Jacqui's+Journal

Journal 3 1. If I am understanding Gee’s explanation correctly, I would think that a classroom activity involving science would be a good example of just in time information. For instance when examining chemical reactions a student would get the verbal information to add a certain ingredient at a certain time. The student would be given the cue at the time when they could best use it. 2. I think that my work with kids who are home schooled now and my (hopeful) future work with inner city kids I think that a game like the Sims would be a good subdomain to introduce. I think that using the problem solving skills and multitasking would become useful tools in the real domain of having to work with each other. It the subdomain of using a personal simulation game would be for students to develop good learning strategies in general for using in the real domain. It teaches them what to learn and then how to use what they learn. 3. I think that the educational game I reviewed would be a good example for this. If Immigration Nation were to be used as an introduction to content, instead of a review, then they would get a lot of good repetition practice and support. This would set up the basis for a transfer of knowledge into more complex problems about immigration later on. Then a teacher could keep coming back to the game as further concrete concepts are built and keep practicing what they are learning. 4. Describe a learning experience you've had where one of your 'cultural models' was challenged. I think that my example works. When I was in early elementary school, probably about fourth grade or so, there was an exercise our classroom did where we each wrote on a piece of paper a word that we identified ourselves as. I wrote down “African American” and it was the first time anyone in my class had ever “seen” me described like that, since I don’t look like it. I think that culturally the “black kids” not only looked the part, but also were playful and more or less a handful. Whereas I was reserved and got good grades. I think that in our classroom domain I did a little shock and awe that day, and I was interviewed by every student when we finally revealed our cards like they hadn’t been going to school with me for four years. 5. When trying to figure out a good game to review for the educational review I played quite a few different games. One game I liked but decided against reviewing was Half the Sky Movement. It is a very good female empowerment game and pretty simple to play. It is task based. You complete the tasks and collect whatever is rewarded and that counts towards something. In most of the “tasks” you play a mini game and all of them that I got to before I stopped playing all resembled the candy crush game where you match like objects. It is a good game for females to play to learn about women in other cultures and the obstacles that they face daily. It does seem to take a long time to play. It also heavily lays into decisions and consequences leading down different game story lines. I also tried to play Darfur is Dying, which is a very depressing game to play. I didn’t understand at first exactly what to do, so I was captured by militia. The game then tells you what happens to the type of person you are playing as when they get captured. So I was first captured as a small female child who would, when captured, probably be raped and brutalized then sold into some sort of work farm or killed. I get the shock value to a very serious genocide problem in Darfur, but I was surprised at the tactics used to get the points across in the game.

Journal 2 1. These different identities can be important in my work with home schooled students because they would able to show a side of themselves that they might not be comfortable showing otherwise. Instead of making face-to-face connections /with me or other students, they can use avatars and online personas to only show what they choose to. This would really help with quite a few of my socially awkward students who have much to offer, but knowledge gets lost in translation when preconceptions about other students are made. 2. In my experience with home schooled students, there isn’t a lot of extra time to really get into identity issues with students. I think that the closest I have come to any experience with that is having a student who was very intelligent, but had to think and rethink about everything. She would get the answers correct, but she would have to recheck every answer given for fear that it was wrong. I think that playing something in the Massive Multiplayer Online gaming world would have really helped her because she could have taken the chances that she was afraid to take face-to-face. 3. One of my favorite areas to work with kids in is reading comprehension. I think that situated meaning is very different for students who come from very different places. I think that I could help student’s gain a better understanding of it by having them write down their own thoughts on a piece of writing, and then interpreting it another way. Or even reading the thoughts of other home schooled kids from a totally different area. The experiences and how the different kids associate images and dialogue would be different enough to pick up on how we all can interpret things differently. 4. I think my recent experience with EVE online is the perfect illustration for this cycle. After I finally got the game up and running, I “probed” the world within the game. I did what I could do initially, I clicked random things and said yes to anything that popped up. After leaving the game and coming back to it, I had a better understanding of what I was looking at so I could hypothesize about the galaxies based on what reactions I got from previous game play. So this lead to playing with more knowledge, which is the reprobe. Then after testing out my previous expectations I could rethink my hypothesis on things and revise as needed based on incoming information. This game has so many components, that this cycle could happen for a very long time, trying to figure everything out. 5. I tried out the Redistricting game, which I actually got quite sucked into. To more advanced players, it would probably seem trivial. I really liked trying to figure out how to rework the country to make the different challenges work. The one that was the most enlightening was trying to even out voters by people per capita. It took me a few minutes to realize that the little blue and red dots were huge chunks of people. It was very interesting to look at how the government divides things and that lots of land doesn’t equal to lots of people.

Journal 1 1) I do not have a ton of history with video or computer games. I played games like “You don’t know Jack” and “The Sims” when I was a child. I watched my brothers play games like “Spiro” and “Sonic”. I have been mildly entertained by arcade racing games. In my adult life I did get sucked into Farmville for a short while, and I will admit I play candy crush every once in a while. That is really the extent of my knowledge of video and computer games. 2) I am not entirely sure how to answer this question. I have only really played games that don’t need anything put a username, no avatar or alternate identity. The only game I have played like that was “The Sims” and you could create as many people as you wanted. I guess that I always created several “characters” for that game. I never thought of them as identities though, just different characters to add to my town. 3) James Paul Gee’s definition of literacy is interesting to me and the work I do because using different communication systems could be very beneficial to the children I work with. I work with students who are tutored online, and I also work with students who are home-schooled. Gee’s thinking about visual literacy could really help fill in the scaffolding for the different children I work with. 4) I think that the biggest experience I have had is learning how to “read” and find the meaning of the images and gestures of social media sites. When I first started networking on social media on a more regular basis, I had a platform where “liking” and “sharing” and emoticons were a common place thing, and I had to figure out exactly what was happening. 5) This last week I tried “Resilient Planet”, I really like the graphics and the realistic feel. It is an interesting notion, made in the class discussion, about the fact that it is more lead than some people liked. I agree with that, except that for some children that just works better. Maybe if the game were to better utilize two different types of play where one is more of a lead adventure and the other is more free play and explore. I did enjoy the game for the most part, and I did learn some things.