During the article group readings, I focused a lot of my attention on the ARGs and cooperative activity/ world building games. What I found so interesting about these is that groups of people were coming together to problem solve, trade information, and group up in order to advance in the games. Minecraft, for example, can be used as a place to build structures of fortitude for the players to remain safe in after dark, when the monsters lurk about. It offers a rewards system by making you hunt your own food and gather your own material, and then as you create stronger tools and weapons from them you can advance to the underground, find rarer and sturdier materials, and (if you actually play the plot of the game instead of fooling around like most do) defeating your enemies. Like in WoW, a lot of people find that all of this is easier to do when they create a world where they can work together, rather than playing individually. This simulation game takes a “real world” setting (with ARG elements) and teaches you about the strengths and weaknesses in the virtual world (enemies and natural disasters/ limitations, geographies and geographic materials, mana vs. melee) that you create.

There was, of course, the ARG that was played by film school students called “Reality” that was part card game and part social media, with different tiers of reward systems, but I think that Ashley will probably focus on that article because she talked about it during our presentation, so I leave that to her. As for things that I researched on my own, I am a long-time fan of ARGs, so I found the Twitter and YouTube page for Marble Hornets. A CreepyPasta that started on 4chan, MH is an ARG that was, unlike most ARGs, started by a group of college kids. While the most popular ARGs are put out by huge companies like Microsoft to promote movies and video games, the MH crew were film students who happened to enjoy the Slenderman photoshopped images that were circulating on the forums at the time, and they decided to take the idea of this fictional monster and bring him to life through a vlog. Other vloggers soon followed in the fashion, and as fans watched and collaborated in puzzle solving they also came to collaborate games based off of the vlogs, and some of the vloggers began to cross-over their series to change the game up and surprise their audiences. As for Marble Hornets, the team has become so well-known that they are currently co-scripting a film with the director of Paranormal Activity that is supposed to hit the big screens in 2015. On top of that they have created DVDs of the series, and one of the vlogger’s personal YouTube accounts was found and is so popular that I’m sure that he makes his wages solely off of the Marble Hornets fame. What amazes me about this small-time ARG gone viral is it shows that through the collaboration of many, great things can be achieved beyond the scope of the game. The vloggers and fans alike have met like-minded people on their journey via the ARG and befriended one another in love for their fandom.

I love ARGs a lot because they not only bring a social aspect to gaming, but they involve individuals into bigger problem solving scenarios and allow people to show what they’re talented at (hacking, cracking codes, etc.) and also learning from others who have different talents than they do (one huge ARG had messages in twelve different languages, so no one person could solve it alone). That sort of collaboration and effort put into a game is just fantastic.

Last year, UC Irvine and Instructure teamed up to create an MOOC (massive open online course) based off of AMC’s The Walking Dead. For those not in the know, MOOCs are part of a “distance education” system, designed to be open and free for all who want to take the online courses whether they attend an university or not.

MOOCs are amazing, and important for the purpose of hybrid pedagogy. According to the open-access journal site of the team of people who created Hybrid Pedagogy, the term can be highlighted in three simple bullet points:

In short, hybrid pedagogy is digital media and technologies being used to further education. It’s almost edutainment- educational entertainment, or entertainment being used to educate. Of course, no educator says that educational technology is perfect; they do, however, like to keep up with the times and take what their students see as fun (television, gaming, social networking) and add an educational twist to it all.

In the case of the TWD MOOC, UCI and its partners that have created the television show-based course aimed to make The Walking Dead educational in terms of applying in-show concepts to real-world issues. The course was titled “Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s The Walking Dead”, and was aimed at college freshmen in order for them to take what they learned from the MOOC and connect it to the GE courses they were taking, specifically literature and sociology classes, political sciences, and biology courses.

On the page I linked you to at the top of this entry, Sean Michael Morris, a journalist for the Hybrid Pedagogy site, interviewed one of UCI’s Dean’s, Melissa Loble, about the MOOC. The university created the course to be open to anyone at any time, without final grades, and in hopes that even one student would learn from and come to enjoy the aspects of the class for what it is. UCI worked closely with AMC, acquiring various clips, interviews, etc.; exclusive material only shown to those who took the course. (I would have signed up just for that- TWD is one of my favorite shows!) What they wanted, Loble shared, was to take this networked, participant-driven class and have people be able to apply the fictional world of zombies to medical outbreaks in the real world, and to human psychology as well as the study of political structures. By the end of the course, if a student paid attention and cared, they could reference the concepts of TWD while talking about the current state of Russia, child psychology, disease vaccinations, etc.

I found that hybrid pedagogy, when applied to the concept of MOOCs, refers back to three pieces we’ve read this semester: “The Twitter Essay” (also on the HP journal), and both articles about sponsorship and accumulating literacies by Deborah Brandt. The Twitter entry because it relates back to how we can use social sites and edutainment for learning purposes, and the Brandt pieces because MOOCs seem to be a huge sponsor for education for those who cannot afford college, or those who would rather learn about how pop culture mixes with modern day life, or those who simply like to learn for learning’s sake. It gives them a chance to do so online, without deadlines, without grades, and for no purpose other than to gain knowledge about something intriguing. As for accumulating literacies, isn’t digital pedagogy and using technological tools with progressive applications a new way to accumulate literacy, or education as a whole?

My mind is still on participatory learning, and it probably always will be because that is IMPORTANT. In Hobart Shakespeareans Hobart Elementary, it’s especially important, and Rafe uses this literacy learning technique in an exciting way. Watching his students, I saw them participating in class by voicing their opinions and problem-solving together; in after school theater practice as they memorized and understood hard Shakespearean plays; in their own homes as they read and learned from the environment around them; in themselves as they shaped their individual selves outside of society’s judgements; in how they handled a classroom money system responsibly; in the field trips they took to learn about history and why it’s important for the future; in the guest speakers who came to their class like Ian McKellen and saw that these students were bright and passionate for Shakespeare; and in the way that they helped each other out and learned life lessons on respect and kindness and hard work, even when they were having fun and “just being kids”. According to Reading in a Participatory Culture, all of these things in how they went out of their way as students and how Rafe went out of his way as a teacher to help these 5th graders truly know what it is their learning and love it, all why teaching them in a non-standard way that makes them rely on each other, is participatory learning at its finest. I think that Henry Jenkins would approve of Rafe’s teaching methods (although he might argue with Rafe on video games being useless, because they’re not. Theater isn’t the only valuable way to teach kids literature!) I also think that Jenkins would ask Rafe if he would ever consider incorporating creative writing into his classes, rather than just theater, because it could give a new and modern spin to plays such as Hamlet. Rafe said in the documentary that he taught his students Shakespeare because that was what he grew up on and he was passionate about it, so it makes me personally wonder how biased he is as a teacher and how flexible he could learn to be in his curriculum. Although his students do a lot (each class and every year), they also all repeat what past classes have done almost exactly, and that could become monotonous even for participatory learners.

Deborah Brandt, author of “Sponsors of Literacy”, would have something to say about the documentary Spellbound. The movie follows the lives of a handful of children who have won their way into the National Spelling Bee at Washington D.C. Each child is different- some boys, some girls, white, black, Indian, Mexican, from all different backgrounds in education and in wealth. Some sponsor themselves, relying only on their brains and the support from their family, friends, and community, never given a cent towards making it to D.C. Others are sponsored by money from their parents and from the prayers of a country, from tutors and from better school systems. As they win and enter D.C., most if not all of these students gain sponsorship through media before their final run in spelling. Some of these children are experiencing Nationals for the first time, and for some this is their second or third time. Regardless, the sponsorships of these students vary, but they all make it one way or another through their own will to learn as well as the cheers from their loved ones. And, as seen in the film, money doesn’t always mean you’re the best- some poorer means of sponsorship are richer in value to the children than the dollar bill could ever be. And of course, even when the kids lose one by one, their family is still proud of them, and D.C. is proud of them for coming to this safe, brainiac environment where they can thrive and excel and try, try, try to spell again.