Jenkins et al. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture"

Henry Jenkins et al. in “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century” argue that the emergence of new skills created by a participatory culture should begin to reflect in the pedagogies of teachers and the goals of education. With this new culture comes problems—they also focus on the participation gap (unequal access), the transparency problem (do youth reflect on their own practices), and the ethics challenge (preparing youth to be community members).

Because of the new communication technologies that children are growing up with, Jenkins et al. suggest taking an ecological approach to see how the technologies work together, how they connect cultures and communities, and how they encourage certain activities. What this means for education, then, is that it needs to rethink its static, conservative approach and perhaps begin to incorporate the experimental learning that children (and adults, although that is not the focus of this paper) are doing on their own time. Jenkins et al. seem to be entering the conversation by disagreeing with reports from the Kaiser Family Foundation that focus on the negatives of “screen time.” They do not dismiss these concerns, but they instead explain they will be focusing on the skills and knowledge that are developing from this “screen time.”

Rethinking literacy does not mean a complete overhaul of previous notions—Jenkins et al. explain that students must be able to read and write to be part of the participatory culture. Instead of replacing these skills, students must expand them. They also explain that these new literacies are social skills. These skills include play, simulation, performance, appropriation, multi-tasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. For each of these skills, Jenkins et al. describe how they define the skill, give examples of the skill in practice, include relevant research or scholars who discuss the skill and the practices that accompany it, and finally offer several discipline-specific suggestions on how to incorporate activities into the classroom (what seems to be the K-12 classroom.) 

Jenkins et al. offer three calls-to-action. They argue that schools do not need to make more room in the curriculum for these new skills, but rather need to reshape the current curriculum to include active application of these new skills and knowledge-making. They acknowledge that more research does need to be done in order to make these skills more effective and personalized for each discipline. After school programs are also important, not as an add-on to school, but as a place for both students and teachers to examine and produce media. Lastly, parents are targeted as media literacy sponsors. They argue that parents should not try to prevent their children from use of media; rather, parents should be helping their children develop these skills. Currently there seems to be a large gap in the literature on how parents can approach this responsibility.

Gee's "Deep Learning Properties of Good Digital Games"

James Paul Gee’s focus in “Deep Learning Properties of Good Digital Games” is to examine the properties of entertainment digital games that encourage learning, relating both to skills development and commitment to the game. He argues that digital games are actually problem-solving spaces that encourage learning, but these games cannot be used for learning if certain properties are not present. He then discusses these properties, some of which are discussed below.

Gee argues that gaming is about problem solving and that players can become emotionally and personally committed to their goals for the game. He connects this to learning by referencing research that suggests people learn more when they have an emotional attachment or something is at stake for them.

Gee explains that emergent properties are the rule-like properties in games that players can control or use as they choose.  This relates to one property Gee discusses about microcontrol. When players are able to microcontrol one or more property in a game, they not only gain power, but then the game also becomes a potential space for players to embody.

But in order for a game to be conducive for learning by experience, Gee argues it must have the right conditions. Some of these conditions include being structured by specific goals, allowing for immediate feedback so users can assess their errors/expectations, and the need to apply experiences to other situations.

Although learning can often come from experience, Gee argues that can be too concrete. He says that games can act as models that bridge concrete and abstract ideas. Models, he says, “are basic to human play” (73).

Another property Gee lays out are “effectivity-affordances,” which are what make games more than “eye candy.” He explains an affordance is a feature of the game that allows for action, while the effectivity is the action that can actually happen. He uses an example from WoW in which some animals can be skinned for their leather, but only certain people have the skill to skin animals. (Some animals cannot be skinned so they are not an affordance, and some players do not have that skill so they lack the effectivity to do so.)

Lastly, Gee argues that games that encourage learning allow for multiple trajectories for a player; this means the player can choose different options and make different decisions that will alter their journey through the game, giving it personal meaning.

Gee explains that all of these properties together can create “powerful experiences that compete with experiences in the real world precisely because experiences in the real world, at their best—when we humans feel control, agency, deep learning, mastery—meet these properties” (78).

There was something that Gee mentioned in his conclusion that I was also concerned about while reading: it’d be nice if there were more games that promoted “good” learning that weren’t army or warrior-based. (Because if these are the real world experiences that good games are creating, I’m not sure how they can transfer to daily problem solving my students must do.)

Connections Among Readings/Questions = Riveting 2-in-1 Blog Post

I now feel the need to define everything. Because we are reading so many texts, I’m almost confused as to what things like multimodality, new media, and technology are. I find myself being as specific as possible when I mention things like “computer-related non-alphabetic multimodal projects.” It’s become annoying to me. But I also understand that this is good because my notions of these things are expanding and becoming fuller. The most recent example is Shipka’s reminder that technology does not mean only the newest technologies. It is so simple, yet was a much needed intervention of my thoughts.

Because everything is defined or discussed in different ways, I wonder: how connected is the conversation of multimodality/new media/technology? Is it productive to have so many scholars defining and using these terms according to their needs and pedagogies?

My final question relates to how I am not able to see the readings connect: how can we use some of these theories and notions in a college writing classroom?  This is something we are always told to be mindful of while reading, but I would love to have a conversation attempting to link concepts like networks and Brooke’s reframing of the canons to our daily practices. Is it possible to bring in more than one of these notions of new media and technology into our classrooms? Or have these texts been so powerfully framed that we must fully board the ship in order to set sail?

(That last line was really unnecessary. I blame it on my sinus infection meds that make everything—including my brain—go kind of hazy.)