people’s emerging digital cultures and the role of schools, along with the digital literacy case studies carried out by Hawisher and Selfe can help us put together an informed picture of how new literacies can or should play out in the composition classroom; one not overburdened by celebration or paranoia, but balanced by the real emerging needs of students.  Though Hawisher and Selfe are (rightly) hesitant to apply their ethnographic research to form a larger narrative, their approach points out how little English teachers know about the numerous literacies their students bring to class, and calls on them to seek out and embrace a broad understanding and valuing of multiple literacies in schools to cooperate with those at home, in the community and in the workplace; the literacies their students shape and are shaped by in other (social, professional, educational) aspects of their lives.

Of course this “unique position of the teacher to make a difference in the literate activities of students” requires an aspect of pioneering bravery on the part of teachers (especially those who do not consider themselves tech savvy), and it will certainly include a learning curve (occasionally we will spend some of our precious class time searching for a dongle).  Introducing the specific strategies and activities she suggests to take this road, Selfe explains that these strategies will depend on the teacher’s willingness to: experiment with new media compositions, take personal and intellectual risks as they learn to value different types of texts, integrate attention to such texts into the curriculum, and engage in composing such works themselves.  Not to mention on computer resources, tech support and the professional development that they have available at their specific institutions.  This is clearly a risk for teachers, not only in their own dynamic with their students, but in breeching this learning curve quickly and smoothly enough to justify the value of new literacies in the composition classroom while the composition classroom itself is still in the process of being contested, questioned, and possible threatened.  The successful use of a range of literacies in the classroom may keep composition studies relevant to students, the students’ skills relevant to future academic and professional work, and therefore the composition classroom relevant to the university.

Understanding the Evolution of Writing Technology

Image credit: Laughload.com

Though more light-hearted than the many alarmed educators who decry that an age of illiteracy is upon us (see Berkmann: “TXTNG: THE GR8 DB8”), this cartoon satirizes the role of technology in distancing students from their education.

Wednesday morning, watching high school juniors attempt unguided research (rather than typing their first drafts) using questionable methods and getting equally questionable results, I pondered the utility of technology in the classroom. Later that day, deftly maneuvering between my laptop’s split-screen (Google Chrome on the right, displaying a pdf along with numerous tabs of research material, and on the left, Microsoft Onenote, with very organized notes in progress on my current reading and past class discussions) I remembered my early relationship with technology.; learning to type with Mavis Beacon and later creating a website about the Salem Witch Trials. It struck me not only how integral a part of my education technology had become, but also how long it had taken to condition myself to use technology so productively.

I think it is imperative to our understanding of the use of technology in the composition classroom that we view new technologies as another step forward in the evolution of writing technology.  We need to look back at the technologies which led to this point with an understanding of what they were made to accomplish, the damage they were posited to cause, and the actual outcomes of each.

Dennis Baron, in “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies,” holds up change in writing technology as a mirror to patterns in the development of literacy.  Although we rarely look at a pencil as a shocking technological innovation, Baron points out that the pencil “underwent changes in form, greatly expanded its functions, and developed from a curiosity of use to cabinet-makers, artists and note-takers into a tool so universally employed for writing that we seldom give it any thought.” And why should we? Today the pencil is a given; it sits in wait among our pens, highlighters, and dry-erase markers, prepared to do its duty whenever we need to jot a note.  When we use it to annotate a lecture or briefing, we certainly don’t contemplate how in its use we are separating the word from the living present.

As Walter J Ong explains in “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought,” the evolution of writing technology has allowed us to move from a completely oral/aural world, to one that incorporates vision and allows for numerous forms of division and distance that permit transformations of consciousness in society. “Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but even when it is composing  its thoughts in oral form.”  In The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition Alexander Reid looks beyond how technology has affected our minds looking at the evolution of writing to propose a theory of the “virtual-actual.”  Reid explains that embodied cognition, consciousness and technology are interconnected, and that humans were predisposed to develop writing based on the social need to process knowledge outside of our bodies.

Armed with these authors’ contributions to our understanding of writing technology, I hope future educators will consider how serious a disadvantage their students will suffer if they are not allowed the opportunity to process knowledge the way many of their peers will have had ample opportunity to practice.