Cooperation and Random Thoughts

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.