Cooperating and Random Thoughts (cause I’m berry tirerd)

I found the presentation by Thursday’s group on 21^st century literacy platforms to be quite enlightening. I played around with most of the platforms on their site (http://ruby2481.wix.com/21stcenturyliteracy#!print/cj5l)  and made my first Wix site in about 4 hours and plan on using it for my groups presentation tomorrow (I spent most of that time composing our presentation).  All the members of that group really knocked it out of the park and really set the stage for success for groups that are following them over the next week.

In my article group we focused our energies on how video games encourage cooperation and how that is a key trait/skill set in learning. You see … Good video games allow for an array of solutions to set problems. This learning principle is successful and possible in good video games by encouraging its players to explore the game setting and experiment for a solution. This makes players have to think in a “real world” style of hypothesizes, experimentation and solution. Group participation and cooperation is central to this “real world” type of learning system.

In this way cooperation in groups is essential to good learning practices. Video games and gaming culture epitomize this style of learning through multiplayer games and a culture that encourages the use of group play, online forums and walkthroughs. This type of learning is utilized by professionals and PhDs because we learn better by cooperating in groups.

Good learning allows for cooperation between its participants to form groups. This approach to problem solving (and education) allows each individual to augment their potential weaknesses through other group member’s potential strengths. By cooperating in groups we allow for an individual’s varying approaches to problem solving through their personal skill set and embodied experiences.

What I did find interesting about a certain article entitled Reality: Transforming USC Film Students’ Freshman Year Into an Addictive Game by Nathan Maton (http://www.argn.com/2011/12/reality_transforming_usc_film_students_freshman_year_into_an_addictive_game/) was how crucial our social process/cooperating in groups is to learning in dynamic real world settings. By functioning in groups we are able to push through barriers in literacy and learning. I see cooperating in groups as a particularly effective way of pushing through the problems of accumulating literacy as outlined by Deborah Brandt in Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century because we achieve a perspective change when we function in groups. This perspective change obviously comes in the form of an identity shift from an individual to a participating group member. But even if this perspective change doesn’t occur, the strength of the group dynamic should still be great enough to offset the “stacking” of an individual’s literacy.

Besides the obvious benefits of learning to socialize better, educators should embrace constructive cooperation as a means of learning because it’s the way we naturally function in the real world setting AND *** it is a great tool for combating the inherent deficiencies of literacy as covered in our assigned reading.

Gee, Pleasantly Frustrating

James Paul Gee introduces a  foreign concept to education (a nearly foreign concept anyway), the idea that it should be “pleasantly frustrating.” The key word there is pleasantly. Of course in order for educators to realize this concept they would have to drastically change the way in which they do things and that is exactly what Gee has in mind when he adapts the learning and teaching principles in What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy.

Gee’s insight into learning and educating is a detailed and comprehensive list numbering 36 principles but there are three concepts in learning necessary to understand those principles and those are “situated cognition,” “new literacy studies,” and “connectionism.” Situated cognition is the idea that what people learn is “fully embedded in (situated within) a material, social, and cultural world (Gee 9).” New literacy studies argues that reading and writing as “social and cultural practices with economic, historical, and political implications (Gee 9).” Connectionism is the idea that we learn best when our learning is based upon actual experiences in the world (Gee 9). The key to understanding these three principals is that the learning experience is an embodied experience, an experience that is comprehensive, and that all learning is rooted in an embodied experience.

The Crux of what Gee tells us about good learning and good instruction in video games is that the games “encourage players to thing about relationships, not isolated events, facts and skills. Gee argues that good learning, through the embodied experience, mirrors scientific learning and experimentation (Gee 217). The cycle typical of experimental science, Gee tells it, is built on a cycle of hypothesizing, probing, getting a reaction, reflecting on the results and re-probing to gain better results (Gee 216). Learning of this nature encourages players to “explore thoroughly before moving on, to think laterally, not just linearly, and to use such exploration and lateral thinking to re-conceive one’s goals from time to time (Gee 217). Gee’s insight into learning is rooted in good common sense and necessary for educational institutions to embrace as education evolves.

 The Corrosive Nature of Literacy

    After reading What’s “new” in New Literacy Studies? by Brian Street I’m wondering what it’s all for; I mean, what is it really all for. I admit that I am very impressed at what the science of learning and literacy has accomplished, is accomplishing, and is continuing to accomplish but what is it really all for? You can color me a skeptical conspiracist for looking at literacy as more than a new science of learning but as yet another way of stratifying social hierarchies with those who “know” and those who don’t, those who have and those who have not.

Street draws our attention to literacy as being regarded as “autonomous”, “ideological”, and then extends “literacy events” to “literacy practices” and then bridges its deficiencies. The “autonomous” model of literacy is defined by Street as the model of literacy where “the assumption that literacy in itself—autonomously—will have effects on other social and cognitive practices (Street 77).” This approach means that if you introduce literacy to the “poor, ‘illiterate’ people” they will then become smarter, improve their social and economic conditions and then rise from the doldrums of their lives. Street concludes that this approach “is simply imposing western conceptions of literacy on to other cultures (Street 77).” Street describes the ideological model of literacy as “being about knowledge: the ways in which people address reading and writing are themselves rooted in conceptions of knowledge, identity and being (Street 77).” Street continues by saying “it is also always embedded in social practices…” and “is always contested, by both its meanings and its practices … are always ‘ideological’, they are always rooted in a particular world-view and in a desire for that view of literacy to dominate and to marginalize others (Street 78). Literacy events are described as the way social practices and conceptions of reading and writing are given meaning by the participants in those events (Street 78). At the crux of my issue with the Science of Literacy can be discovered in what Street says, “literacy does not necessarily have the effects that the rhetoric has suggested – improved health, cognition, empowerment” and this makes it harder for policymakers to “persuade funders to support literacy programs (Street 78).” Street continues to describe a process of bridging the problem with engaging between theory and practice, academic and applied concerns in hopes of constructing more meaningful solutions to spreading literacy but does spreading even this most advanced approach to literacy science help the cultures and societies it aims to benefit?

My aim isn’t to restate what has already been stated but to point out the agencies of control inherent in the definition of the models of literacy and therefore inherent in their application. The autonomous model of literacy imposes western ideology. The ideological model of literacy is always embedded in social practices that marginalize others. Literacy events of social literacy where the participants give meaning to those events function in a defined setting.  We assume literacy to be applied benignly and in good conscious but look at our society.

We are arguably the most literate society in the world and what do we use it for? Our society’s agents, those most inclined towards using literacy, use literacy in more and more creative ways to control the cultural landscape. The conspiratorial “they” use their powers of literacy to deceive us with powerful research into rhetoric and use it to map our political and social interaction (don’t believe me? research the Boogeyman “Lee Atwater” and that other rhetorical genius behind Bush Jr’s campaign). Our cultures value systems are based upon our own capitalist ideology and I’d argue are also defined by them. Our literacy practices, as we interact with one another, are dictated to us in varying ways by “those” in positions of power (social networking tycoons, pop-culture, media moguls, powerful political entities, the power-elite). Aren’t these advanced uses of literacy by the “power elite” a product of our advanced literacy science? What is missing as we describe and become aware of the science of literacy is the paradox of their relation to the defining process and the effect these processes have on the societies that it encounters. Are we using our advanced research and knowledge into the science of Literacy to advance other cultures or to subjugate them by turning them into future paying customers? Are we corrupting their ideological systems by imposing Western culture on them in dynamic and subversive ways? Does the science of literacy have a corrosive effect or a good one and in what measure of both?

 

 

In class prompt: Bad Teacher = Lit Motivator

 The inspiration for me to enhance my literacy actually came in the form of a conflict I had with my 7^th grade English teacher. The instructor will remain nameless but I will say they are female. From day one for whatever reason, she and I just never hit it off. She would speak condescendingly to me as if I were five years old, over exaggerating her vowels slowly so that “Chris BC” could understand. I guess she thought that I no learn good.

One day I wrote a book report which I thought was quality work but she saw it differently. She said something about it having too much opinion and personal perspective and the vernacular being too modern… The point being, she didn’t like my style and she asked me to rewrite the report. So I went home, I sat down and I couldn’t write. I couldn’t do what she asked me to do. I liked what I had written and so I screwed up the courage to stand up to her and tell her what’s what. The next day I walked into class and told her what I thought; she handed me a “C” and I think I passed her class with a low “B.”

It didn’t take long for me to appreciate that decision ‘cause I raised my standards and kept my style choices. Other instructors since then have commented that they liked my style choices and have given me high marks … I guess the point is that she sort of motivated me to take what I write seriously because she didn’t like what I had written and that offended me. Still I admit, whenever I get good marks and comments on my assignments a little part of me wishes I could slap them down in front of her and show her up a bit.

Personal Literacy Trends and Appreciations

 This prompt is quick and easy for me. My dad was a foster kid and my mom’s parents are from Mexico and essentially illiterate. Not to sell my grandparents short or anything, they taught themselves to read well enough later in life; it’s just that reading wasn’t a priority during my mother’s formative years. Growing up mine and my siblings exposure to literacy came through watching my parents read work material or some supplemental reading from the bible. Suffice it to say their children have had to find literacy on their own later in life … there I go selling my family short again … My mom did read us Dr. Suess books and the like before bed time when we were very young.

I do see how my family did set certain literacy appreciations and trends for me. The moral and ethical debates, as well as their rhetorical arguments, are a cornerstone of discussion (mostly argument) and literacy with my family.  This has formed the backbone of my interpretation of the rhetorical world around me and all the processes literacy entails.  It has served me well as it has helped me to adapt to literacy today and literacy today may best be measured by a person’s capacity to amalgamate new reading and writing practices in response to rapid social change (Brandt 651). For me literacy is first rhetorical, ethical then moral and in that order of importance. My inherited literacy tradition has gone a long way for me in my perception of the world around me and that is to say it has gone a long way for me in literacy and its enterprises.

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I’m gonna go off reservation now and try and make up for last week’s blog and try to combine it with a separate thread discussion in this week’s blog.

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 Literacy Surges Past Education

 So far in class we’ve learned that literacy can’t be narrowly defined as only the ability to read and write, rather it is the sum of our interaction with our environment. Literacy is transformative across ideologies, it is both macro and micro, both socially and culturally. We as a society need to figure out the future literacy “surge” so that literacy stacking – our inherited “lit” traditions – doesn’t inhibit as much as it enables. But why waste effort trying to enlighten ourselves to the rhetorical analysis of what literacy is where it applies to education? Brandt hopes “we can also begin to see how the role of the school in an advanced literate age can be reconceptualized to help students at all levels detect the residual, emergent, often conflicted contexts of literacy that form their world. (Brandt 666).” But wouldn’t it be more effective not to look at that many tangents and avenues of rhetorical analysis, through the lens of the bureaucratic nightmare that is EDUCATION?

In our advanced literate period we are required to have the ability to work the borders between tradition and change, and to have the ability to adapt, improvise and amalgamate  literacy (Brandt 660). Looking to “education” for ways of coping with literacy as it “surges” may be a flawed point of view; it relies on an institution that has historically valued antiquated systems for change and progressive thinking. How can we rely on the institution of education to formulate the interpretive opportunities of the complexities of literacies amalgamated past, present and future (Brandt 665)? Some may even go so far as to point out that “education” has never been innovative or supple enough to deal with changes in literacy. As a matter of fact, it usually takes turbulent social changes to accelerate new models of literacy into the social norm and those changes rarely come from education. These shifts in literacy almost always form with the rising and falling of social ideologies. That’s not to say that these enterprises aren’t part of the same process, it’s just that defining it and predicting it is specific to the goals of the institution of education and all the baggage that comes with.

Perhaps Brandt aspires to too lofty a goal when she asserts that literacy today may be best measured (by educators) by a person’s capacity to amalgamate new reading writing practices in response to rapid social change (Brandt 651). How can an institution influenced by federal, state, county and local authorities  hope to understand such virtuous analysis of a “literacy crisis”? Maybe it would be more effective to shed the idea that the institution of education will be the salvation of literacies verging conflict and to focus that idea elsewhere. It may be more conceivable to embrace the notion that understanding literacy comes down to an individual’s abilities, goals and aspirations. The cream does rise to the top, no? It could be that the most effective way to communicate the message of the changes and practices of literacies is not through the institution of education but rather to focus the message to individuals and the home … and the home is where it all begins.