One common thread between all three of the English classes I’ve been taking this semester is the strong benefit small groups have when doing English coursework. Even in classes where the assignments are turned in individually, the ability to share work with peers and get an idea of what they’re doing has been helpful.

In 332 in particular, I’ve liked the emphasis on looking at literacy as it’s practically used, not just an idealized longing for when students learned “real” literacy. Literacy needs to address the way students communicate and interact. Teachers need to encouraged to bring new methods and tools into the classroom. Fixating on standardized testing is driving English classrooms towards the rote summary; constant checkups on whether students have read the material, but little concern on the way anyone intends them to use it.

While the many opportunities to talk about games were of course a fun part of the class, I think the most enjoyable part still comes back to the story creating group project. I’d love to see the format expanded into a longer assignment. It might be something that Google Docs helps enable students edit a story rapidly while keeping the same storytelling momentum.

I hope the remaining English classes I’m taking at Chico will have the same open-endedness and exploratory attitude of 332.

One consistent element found in every presentation was the use of group work. While in part this may have been the result of time constraints, it also reveals how groups create content; often a different result than if everyone was left to their own devices.

I think by far my favorite group project (other than watching non-gamers hold a controller) was the short story creation. It seemed by far to be the most productive, in terms of output, and perhaps the most engaging; the restrictions were few, and all three groups ended up organizing in different but equally effective ways.

One of the strengths of this approach is that the writing required is divided across the group, cutting individual responsibility for producing output down considerably. I think this helped lower pressure by making expected output more manageable.

Another strength is pooling creativity. I believe the other two groups went with a round robin approach to adding new content (similar to the one line added each rotation from the Hip Hop presentation), but our group worked as a collective, adding ideas together as a single person worked it into the narrative. We chose to type our story, which I think helped in the way of allowing minor editing. Writing it out might encourage a constant flow, but having the ability to modify the story if we want to go back was a plus for our story.

Of all the group projects we’ve done so far in class, it’s this short story format that I think I’d like to apply to an actual classroom. I think it would only benefit from having more time than we had in class (perhaps a week long assignment in a classroom setting), to broaden the scope of the story, and allow for going back to edit for consistency and typographic issues. The combination of group work and open-ended prompt keeps individual output requirements low while allowing for a huge variety in potential short stories.

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/imperatives-and-alibis-fascism-and-the-rhetoric-of-educational-innovation/

It’s not every day you read an article comparing an education pedagogy to fascism.

The article opens with an example of a UK school that has retrofitted most of its traditional library space into a flexible learning environment where students were given access to a variety of connected devices and could configure the space for group work. While all students had access to the devices during assigned individual study, the collaborative work was limited to “struggling students.”

The first criticism the author aims at this system is the idea that these learner-based systems are only necessary to catch students up so they be integrated into a traditional, test-performance based system.

The second is that the school only allocated relatively young teachers to the task, unwilling to risk more experienced teachers for the experiment they were trying with struggling students. The library was effectively more about the flash of technology than in using that technology to help students learn.

The author’s comparison to fascism is specifically in relation to an education reform under fascist Italy, the “Riforma Gentile” of 1923. The author draws on criticism of the reform from the then-political prisoner Antonio Gramsci, who believed the system to be too utopian in scope; an education platform that did not account for socio-historical factors. It created a divide among students, pushing a small few to become “masters of their own thinking,” leaving the rest to inferior and rigid vocational training.

Although the author is not equating the policies of today with fascist Italy, he does suggest some similarities, namely a hegemonic undertone that resists criticism. He suggests a tendency to look at educational successes uncritically, ignoring their frequent socio-economic advantages when applying the same criteria on everyone else.

He moves on to say that technology or innovation are often used as “smoke and mirrors,” a guise in which to present the school in a positive light, while leaning towards an increasingly rigid and uniform teaching system. The addition of things like parental choice further exacerbate this, with incentives for struggling schools to model themselves after successful ones, disregarding their socio-economic differences.

The author points to a central tenet, the idea that educational performance equals economic performance, as the core of the problem; the idea that the output you get from schools is a direct correlation on their future success, driving a push to constantly monitor and compare students, to highly regulate the curriculm, and emphasize tests. With market-based systems being pushed, conformity is encouraged, further stagnating schools. The author’s initial example demonstrates perhaps the worst of this effort, the pushing of already marginalized students into the afterthought, separated from the core educational system that the school is actually judged upon.

I think the article touches on one of the hardest parts of dealing with education reform, the actual logistics. The school had the money to reform their library into a new and interesting learning environment that emphasises group work and constant internet access, but in practice is unable to put anything more than already struggling students behind this system for fear of doing poorly on standardized tests. When a direct correlation between test performance and future economic potential is assumed, it leads to narrow discussion on how to best serve students.

I’m a little torn with the book “What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning And Literacy” so far. On one hand it demonstrates video games as a metaphor for various forms of learning. On the other it’s primarily grounded in a lot of prior work with learning and literacy (originally unconnected with video games) and seems primarily aimed at connecting unfamiliar video games to people with a working understanding of this previous body of knowledge. With so much of the book devoted to explaining video games to an unfamiliar audience, it comes across a little like a bibliography that explains a particular line of thinking about literacy by connecting them to video games. Without having that reading in the relatively deep library Gee draws from, it’s a bit easy to get lost.

One area I focused on was the idea of virtual personalities, the notion that when you’re playing a game as someone else, you construct a personality consisting not only of that character, but of you playing as that character. It’s an interesting conceit, and one with perhaps some uses in things like creative writing and the like, but one I had a harder time going along with given the real life application given.

Gee uses science classes for this, suggesting the idea of a “learner as scientist” personality. Now, with a fictional character I create and then draw from my own personal experiences to dictate how that character develops, this virtual personality metaphor holds up. But I don’t see myself as a separate person in a science class. There may be different decorum in one class from another, but I don’t construct a separate personality when I’m in a science class, or any other.

So with what we’ve been working with in the book so far, I’m not sure I’m the intended audience. Gee has done some fantastic work in connecting video games and their concepts to literacy and learning, but this book in particular seems to emphasize an existing understanding of literacy that just uses video games to compare to them.

I’m personally a little more excited about Gee’s other works; I think he might be a little more accessible with media not outright approached from a position of prior knowledge.

The sponsorship of a particular type of digital literacy seems to differ primarily from print-based literacy advocacy in its intent. Getting someone to read is perhaps foremost about spreading literacy as its own goal. But digital literacy is inherently more specific, since its application is often limited to the particular platform in question.

The ability to use Twitter for example, certainly a type of digital literacy, applies solely to that platform and has little cross-compatibility with other forms of digital communication. The advocacy or mentoring of someone into the Twittersphere thus is really about getting someone connected into the Twitter ecosystem.

Print-based literacy may be seen more as a building block, or an entry level access to all that the written word enables. But digital literacy belongs in a sub-category primarily concerned with getting access into particular communities.

I find digital literacies for myself are a combination of falling into them myself by trawling the web, and getting linked to it by friends. Who your peers are really affects what kind of digital literacy sponsorship you’ll experience. A particularly tech-savvy crowd might be riding the edge of new forms of communication, while a less hooked in crowd may be content to do with older systems.