Pedagogy -/- Pathology of Video Games

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

James Paul Gee’s work has come up in my reading a few times since 2008, and I was particularly interested to read What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy because of a recent family incident. My nephew, age 5½, was withdrawn from his day-school last week because of a classroom conflict. Little Newton has his own handed-down laptop, but he is only allowed to play video games which his father and I deem expressly educational. They must teach the following: preferably reading, possibly solving math problems, or my favorite, real-life problem-solving skills. We endorse PBS Kids games, PBS games, Nickelodeon’s game site, and such Rube Goldberg-style inventive games as The Incredible Machine. We limit his television time and his computer time separately, but his father brings him outside to play (and sometimes help work) at small farm tasks. Often he just ends up playing with the box, as the phrase goes, but Newton has been a great assistant and companion to me in my projects for years now.

Newton came home from school last week and told us that his friend had brought a Nintendo DS to school—the device I would still call a Game Boy, with two three-inch screens, one mostly for display and the other predominantly for input. The teacher insisted that the game system would only come out after five o’clock, but we found that the other student was actually playing the game for several hours before that and for the several days previous. I was miffed for just two reasons: the tiny screen would only permit one student to play at a time, while the other kids crowd around the tiny screens, peeping over the player’s shoulder. I was taught that if I were to bring food or a toy to school, I must bring enough for everyone. To be the only kid without a valentine card in his box is a sad way to start the spring. The second reason was the teacher’s attitude: upon my brother’s arrival, she asked, “Newton, did your daddy get you a Nintendo DS yet?”

My brother explained that we don’t let him play game systems or fighting games at home. She replied that video games in general are educational. My brother asked how, and the teacher said, “They improve hand-eye coordination.” My brother replied that he could think of several ways to teach hand-eye coordination to more than one student at once.

This is a typical conflict today, as it would have been in 1980 or 1990 or 2000. Newton’s father and I don’t object to the idea of digital media in school. The boy is taught at home with books and on paper, but also with a computer and with videos. His father and I hoped that school would stick to book learning, but we had hoped, more so, that school would teach him to be social, to interact, to share, to compete, and to communicate. Aside from sharing, I don’t believe that taking turns with a hand-held game system accomplishes those goals.

As an active and rather well-rounded farm kid, Newton is willing to while away an hour or two at nearly any task, so by limiting his access, we have encouraged him to think of his computer as a learning tool. My brother adds the programs he approves, and I set up the desktop and bookmark bar so that Newton can open any of that list of programs. I searched for games which I believe helped my own cognitive development, along the lines of Apple Panic, Think Quick, and later The Secret of Monkey Island and Lemmings. The best example was Rocky’s Boots, produced by The Learning Company, where I learned to make basic electrical circuits with and, or, and not gates. Just a two or three years later I realized I had been tricked: electrical circuits operate on the same principles as logical operations, and one who can produce an intermediate-level circuit can also make a flowchart, a grade book, fill out tax forms, and identify logical faults.

Little Newton has been withdrawn from that school (in a common story of parent-teacher conflict: high drama and an eventuality which doesn’t have much to do with the student’s learning), and many more school events have already been set up for Newton. The story raised several questions for me which are addressed by Gee. First, does hand-eye coordination add up to learning? Gee references the dexterity required to feed input to video games on several occasions What Video Games Have to Teach Us, but in so doing he confirms that tactile skills are just a vehicle for learning, not a method for improving mental acuity. I’d venture to say that Gee believes as I do—that calling a video game controller a tool for dexterity is like saying a gas lawn mower improves mental discipline.

Gee explains his games well, and he shows his ambivalence—guilt and pleasure—in teaching his children, getting tips from his children, writing his research, and mining the semiotics from video games, with a real aptness for explaining and with an endearing, precocious manner of address to his audiences. Splitting up his lists of learning principles with pages of research/explanation between contextualized the lists well. Having read the book, I’m sure I’ll be able to interpret the list and share Gee’s ideas. I’ll share them with my brother, for instance, so we can figure out how to use the technology to teach the child without boring him to death with my insistent Scrabble or my incipient coin collection. Gee’s politics rather overreach his argument, but the context—his clear anger about poor teaching and ludditism in the classroom by disinterested educators—comes quite welcome.

More resources:

I heard a story this week about a young man who put off medical school for two years because he was busy with his job and twenty-ish hours a week making raids on World of Warcraft. As a coda, he beat his obsession and began medical school. One phrase stuck with me: that he still had his account but would never login to WoW’s server again. It was as if he could only stand not to play if he knew his character still existed somewhere—like those who say it’s easier to quit smoking if you have a pack nearby.

I looked for recent articles, so all the following studies come from 2007 to last month.

CRC Health Group and video game addicts. I like the slogan: “When video games become more than just games...” (ellipsis in the original.) The split between “teens” and “adults” on this site rankles me. Note the slant on such articles as “When to Pull the Plug” and “Boys and Video Games: A Natural Attraction?”

http://www.video-game-addiction.org/

The American Psychiatric Association sports two .pdf studies on video game addiction, and I’ll link the search: http://www.psych.org/search.aspx?SearchPhrase=video+game

I was lured by this phrase: “Even though APA doesn’t classify video game addiction to be a mental disorder [...]”

LiveScience cites a study which claims pathological video game addiction affects ten percent of “youth gamers.”

http://www.livescience.com/5409-children-addicted-video-games.html

USNews Health’s article from January links depression/anxiety and video game pathology.

http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/brain-and-behavior/articles/2011/01/17/video-game-addiction-tied-to-depression-anxiety-in-kids

And I quote: “Eighty-three percent of the study volunteers reported playing video games sometimes, and another 10 percent said they had played video games in the past. The average time spent playing video games was around 20.5 to 22.5 hours a week.”

Tutorial:
http://lifehacker.com/#!5758404/learn-the-basics-of-photoshop-the-complete-guide

From Night School via Lifehacker, I’ve enjoyed a couple of these tutorials for Photoshop. I found the color theory section quite engaging, since my taste in color is neither theoretical nor tasteful.

It includes the following tutorials, each of which can also be downloaded as a .pdf:

Learn the Basics of Photoshop in Under 25 Minutes

Basics of Photoshop: Color Correction, Touch Ups, and Enhancements
Basics of Photoshop: Basic Drawing with the Pen Tool
Basics of Photoshop: Designing a Website
Basics of Photoshop: Next Steps and Further Resources

pedagogy of the unimpressed

In his section “Differences in Value (As in, “Is It Any Good?”), Lessig brings up a conversation with programmer Victor Stone of ccMixter. Stone told Lessig, “As the boomers die out, and they get over themselves by dying, the generation that follows... just doesn’t care about this discussion. They just assume that remixing is a part of music, and it’s part of the process, and that’s it.” (97).

Students’ Right To Their Own Language deals with voice and dialect, with reference to cultural disparities, regional differences (or trends, to avoid the difference), and mutual acceptance. To follow Lessig’s rationale of regulatory humility, one reason that students’ writing would ideally be accepted on the student’s terms is that educators are worn down by the task of compressing the words of a student into an academically acceptable form. In the future, to pirate Stone’s words above, students may believe they can remix their cultural voices with a median form of English (the one traditionally taught) to produce a more personal and varied writing form. Most educators would, I suspect, consider this an ideal.

Academic English and Standard English are different forms, to my mind, but here are my arguments.

It concerns me that Standard English carries little merit in this SRTOL document. If we look at Standard American English, for example, as a pigeonhole into which to cram the next generation’s language, then I agree that standard is a hegemonic tool. (That’s what standard means.) I offer a contrary that could be just as much an ideal hope: that a standard English is already a hybrid, a remix, and an evolving voice. It’s the voice that will be known to readers, appealing to employers both domestic and overseas, and expressive of the writer’s own thought process—with academic overtones and a constant attempt to make oneself understood (or at least intelligible) to the greatest possible audience.

The other argument I hear sounds defeated or at least decommissioned: I don’t care what students write as long as they are writing. That’s the best we can hope for at present. Get them excited about anything, and maybe they’ll have the tools to apprehend the material we want them to read and write.

Several students in our own class this semester, starting with Amber, expressed a fear of appearing to try to be hip to technology in teaching. That would be a good start, as far as our future classes are concerned. It’s not so bad to be the teacher lady or teacher fellow, and media is only as good as the material presented. If it’s only a slideshow of pictures of authors, they should be good pictures. If it’s a flashy presentation with four senses engaged and fades that stop short of cliché, that won’t save the presentation from a cruddy subject.

It’s easy to point out that language and media are different—in that human language, spoken or written, is a direct reference language, whereas media, whether spoken word, soybean ink on gray recycled paper, an Ignite slideshow, or a documentary posted to the public, are not languages but vehicles for language. The confluence of the two categories is the end-user of each medium, the communicator. I’ll always be a fan of the written word and the speech; I’ll be an advocate for those two skills above others, because somebody has to support each specific category. The art of speech has fallen a good deal farther behind the curve today than the art of writing.

Digital media increasingly represents students’ earliest exposures to communication. I believe that guardians still teach reading and writing first, but when kids learn on their own, for those hours a day when they are not directly instructed, I believe that most of their engagement with the world of vicarious language is entailed by digital media. It’s not regulatory humility to acknowledge and appreciate the medium which conveys the world to, as Lessig would say, “our kids.” I brought up Paulo Freire a couple of times in class, and in his work, bringing the great big world to the people through the word is the first step to getting the word of the people out into the world. What a right to their own language, the right to “own” language, would look like for students in 2011 begins with admitting, for guys like me, that we can learn more and faster from digital media than from the average book, with its linear writing and plodding, cajoling text.

This recalls the end of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ “Farewell Letter” published in Peru’s La Marioneta on 29 May 2000. “I have learned that a man has the right to look down on somebody, only when he is helping him to stand up.”

As a short archive on Marxist pedagogy, this page from the Marxists Internet Archive at the Australian National University offers good resources, especially on Leo Vygotsky.

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/subject/education/

This conference paper by educator Rich Gibson makes a good introduction for the work of Freire.

Gibson, Rich, Associate Professor of Education. “Paolo Freire and Revolutionary Pedagogy for Social Justice.” San Diego State University.

http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/freirecriticaledu.htm

From Democracy and Governance, this is a strong summary of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and an accompanying study.

http://www.comminit.com/en/node/27123/348

In the spirit of debate, see Sol Stern’s retrospective on Freire’s influence, which claims that “Freire’s ideas are harmful not just to students but to the teachers entrusted with their education.” Stern claims that Freirian education had no demonstrable impact on the third world, and that today’s teachers “will surely learn nothing about becoming better instructors” from Pedagogy of the Oppressed’s “discredited Marxist platitudes.”

Stern, Sol. “Pedagogy of the Oppressor.” City Journal 19.2 (Spring 2009). Available 14 Feb 2011,

http://city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html

For a tutorial this week, I wanted to share how I get away with driving so much.

First, I downloaded this free text-to-speech .mp3 maker.

http://www.naturalreaders.com/index.htm

My students email me their rough drafts. I feed my students’ rough drafts into this reader which converts them into .mp3 format, read by the voice of Microsoft’s “Paul.”

While I’m driving to work, I play these files.

For entertainment, I also download Project Gutenberg’s free human-read audiobooks, linked here.

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1

There are even more read by a computer, but after listening to the computerized version of my students’ essays, I can’t stand the fake voice. It’s interesting, though, how the necessarily flat reading by the computer resembles reading more nearly than the personal inflection of a professional reader.

Provocative Argument, Rough Analogy

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2008.

Before I say anything else, I want to mention that I really dig this book. Lessig’s argument is continuous and engaging. The examples come on each page, they are grouped well, and they are both in-depth and effective. The language Lessig uses is direct, his metaphors are compelling, and his sentences come hard and fast.

Lessig does not waste his time correcting or even pointing out the ambiguity and contradictions in his sources. That’s part of his irony.

For example, in his discussion of sharecropping beginning on 243, he paraphrases David Bowie’s legal representation for a remixing context. “The remixer also waived any moral rights he might ‘feel’ he had in the remix. And the remixer granted to Bowie’s label, Sony, ‘worldwide royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive license’ to any content added to the Bowie content to make the remix” (244).

This verbiage is fantastic. It’s exactly the waiving of a feeling of morality. Lessig restrains himself from taking pot-shots at this morass of retro legal language. If I were a musician and were told to sign this document, I would see that I was granting a “non-exclusive” and “royalty-free” license. I would take that to mean that I still had some part in that license, because it is not exclusively granted. I would also assume that Bowie’s franchise could not take royalties on my music.

That is because I am not a lawyer. Professor Lessig is, however, and he claims that Sony (“Bowie”) could then sell my remix, however creative and original my adulteration of his music might be.

I’m concerned the he also doesn’t realize, probably due to the breadth of his project, that several of his analogies, and even his premises, are also contradictory.

In chapter five, “Cultures Compared,” Lessig claims that our country and civilization in general has a long-standing tradition of regulatory humility: the law will control what it can, and beyond that, it will bow out unless personal liberty causes citizens to injure each other. In other words, what the law cannot control, it permits. He argues that by labeling our children pirates, we create a pirate culture. That goes against his premise that if we stop calling a crime a crime, then the next generation will not be criminals. I’d argue that removing the name of a crime doesn’t make it a crime, and calling a person a misfit doesn’t make him eventually become a murderer.

Moreover, isn’t our legal system a little more ethical than this? It’s always worth asking, and sometimes I find our judicial or executive or legislative branches each unethical. Taken as a whole, though, I believe that our system is not “evil,” in terms of the law of Google. If regulatory humility is the motivation or limit on law, then the reason that the law bowed to civil rights activists is that the law couldn’t control it. The power of protest would have angered the government, and the government would have made laws accommodating the upstarts. The awakening of the conscience of a nation would have played no part. Is that what history has reduced us to: Pavlov's dogs, even in ethics?

That’s particularly troubling given Lessig’s later use of Civil Rights activists and the restauranteurs called as federal witnesses. Lessig claims that the business owners wanted the law to support the ethical choice of integration, so that they would not be subject to vandalism and mercenary injustice, as dissenters against that part of a community which wanted to maintain segregation. The law needed to support integration—but wasn’t the owners’ argument rather selfish and faulty? Were they willing to take a stand or not? They were only able to do so if the law would support their choice. I believe they were willing to integrate their businesses regardless.

If the law were based on “regulatory humility” instead of ethical choices, could rights for all American citizens have been fulfilled?

On a lighter note, please consider these comparisons he makes:

I agree that misdemeanor offenses or even federal copyright violations are not as damaging as rape and manslaughter.

But

How much is prostitution really like piracy?

How much is volunteering really like sex?

Bibliography: Techno- & Bio-semiotics.

This complex featured article gives a semiotic take on several digital subjects addressed by Jenkins and Lessig.

Kay O’Halloran (Director), Bradley Smith, Sabine Tan, Alexey Podlasov, Stefano Fasciani and Alvin Chua. “Multimodal Digital Semiotics.”

I also like this piece connecting sign studies from the East to our hemisphere.

Wang, Yongxiang. Chinese Semiotic Studies: a Bridge between Chinese and Western Semiotic Scholars.

Both of these articles may be found in this e-journal, released Sunday.

SemiotiX New Series: A Global Information Bulletin. ISSN: 1916-7296.

http://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/

If you want your mind blown, you might check out any article by Estonian bio-semiotician Kaie Kotov, including this one:

Kotov, Kaie. “Do you mind? Does it matter? Semiotics as a science of noosphere.” hortus semioticus 6 (2010). ISSN: 1736-3314. http://www.ut.ee/hortussemioticus/6_2010/kotov.html

Video tutorial:

If you haven’t yet come upon this resource, I must share it. Yale University followed Harvard’s lead and began proving that their professors were as serious about teaching as they are about research.

The first time I was permitted to teach an upper-division course, this came in quite handy.

http://www.youtube.com/user/YaleCourses

I particularly have used the lectures on literature theory as a benchmark for my own course this semester.

Technicolor (Lover, Break my Heart) (--Gregg Alexander)

OCR Help.

A tutorial on optical character recognition, which has saved me a great deal of time in reading books as e-books.

For our general use with Word and the lab scanner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfxMookbT_I&feature=related

For a copier like we have in the department and also the one in the CATS Center for tutors.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Ps5GJko0c&feature=related

Writing about...
Reading to Write or Teach
By request, I have paid attention this week to the ways I read a text for our class. Alternatively, I’ve been thinking about what I do with a text before I teach it.

Essentially, I keep the book and either just a pen, a pen and paper, or a computer in front of me. I read, and when I read an interesting passage, I read just a little beyond it to make sure that I’m not provoked for no reason.

If only a pen: I mark a vertical line in the margin for passages or a dot for good words.

If a pen and paper: “” then write down the page number, plus three words of my thoughts.

If a computer: “” plus a question or more expressions of my interest (or complaints).

When a text includes definitions, I type them up or write them up as outlines. For instance, I might divide the Neoclassical Period up into the Restoration, the Augustan Age, the Age of Johnson. I fill in the outline as much as necessary to explain to my students (or to jog my memory) on the features of the definition.

I also put stars—or rather asterisks—next to those passages or notes I believe will be most handy.

Later, I think about all of this while looking only at my notes.

This generates all the organization that I am liable to produce in the course of writing and speaking.

--At least until revision.

Regarding Technicolor.

Nelson, Alondra and Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines, Eds. Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life. New York UP,

Editors Nelson, Tu, and Hines seek to answer, through the Technicolor anthology: “How will we know when the digital divide has been mended?” (1), and they select articles which demonstrate “the many interfaces where technology and race intersect” (2), with further treatment of gender, culture, and 20th-century diasporas.

Given the citation of the three “Falling Through the Net” studies, which we also saw in Literate Lives, I wonder how the use of cell phones has impacted the connectedness of individuals. In Nelson and Tu’s interview with the documentary filmmaker Vivek Bald, the documentarist of Taxi-Valas comments, “With cell phones, interactions become very individualized, one person to another, in a way that undermines the more communal space of CB, where a number of people can listen and participate at the same time” (94). When I moved to a farm in Casey County, Kentucky in 1997, I learned that only eighteen months earlier Chicken Gizzard Ridge Road, where the farm was located, had lost the party-line system. The neighborhood biddies were still depressed that they couldn’t answer their home phone, which had only recently shared a line with three other houses, and get all the news that was dirt on their next-door neighbors.

While I’m sure that several Native American Reservations would be lucky in 2011 to have a land-line phone per four houses, I question whether the advent of no-contract cell phones has sequestered the individual away from the community; I’m sure, though, that it has isolated the individual from the sense of a household. If my land line rings, it can only mean a wrong number or a solicitation. At the same time that my housemates can contact me anywhere I am (the basement, the yard, the road, or the store), I am somehow less available to the outside world when I am in my home—because it is no longer the household which can be contacted, but me individually. That increases the gap between myself and my cohabitants, such as my roommate, girlfriend, nephew, or brother.

What Vivek Bald needed to intercept the cabbies’ conversations was likely either a better CB or a footwarmer amplifier rather than a crystal (92)—but his problem was the same: he found the drivers isolated from not just the community, sealed off as they were in their cars, but also insulated from the community of other commercial drivers. The “virtual communities” they were involved with was a strict and tiny subset of the community at large: citizens > entrepreneurs > roadies > commercial drivers > Taxi-valas (> those trying to make Auto-biographies). I’m left to ask whether the virtual community here is much like the virtual democracy Nguyen outlines later in the anthology, virtual as in no cigar.

As with other platforms of technology, I ask whether our increasingly subdivided literacies are leaving us with knowledge so specific to each venue (or each gadget) as to make specialized literacy itself divisive. If you aren’t on my channel, I can’t hear you. If it’s not my music, I don’t want to hear it. If it isn’t an e-book, I won’t carry it with me. If you don’t have wi-fi, I won’t buy your coffee. Everywhere I have gone the last few years I have refused to bring “my” music with me (but please bring yours, I would love to be exposed to yours)--because I am afraid that my taste will inbreed and mutate, and I won’t be in touch with the new exposure. In other words, I believe that I will fall off the cutting edge and lose contact with the general wave of information and the current of popular culture. This translates neatly into academic in the specificity of academic “concentrations” vs. the broad appeal of interdisciplinary communication.

Bibliography of Smarter People than Myself

I will point to some of my favorite articles on humans as cyborgs, sentients, and simians—with reference to Donna Haraway and Bruno latour.

Clarke, Bruce. Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems. Fordham UP, 2008

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34099123/Posthuman-Metamorphosis

Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges.”

&

Star, Susan Leigh. “Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions: On Being Allergic to Onions.”

&

Latour, Bruno. “To Modernize or to Ecologize? That is the Question.”

All in this great Technoscience 2007. Eds. Kristin Asdal, Brita Brenna, and Ingunn Moser.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/42813486/Modernize-Ecologize-Bruno-Latour

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard UP: 1993.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38504479/Bruno-Latour-We-Have-Never-Been-Modern