First Session
SYMPOSIUM:_Media Literacy & Gaming Literacy
James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler, Elisabeth Hayes, _David Shaffer_& Rich Halverson
James Paul Gee, Chai
James Paul Gee
Traditional approaches to medial literacy is based on the idea that people are duped by media, taken advantage of and that they should be taught not to be hoodwinked
But now, young people are so cynical that they don’t believe anything they hear
A Productive and Integrated approach
Young people produce media and consume, and can produce at a very sophisticated product. What percentage of people partake in this?
Coming to meda as a producer is perhaps one of the most crucial skills for the future
Producing or thinking like a producer
The gal is not any one political stance, but a deeper appreciation of the sorts of messges and effects the design of media carries and the netw..
Games make you THINK as a producer, either through modding directly, or using the thought process of design as to how you succeed at the game
(look at Cibi Robo - 4 in robot that cleans the house – in this game, you have to think of the house in a whole new way, in a new design space.. drawrs as stairs, etc.
Today and contrary to traditional approces, media literacy cannon and should not be separated from technological literacy, information lit and science lit.
- Joerg Meyer, professor at U of Irvine
- This dude does bio-medical imaging, everything from earthquakes to bodies, he looks at how you marry huge amounts of data to visual ways of interpreting it from the software to the art used to display it.
- And he sees how his technology leads straight to potentially great games
How this connects to print literacy. Success in school is not based on learning phonics, the most important variable is the child’s ability to handle complex and technical language. Science language, mathematical language
The paradox, kids are facing more complex language in their games than they ever, ever do in class. (yugioh website, for example, being read by seven yearolds)
And games aren’t spending 5 billion to do this, they MAKE 5 billion doing it
Kurt Squire
Media literacy to him: sitting in class and feeling that media literacy had as much to do with your cultural identity as anything else, this needs to become more comples
Historical Roll playing games
Two important things.
Media production, not just consumption (wikipedia, daily kos,) the line between producers and consumers are blurred.
Simulation – being literate with simulations is key
Historical RPGs,
At their heart they are simulation , but they are also known and already exist (don’t have to spend the money developing them
This also provides an opportunity for teachers and their students to talk about media that’s familiar to
Questions we need to ask / do
One thing, need to educate the teachers and make it available to them, and look at online participatory media
Simulation:
Sid Meyer’s Priates (a beter colonal history than what’s in the books, according to some teachers)
Practices in media literacy:
Squire, K. (2005). Toward a media literacy for game, telemedium
Games are interdisciplinary, and then looking at design. Today, you can have kids designing things. (Using Civ 3 to design the current political climate
Constance Steinkuehler
Studies MMOs (primarily WoW, but looks at Linneage
Informal Scientific Reasoning
-Deanna Kunz (spelling?)
being able to reason through basis hypothisis testing.
AAAS standards for scientific habits of mind (American Association for Advancements of Science) - these are the basis of all standards
“Science is built of of facts as a house is built of stones, but an accumulation of facts is no more science than an accumulation of stones”
MMOs and this –
WoW forums,
-Druid pilot program in the forums
- did this right after the druid love patch
- looked at this thread
o They found a lot of scientific discursive practices
ß According to kunz the average person doesn’t do this very well
ß In games this is a very different profile
o Modle based reasoning
ß People displaying the ability to characterize a complex sysem
o People did not do a good job of understanding theory and evidence
One in five Americans have basic scientific literacy (Miller, 2004)
Standard “inquiry” activvites engender epistemological beliefs contrary to science
(Chinn & Malhotra, 2002)
- Science isn’t about facts, it’s about a structure of the world.
So back to gaming literacy:
Students were datamining legacy. Building mathematical models and arguing about it, she’s all like “you’re doing science!” and they are “no, we’re cheating the game”
Will Wright in the april issue of wired.
Sometimes, mastering the game system means doing scientific reasoning
Not just literal production, but production fo solutions and understandings (not just mods..). (Which sometimes then become objects, technologies and other fine mangles ) like innervate for druids
“The gamer’s mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way -…”
Elisabeth Hayes
The problem, we don’t’ have enough people prepared to deal with computer and information related jobs, there’s a growth of need, and a 42% decline inn the number of undergrads choosing com sci.
Cause they are boooooring. Most young people have little accurate information about occupations that rely heavily or centrally on the use of computer tech
And, young people are not tech wizards, they are just as bad or worse than adults
Learning about IT in school is not enough
- out of schoold experiences with IT are a primary factor in motivation young people to study computer science
- We need to better understand how people acquire IT expertise throught informal as well as formal learning experiences
How can video gaming can be a starting point for developing tech-savvy youth and adults
What does it mean to be tech savvy?
Old definitions of computer literacy – can you turn it on? Wordprocess? Etc
Intelectually capabilities, IT concepts, IT skills, three corners to the triangle of IT fluency. Intelectualy capabilities includes being about to think the complex thoughts and think critically of uses and results of having tech in society
According to her, this is still not enough, it hasa focus on being a consumer rather than a producer
Her model:
Intelectual Capabilities, IT skells, Design knowledge, specialist langage, Social practices, IT concepts.
How to game your way to IT Expertise:
Oblivion: get pc version for modding abilities
- built in modding features, tools, concepts, design, language
- To understand the tool, you need specialist knowledge to understand the language
- Also need design knowledge
There’s an oblivion mods Wiki
Re-building the world of Oblivion as one pice from the bottomup
There are specialist groups for each pice
Archetecture group is having online debate to how to do it best, developing specialist language wed to a knowledge of design
A productive framework of IT expertise may help us to:
- Better understand the affordances of games and gaming communities for IT learning
- Engeage more youth and adults in informal and formal IT learning
Starting with programming is not a good way to teach IT skills, start with something fun (duh! Start where people are at!!)
Also help peole to understand how social it is
Geography applications
What are kids studying in geography clas with things like googlemaps, etc etc?
80% of students who leave say more “real world” opportunities would have kept them there
a game is always a culture
In order to participate in a game, you have to take on an identity, you have to have skills, etc
Every game creates and epistemic frame, and you can think of that frame as lenses to see the world through
We know a lot about how pople come to have these frames
The way professionals act is thinking that reshapes what we are doing while we are doing it, re shaping ways of doing and ways of knowing through the practicum , taking action and reflecion on that action, and this spirals in until they occur simultaneously.
We can simulate this with children through games For example, a game in which you re-plan a city, for students here, state street in Madison.
A book in December “ How computer games help children learn”
Epistemic
Erica Halverson
We are good at producing popular culture. (as a nature)
Reality Television: started with the first season of The Real World
Subjenre of reality televisions, folks who are artist who are creating high-quality media in a competition. Project Greenlight was a show designed to find america’s next great filmmakers, actors, writers, etc
These have taken the unscripted drama and moved it to the realm of people producing media at a higly sophisitacted way
Games as text, how to read games?
Article in the educational ____ “the failure of ….” (some recent journal article.. check it out)
Post progressive pedagogies
How do you join all of these ideas to how to link this to real classrooms, how to tie it to content and cirriculuum
Production of this new media and the era of copyright
July 6th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
I am also typing up my notes from the GLS Conference and was lookiing for any references to Deanna Kunz’s work. Have you located her in the literature at all?