The two most joyous times of the year are Christmas morning and the end of school.

-Alice Cooper

This semester has been quite a ride and I was glad to have been a part of this class. Honestly, when the semester first began I hadn’t been quite sure to expect. My perceptions of literacy were simply that of it relating to academic reading and writing and that’s about it.

But reading articles like Szwed’s piece about how literacy is more than just reading from a textbook but a tool that we can use to understand not just text from a book but the environment around us began to open my eyes to how much more complex literacy is. Literacy is everywhere and in everything we do. Literacy is not just in a textbook or in a classroom it’s in our everyday lives even when we are not intentionally picking this up. Everything is literacy and it’s not just through pen and paper/books or textbooks anymore it’s in our media, in our technology, in our clothes, or even tattooed on our skin.

Literacy is involved in the way we interact with the other people and the world and some people have more advantages than others with literacy. Whether it be their familial background, their financial stability, the environment each affects the way that we’ve interacted with literacy and have been sponsored or not sponsored to read, write, and interact with text of any kind. Literacy is connected very much with that and certain people have better advantages in having higher skills with literacy than others do. Brandt’s piece about sponsorship also really hit home with me. When I was second grade, I remember being put in the reading group which all the other students called the “slow group” or if they were being particularly mean the “stupid group”. So I really had tried to move up into another level and practiced reading the assigned book but even when I thought that I could handle the challenge of the more complicated books my teacher didn’t let me try to move up. I had made more than one attempt to get her to give me a chance but I had no luck in convincing her. So this idea of sponsorship and access is so important to me because I honestly feel that certain people have more access or sponsorship than others and that it can impact how a person views and interacts with not just literacy but I think life in general and that’s not something that we often think about but it’s important to thing that needs to be discussed more.

I’ve learned so many things about literacy but I found that I was able to express my ideas in ways that I don’t usually in other classes. I don’t talk much in a class setting mostly because I have a hard time making what I want to say sound understandable to the other person. So when we got to look at video games-something that I love and am so passionate about- and be able to examine and discuss them in class I was internally very happy because if it’s video games I could talk about for days and never shut up about them. So even though I still struggle with being able to express my opinions fully, I think that this class helped in improving my ability to look at texts and converse more fluidly among my peers especially when it came to group projects. I personally hate group projects but the fact this class really made me not hate them. They never felt forced or awkward or frustrating and I actually learned something from them. I enjoyed the freedom we had to look at topics of interest to us (like video games) and be able to express our ideas through mediums we were interested or passionate about in way that was engaging to not just the specific groups that covered those topics but also to the rest of the class when we presented and shared about those topics.

I’m really going to miss this class but I’m happy to have been able to take it, experience it, and learn from it.

 

I thought that each group did an excellent job on their workshops. They each kept the class active while presenting good information about their topics. It was also fun and interesting to participate in the various activities that each group had us do. 

Adolescent Literacy

In the adolescent literacy workshop some of the ideas I took from the workshop was to consider how the much influence others have on what I read- whether that be in social media, books, movies, music, and any other literacy. The discussion about what we allow people to see on our facebook, twitter, instagram, and so on was an interesting introspective look on how we don’t always realize that what we put on social media is being read by others but also how powerful social media can be as a new literacy.

Hip Hop & Literacy 

Self expression is a big thing that schools seem to slowly if unintentionally strip you of the father you go. So it was awesome to see examples of teachers using music in their classrooms to help students connect with not only the material but also with each other. I also like the comparisons that were made between hip hop and poetry because it’s something that people don’t always realize that they share commonalities with each other. In the same way that poetry is examined in classes so too can music and to experience it first hand in class by looking at music and then creating our own was fun and good way of showing how effective this can be to teach in classes. 

Make/Hack/Play

In the make/hack/play group it was fun to see how learning can be achieved not just through text books or lectures but sometimes in simply being able to craft things. It’s a form of self expression and creativity that needs to be offered more in classrooms. It’s clear to see how something like this can be applied to classes. Being able to create things -the only limitation being your imagination- to help solve problems makes make/hack/play something that schools need to take advantage of. It promotes critical thinking and creativity in ways that are simple but effective. 

The main thing I took away from all of this is that there is not a limited way in which we have to interact with literacy. Whether it be through social media, music, creating things, all of it involves literacy in some way and there is no way restricted way in which we must interact with text or only one way to teach a class. It makes me sort of wish that when I was a kid in elementary to high school that my classes had been more engaging like these workshops showcased. It definitely would have made a world a difference in terms of my engagement in class. 

In a TED talk by game designer and director of R&D at the Institute for the Future, Jane McGonigal, she talked about how games could be used to create “epic wins” in reality and not just in the virtual world. A lot of the articles and videos have shown how video games can be effective tools to use in the classroom. In the articles we’ve been reading and seeing various examples of how video games could be used in school.

In a middle school called Quest To Learn in New York, teachers teach all their classes with video games. They allow for the kids to create their own games and play each others games which in turn creates a sense of community between the students to help them grow and learn to work together to solve the “quests” within the classroom.

Minecraft offers a lot of versatility. People are able to craft (hah) and create various things such as actual working computers, nuclear reactor simulations, working calculators and so on. The list is endless. A biology teacher was able to make the inside of an animal cell which from there he and his students through Minecraft were able to visually see and interact with the animal cell within the virtual world.

Paul Andersen, a science teacher from Montana, also did a Ted Talk about how using the format of video games to make learning fun. He created a system that allows his students to be active in their learning. In his talk, he mentions the need to get rid of the stigma of failure and that students should be able to move through their own pace and be able to retry without having school be an all or nothing system.

All these are ways in which gaming has changed the way one can learn and it’s so interesting to see how people have been able to utilize video games in way that can change and reinvent the way learning is taught in the classroom.

Video games in the classroom allow for students to experiment in a safe environment, connect with a community (other students) to help them to achieve goals, and present flexible tools for teachers to teach effectively.

“The game encourages him to think of himself an active problem solver, one who persists in trying to solve problems even after making mistakes; one who, in fact, does not see mistakes as errors but as opportunities for reflection and learning.” – What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy

I start with this quote from the book because this one of the topics that I really liked that the author ,James Paul Gee, talked about in several of the chapters. Video games start off the player in tutorials or scenarios where the risks are not very high and players are shown the ropes and basics for what they need to do later on. They help prepare and guide us for what to expect in the future as we play. As the game progress things get more challenging and the player is likely to make mistakes but in a way that challenges and encourages the player to do better.

For example in the early Tomb Raider games, starring the famous adventurer Lara Croft, had very wonky controls on the PC and at first it could be a little tricky at times in getting Lara to not swan dive head first into the ground subsequently breaking her neck . As you progress through the game, the controls can become second nature but even then you might find yourself  yourself diving head first into a pool of lava, make the mistake of jumping off the wrong ledge, or not react fast enough to falling into a trap door filled with deathly spikes regardless the game will allow you to restart where you last saved off. Learning from your previous actions, you then know that there’s a trap door from underneath the ground up ahead and you can plan ahead for what controls you need to use to make sure to avoid it so it won’t catch you by surprise again. A lot games do this of course and like Gee mentions throughout the book, this allows the player to want to explore, challenge, and learn in an environment that doesn’t necessarily feel like its bad to fail because you can always try again.

Put this in contrast to school were it tends to be all or nothing at times and if you fail you’re forced to accept that mistake without given the chance to try again and I think this is one of the things that schools could take away from video games. Video games allow a player to not be afraid to make mistakes which is an aspect that school tends to lack. In middle school and high school I  was hesitant to raise my hand and answer a question a teacher asked because I was afraid of being wrong and put on the spot. As a person who wants to be a future English teacher to non-native speakers, I would want for my future students to not be embarrassed, the way I was, to make mistakes. Gee in his book shows how video games make for a good basis in which we can learn without the fear of  being wrong for not getting it the first time and I think that this is something which we definitely need to promote more in our classrooms.

 I only covered just a piece of information that the book talks about because this is the part that I wanted to concentrate on but it really goes far into explaining all the ways that video games could be used to improve the way we tackle problems in learning new literacies. I think that Gee did a good job in breaking down his book to be understandable and interesting to read even for those who aren’t so into gaming. It’s definitely a book I would recommend to others.

I can understand Keri Franklin’s initial frustration with Twitter. It’s not an easy thing to be able to access right away almost like the campus wifi but I digress.

It’s through digital literacy sponsorship that Franklin was able to learn the language of Twitter and I think that really highlights how different digital literacy sponsorship is to print based sponsorship. With technology allowing us to be able to connect with people all around the world, the dynamics of the sponsor and the sponsored has changed.

The line has essentially blurred because no longer are we tied down simply to one person to sponsor us in our literacy. Now we have access to a multiple number of people who we can interact via the internet daily that influence us and who we in turn influence as well. Not to mention the various resources like Google, YouTube,  and other sites that offer their own kind of sponsor ship through tutorials, blogs, articles, and so much more. Digital literacy has opened new ways for us to view sponsorship and it’ll be interesting to see how it will keep developing as time goes on.

One of my recent experiences with trying to learn a new digital literacy was trying to solve connectivity issues for my brother’s PS4. He was having problems getting online to play with his friends. This was due to issues with Comcast Xfinity’s DHCP settings which to put it in really brief, simple terms was an issue with the server’s IP address. Despite trying to get help from their customer service, my brother gave up on them and turned to me for help. So both of us looked around Google and other sites to see how others fixed the problem. We utilized the information on the web and eventually came to fix the problem ourselves.

Does digital literacy have a learning curve to it? Yes, but with the right resources, motivation, and sponsorship it can be a powerful tool that is teaching us a new way of learning and solving problems and at the same time helping to educate us through a different lens.