Gaming

I am once again motivated to read Gee's book about videogames and literacy. I don't know, but I'm guessing that's the first piece that started people thinking about this. This also made me think about an article from Psycholinguistics (DeBeaugrande & Dressler) that discusses what is a text. As we've also discussed in here, we must shift away from our traditional ideas that a text is a set of words written or printed on paper or a screen.

The idea that text is so much more also reminds me of Discourses. I wonder if you could say that Discourses are texts that only certain people know how to read and even fewer are allowed to write.

I was also led to think about another interest of mine, which I also have very little background in--semiotics. As we discussed World of Warcraft and how even different symbols were text, it reminded me of how (like I said above) text is more than words. Anything that carries meaning is text, even pieces of oral language. I wonder how far we will go towards signs becoming more important than text. I still don't see that happening the way some (Kress) argue. The thought brings up other important ideas, such as subjectivity. Signs clearly denote something, but where they really pack in a punch are with what they connote, and that is all subjective. With more signs and fewer words, I wonder how our understandings of the same sign will differ, perhaps without us even knowing or discussing it. Not earth shattering, but still a shift, and I think an interesting one.

New Literacies (4/23)

The readings from this week (April 23) left me feeling mostly excited, with a little anxiety thrown in for good measure. I'm very interested in new literacies, both in and of themselves and in terms of how schools should and will respond. For this second reason, it was cool to see the Jenkins piece. It's the first thing I've seen which offers any sort of concrete suggestions for what schools should actually do, how they should change. It's especially interesting in light of Randy's comment in class that teachers can't wait on policy but instead must be a step ahead.

My final project for this class is a website for teachers to discuss and share about the ways they're implementing new literacies in their classrooms. I would think such a website would flop for many reasons, but perhaps chief among them being that so few teachers even know what new literacies are. I work with undergrads who will be new teachers in the fall. They've hit on none of this in their teacher preparation.

It was also cool reading about Web 2.0. I kept trying to place myself on the continuum from 1.0 to 2.0. I have a blog, but I never had a website--though I guess I will once it's published on Wednesday. I occasionally go to Wikipedia for information, but I would never write on it. I don't use Flckr or tag things, but I love all things Google! I'm still on a learning curve, or I guess a participation curve.