I have been reading James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy. His book explores literacy from the perspective of a gamer, and organizes and defines many different ways of learning literacy. I really like the book because even though I don’t have very much experience with video games, I see how his theories could be easily applied to many different types of activities and literacies.

This book provides us with great examples of multi literacies as well as functional literacy which we have been discussing in class. Video games are an area that people can learn to be literate in other than the traditional areas of reading and writing, and gamers need to know a lot of basic skills and rules about the games in order to achieve the functional literacy needed to excel at the games.

Gee has come up with a lot of interesting principles about learning and accomplishing literacy that can be explored through the world of gaming. One of the learning techniques that really interested me was the idea that people have a lot more freedom to take risks and explore within a game rather than in real life because their character will just come back to life if it gets killed off. Gee calls this the “Psychosocial Moratorium Principle”. I thought this learning technique was really interesting because I associate literacy very closely with creativity, and sometimes people can be intimidated or embarrased to share their work and ideas with their peers in a classroom setting. The fact that a game isn’t real takes some of the pressure off of kids and allows them to take greater risks and experiment more.

I also liked Gee’s “Multimodal Principle”. This is the idea that literacy needs to incorporate symbols and pictures along with text, which is exactly what a video game does. It seems like learning to master a video game and incorporate meaning for pictures along with words is a skill that would be critical for functional literacy. For example, in order to drive you need to be able to read signs, but before reading the word stop on a stop sign, you would probably recognize that you are supposed to stop based on the shape and color of the sign.

Gee had many other principles, but the overall message that I have taken from his work so far is that we need to think outside the box and broaden our ideas of what literacy is, how to teach it, and what it means to become literate. We should always be exploring new methods of teaching kids and be open to the idea that literacy comes in many different forms.

After reading Street’s article as well as the blog post by Keri Franklin on learning a new literacy, I’ve picked up a lot of new ideas on the importance of being literate in the modern world, (or whatever situation you need to be literate in) as well as how difficult it is to become literate in a field.

One of the main ideas that I have gained about literacy from these articles and the other material from our class, is that literacy really expands beyond the traditional classroom stereo type of reading and writing. Street’s definition of an “ideological” literacy model is a very new concept to me, but I think it makes a ton of sense. This model allows for a much looser definition of literacy, that can be redefined depending on the social setting that one is trying to define it in. This seems like the only logical way to organize something as complicated as the definition of literacy, because different places and social situations have radically different levels of literacy, and in some ways this is okay because they also have different levels of need, especially when it comes to the more academic fields of literacy. For example, students at a college or graduate school need to have a far higher level of academic literacy than a student in high school.

Street also forms new categories of literacy and introduces the idea of “literacy practices”, which involve the different steps that it takes to put literacy concepts to use in different cultures. There is a difference between having knowledge and putting it to use, and perhaps the area of literacy practices is where we can place non-academic forms of literacy such as practical knowledge that people use at work and in their every day lives. These literacy’s are just as important as academic literacy and are crucial to people being able to survive in their culture and do their jobs.

Franklin’s blog has given me an insight into how difficult it can be to learn a new literacy. I can’t remember learning to read and write, at least, I can’t remember the struggle and frustration that I’m sure came with it. I have had to become educated in legal jargon for my work, and that is probably the most difficult area that I have had to become literate in. Learning new technologies hasn’t been much of a struggle for me since it has fit right in with my generation. It is easy to pick up by being social with other kids as you grow up. It’s interesting how different it is for my parents to learn how to use new technologies compared to my sister and I. Overall, it seems like instead of worrying about coming up with a singular definition for literacy, we should make sure that everybody is able to gain individual literacy for their own personal needs, and figure out an effective way to get the information across to them as efficiently as possible.

The most interesting point of Brandt’s essay Accumulating was when she was talking about Sam May’s experiences with literacy and how he had to become literate in social media which was just being invented at that time. Literacy has really grown over time and every generation has new forms of communication that they are expected to become literate in. At the same time, old forms of literacy drop off as time goes on they are no longer relevant. For example, when I have to read poems in old english I can barely understand what they’re talking about because so many of the words are different than the way that we speak now.

I got a chance to talk to my mom about the differences between our literacy educations. It seemed like the main difference between us was all related to computer literacy. When my  mom was in school the internet wasn’t as readily available as it is today so she did a lot of her research in library books. Both of my parents struggle with navigating social media sites like facebook and often have difficulty texting on their iphones (although they’re finally getting better at it)! I on the other hand, remember having typing class when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I also had to take basic computer classes so I could learn to use a Mac and a PC and learn how to use all of the computer programs as well as how to do effective internet searches.

Everyone in my family is a big reader. Unlike my technology education I got most of my reading skills at home. My mom and dad started teaching me the alphabet right away and always got me books and took me to the library. My parents have also always encouraged me to write and were always supportive of reading my poems. I was very lucky that my parents always made sure I had plenty of books and read to me because it definitely helped me get ahead in school and jump right in. Now I am returning the favor by bringing up to speed with new technology.

It has been very interesting thinking about what social literacy is and the difference between social literacy and individual literacy. Social literacy is the standard of reading and writing that a community needs to meet in order to be considered “literate”. After reading through all of the essays, it seems that we don’t really have a good definition of what social literacy actually is or how to measure it. Every author struggled to come up with a standard that we could all follow, and there is no test to fairly and accurately measure everyone’s literacy against each other.

Another issue in determining social literacy is trying to set a standard of literacy for a community. Obviously the standard would vary depending on what community you are in. Even within one city, there are different standards for different people. Students in college are expected to have a higher level of literacy than high school graduates. It stands to reason that areas with higher literacy will become much more advanced and soar ahead of areas that have “less literacy”. This idea of social literacy seems to lead into a huge concern about making sure that we are literate enough. People are very concerned that children are advanced enough in reading and writing, which does seem like an important issue that we need to put effort into. Beyond that however, people’s concerns about literacy crises seem to be very vague.

One of the huge areas causing alarm that we have been able to pin down has to do with  the new slang that occurs when writing over social media sites. People seem to be extremely concerned that a new way of writing (some even call it a new dialect) will destroy our children’s literacy. Although this is a valid concern, studies among college students have shown that students are smart enough to know the difference between social situations and can figure out what kind of writing is appropriate to use in each one. It seems important that we emphasize the difference between the situations as part of our children’s education, but beyond that I don’t think there’s any huge cause for alarm. I would argue that most kids figure out how to speak to people in different situations, and this indicates that they would also know the difference between the people they are speaking to when they write as well.

Trying to draw clear lines regarding social literacy seems to be basically impossible. Instead, it seems like it would be more productive to focus on individual literacy and the idea of “functional literacy”. Functional literacy is specific to each individual and includes the set of skills that the individual needs to get through their day. In my mind, this is a much more important thing to focus on because after basic reading and writing skills, everyone has different needs to address. For example, I am employed at a law firm, and in order to do my everyday work I had to become literate in legal jargon and learn how to utilize legal databases and resources. This is incredibly important in my life and I wouldn’t be able to do my job without it, but to most people these skills would be completely unnecessary. Everyone has their own literacy needs, and it seems to me that if we try to ensure that everyone can read, write, and differentiate between social situations, then we don’t need to worry about placing the literacy bar in such an exact position. People will go on to gain knowledge in their own fields, and by doing so we can form a complete society where everyone is literate in the way that they need to be.

Hello everyone, my name is Amanda and I’m a senior at CSU Chico. I’m originally from Mendocino where I lived my whole life before coming to Chico to study vocal performance. Even though I loved studying music, I realized in my Junior year that it just wasn’t for me anymore so I switched into english studies. Switching to english has been great because I used to read and write all the time, I especially loved writing poetry, and that dropped off once I got busy with other things in college. It’s been great to pick all of it up again. During my time in college here I also started working at a local law firm and have really been enjoying it. I’m getting my paralegal certificate from chico in addition to my BA in english studies and plan on attending law school after I graduate.

The part of  Szwed’s article that I found most interesting was when he was comparing learning in a classroom to learning outside of a classroom and how, in order to achieve literacy, it was imperative that a student is able to take the knowledge that they learned in school and apply it to the outside world. This idea really struck me because I’ve always seen students asking themselves why what they were learning mattered, and so the idea that literacy needs to be able to move back and forth between an academic and a real life situation is important.

He also expanded my idea of what literacy is. I was always excited about reading and started learning how to read before I started going to school so I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read a little. At the very least I knew the alphabet and could begin to decipher the words. To me, literacy has always been focused around reading and writing, so it was interesting to look at Szwed’s definition and think about how literacy really includes things like reading street signs or a map and being able to function in the every day world not just in a classroom.