Kevin's+Journal


 * Reading Journal Week 1: Chapters 1 & 2**

1. Describe your background and history with video and computer games. I started playing video games when I was a kid. I think my first console was my grandpa's Sega GameGear. At home I've almost exclusively played computer games. My mainstays have always been role playing games (RPGs). I enjoy being able to control my character(s)'s attributes and shape them in differently through multiply play throughs in order to change the general gameplay. I tend to enjoy them more the longer they are. I prefer to devote my life to a single game at a time and I want the experience to last as long as possible. I think they longest game I've ever played through was Exile III (circa 1990's by Spiderweb Software). I have no idea how many hours it took me to get through that game but I think I played it for a solid five or six months without repetition. I've only ever really console gamed while at friends' houses. I own an x-box and a Playstation 2 now but I very rarely touch them. I really just prefer the computer interface.

2. What are some of the real and/or virtual ‘identities’ you take on? This is a very loaded question. I take on many different identities in many different contexts so I will focus here on what commonalities those identities share: integrity, fairness, empathy, compassion, goal-orientation. No matter what the circumstance, be it in my real life or any virtual iteration, I do my best to take responsibility for my actions. I understand the concept of cause and effect - action and consequence. While gaming and while not gaming, I do what I can to predict what the outcome of my actions will be. I use that prediction to plan my current actions in order to develop a desired outcome. This is a complex thing to do, as pretty much no aspect of my life has no impact on any other part of my life (i.e. every part of my life is connected to every other part of my life either directly or indirectly). This means, in order to accurately plan a desired outcome, I must plan for ripple effects. As a simplistic example: If I want my RPG character to gain experience, I have to go out and get into fights. There may be opportunities to fight some farmers but those farmers are minding their own business. Even if getting in a fight with them will have no real effect on the rest of my gameplay, I don't like to go slaughtering random farmers; it just isn't very compassionate. So I'll have to go out somewhere else to gain experience. That example is too simple to capture the truly interconnected nature of all of the goals that I am pursuing at any given point in time: multiple goals of varying importance, varying duration, with sometimes conflicting interests. I do what I can to maintain a coherent omni-identity by balancing these goals.

3. What impact might James Paul Gee’s definition of ‘literacy’ have on your teaching? Actually, the way he describes literacy is very much in line with how I think of literacy. He considers literacy to be a matter of being able to interpret and produce meaning. He argues that this is impossible outside a social context, that literacy is a social endeavor. I tend to agree with this line of thought. This impacts my teaching by the implication that in order to teach my students to be literate, I must teach them how to be social in the context of whatever I want them to be literate about. Gee seems to take this a step further than I would though, saying that as literacy is necessarily social, so must be learning. I don't agree. This implies that learning is impossible and/or irrelevant in the absence of other people. So if there isn't anyone else around, I can't learn? Or my learning is pointless? Hardly, I would say. I would modify this generalization from literacy to learning to say that learning is impossible and/or irrelevant in the absence of context. You may not need people around to learn but if there isn't anything around, then learning may be a bit hard. I think Gee would appreciate this modification, given his focus on semiotic domains, which I'll write about below.

4. What experiences have you had learning in new ‘semiotic domains’? I interpret semiotic domains as contexts for learning (i.e. literacy groupings/clusters). With that understanding of the term, I would argue that everything I have ever learned has occurred in a semiotic domain. Further, any time I have learned about something that I was previously ignorant about, would be a time that I have learned in a new semiotic domain. I suppose my most recent experience with this would be my learning in the semiotic domain of teaching. Starting the MAT program at WOU required me to learning not only the jargon of teachers but their general values, focus, concerns, etc. as well.


 * Reading Journal Week 2/3: Chapters 3 & 4**

1. How might virtual and projective identities be important in your teaching? Though Gee puts forth these types of identities to explain the relationship between the gamer and the gamer's character, I think a very similar parallel can be drawn with students in the classroom. The virtual identity might be something like the student's identity as a student, a math student in the case of my classroom. The projective identity, then is a sort of projection of how the student wants to see her/himself as a math student (e.g. does the student want to be good at math, feel indifferent about being good at math, want to be bad at math). In this way, taking Gee's consideration of identity into account, I can view my students as people who are stepping into a different role when they come into my room than they do when they leave my room. This perspective can be useful in understanding where my students are coming from, which can be useful in helping my students get to wherever it is they want to go.

2. Describe an experience you’ve had in teaching a student with a “damaged” identity. To be honest, given Gee's writing, I'm not sure what a "damaged" identity is in this context. My best guess is that we're talking about a person who has one identity that doesn't fit with the other identities that that person has. Such as a gamer playing a game in which their character must resort to thievery when that gamer feels very strongly that thievery is wrong. In this case the players "real" identity and "virtual" identity (and perhaps their "projective" identity) are in conflict. If that is what is meant here by "damaged" then I deal with students with damaged identities all the time. Most of my students do not see themselves as being "good at math". So they are forced to come into a room in which they must take on an identity, that of a math student, which is in direct conflict with their "real" identity. My general reaction to this is to help the student forget that their "real" identity and play along with this identity of them as a math student. The alternative is to get my students to adjust their "real" identities so that they are not in conflict with the identity of a math student OR to adjust their understanding of the identity of a math student to the same effect. Either of those alternatives take a great deal of time and reteaching about the nature of mathematics. And with so much pressure on me as a teacher to increase my students' proficiencies as skills that are not directly related to their identity conflicts, I feel that I do not have time to help my students in the way that I believe they need help.

3. Give an example of a situated meaning in your content area, and describe how you might help students gain a more embodied understanding of it. Math is full of situated meanings. As Gee describes it, situated meaning is essentially referring to connecting a concrete idea to an abstract idea in order to make sense of it. That's pretty much all math education is about. It starts when we first start discussing numbers. Take the number one. What does that mean? If I ask you to conjure up an idea of the number one you might think of this symbol: 1 or you might picture a single object in your mind. This is exactly what Gee is talking about. The number itself is an abstraction and in order to gain some understanding of it we have to embody it somehow (e.g. with a symbol or a representation). I teach geometry, for which we use pictures, diagrams, equations, all sorts of mechanisms to embody the concepts that I wish my students to learn. Ultimately, I believe that math itself (i.e. the mathematical language) is a situated meaning. It is a way to talk about abstract ideas through an understanding of concrete ideas.

4. Describe a recent learning experience that involved using the probe, hypothesize, re-probe, and rethink cycle. Actually, while I was playing Trine 2, the game that I wrote a review for (link) I used this process. In the game you must pick up these orbs in order to make your characters stronger. As I was moving through the game I came upon a strange alter-looking thing. It was glowing so I thought it must be important. At first I thought I might need it to solve a puzzle that was located near the ater. So I tried moving the alter, it did not budge. Still thinking that it was needed for the puzzle, I tried moving the puzzle to the alter but I couldn't do that either. I played with the puzzle a little and realized that I didn't need the alter at all in order to solve it. So I moved on thinking that it was a mystery that would just go unsolved. That is, until I found another identical alter. It was then that I noticed that the glowing of the alter looked like the experience orbs in the game. Then I thought maybe it wasn't an alter but just something that had an orb trapped in it. I thought this because I had run into other structures that I had broken open in order to get the orbs. So I tried to break the alter open, which worked, and I got the orb.

Review of the week's games: The redistricting game was a very interesting one, I think. It was pretty fun to try to control how the districts are laid out so that the outcome of the elections would be decided in a specific manner. I think the game did a good job of shedding light on a flaw in our governmental process. I didn't get to play the Mission US game very much but what I did play, I liked. I thought the approach of putting the player in the shoes of someone who was in the midst of the coming US revolution was an interesting take. Unfortunately, I didn't get far enough in the game to get any real information out of it and the first part of the game didn't very well hook me in.


 * Reading Journal Week 4/5: Chapters 5 & 6**

1. Give an example of 'Just in Time' information presentation in a classroom activity. Today, while I was teaching geometry, there were several instances of 'just in time' information. We had a couple of review problems. Though the situations were familiar to my students, the dimensions of the shapes they were to solve were given as just-in-time information. Also, I led my students through putting together some notes on new material. For the purposes of today, the information for those notes was given as 'just in time' information. In the future, however, the notes will serve as 'on demand' information for my students.

2. In a content area of your choice, how might you incorporate teaching in a 'subdomain' of the 'real' domain? I'll refer again to the notes I had my students build today. Those notes are like an example of a subdomain of the unit we're covering. The notes were for finding the surface area of prisms. While I was taking my students through how to find the surface area of a triangular prism, I was pointing out ways that our process could be useful in finding the surface area of any prism. The context of what we were doing was the same as what they will see on their quizzes. I would say that those notes serve as a, "concentrated sample of the most basic and important actions, artifacts, and interactions," as Gee put it, concerning finding the surface area of prisms.

3. Describe a technique that you might use to help students 'transfer' early learning to more complex problems. I would use symmetry. Continuing with the idea of surface area. Later in the unit, students will have to use the techniques that they have learned last semester (e.g. how to find the area of a polygon) in order to find the surface area of a prism. Symmetry, in this context, means showing students how what they're looking at now is like what they've already seen. This may be as simple as asking them what shape is there or as explicit and directing them to see the shape and then directing them to their old notes on how to find the area of that shape.

4. Describe a learning experience you've had where one of your 'cultural models' was challenged. When I was in college (undergraduate) I believed that intent behind actions mattered. As an example, if I stepped on your toes but did not mean to, it was a lesser offense than stepping on your toes on purpose. For me, intent was a meaningful variable in determining fault. This was a part of the model that explained the culture that I lived in. I had a professor who challenged this cultural model. She put forth the perspective that it does not matter what the intent is, the fact is that you stepped on someone's toes. The damage done is the same in either case, intentional or unintentional, and for that reason, intent is not a variable in determining fault. This was for an ethics course. In order to pass the course, I had to take on her perspective in order to adequately justify both sides of this argument.


 * Reading Journal Week 5/6: Chapters 7 & 8**

1. In a content area of your choice, give an example of a way in which the 'affinity group' "enforces certain patterns as ideal norms".

2. Describe a classroom activity where students are able to 'leverage' the 'distributed' knowledge of their peers.

3. How might you give students more direct control (as an 'insider' or 'producer') over their own learning?

4. Which Principle of Learning do you feel is most-applicable to your teaching, and why?