1. Post titles! Almost all the work anywhere near my field (literature) that tries to synthesize cog sci with, well, anything else (semiotic/structuralist/poststructuralist approaches, social/economic/Marxy approaches, or even plain old literary formalism) resembles a train wreck. Not that there isn't a cottage industry of (mostly German) scholars cranking it out.

2. (all IMHO, of course) The cognitive scientists may repudiate Skinner (or they may not, scary thought), but they're still closet behaviorists in their experimental approach. And they think of anybody who doesn't share their queer wires-in-the-head brand of psychological empiricism as, at best, fuzzy-minded; at worst, they'll call you dualistic, spiritual, deluded. They seem to have a very narrow view of what's hard, empirical science, and like to deride others (even other fields of psych) as soft and speculative. Sadly, in this respect, I think Hampshire is a fair model of the academy at large (though it forces people to rub elbows with each other much more than a traditional department-based structure, which leads to more tempers flaring).

I promise to show some restraint and stop gangpiling on your blog. Soon.

no no! please! keep gangpiling!

guhhh titles... ok the big one is What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee. Almost everyone in my department seems to be reading this. More on it later, I am only about 70 pages in and I'm already way too in love with the book. Gee also wrote a book titled Social Linguistics and Literacies which looks good. Basically, we should all mine Dana's (http://danawcammack.typepad.com/flaneuse) lit review for resources. That's what I did. Dana, do you have any other tips on which of those books is particularly salient? And hey, can you post your lit review or at least its bibliography online?

(40 pages into Gee book) Love it why? I mean, it's readable and light, with a nice journalistic prose style which doesn't demand too much of the reader, but the actual *content* is feeling to me so far like a cavalcade of obviousness, question-begging, oversimplification, unjustified optimism ("games are constantly getting better," unwarranted Darwinian analogies), and video-game boosterism. Someone explain what's so cool about this book? I'll read more, since it's possible I'm just being unfair (as opposed to something else *as well as* unfair), but some discussion might help.

Remember, I did say I am "way too" in love with the book, I'm not exactly being rational about it.

[snip]a cavalcade of obviousness,
question-begging, oversimplification, unjustified optimism[snip]

Well, Mr. Cavalcade Of Unremitting, Wordy Pessimism, it's obvious to us because we *grew up playing video games.* You know as well as I do that boomers just don't get it -- I've heard your anecdotes about trying to teach professors to play. Some professors in *my department* can barely be convinced to think about developing video games, and this ought to be their field.

The man says that video games are doing a better job of teaching kids than schools are! It's quite a claim to make in the era of No Child Left Behind that kids learn more from playing than from standardized tests! And he *is* making it in a nice readable journalistic style which might actually reach your average educator.

Yes, there's times when he really doesn't understand what he's talking about. And the more I read the more I feel like he hasn't organized his throughts or his chapters well. Not to mention that soundbyte journalism could really make hash of his message.

I still think the book's important. Someone desperately needed to start a discussion of how video games can be used to educate. The military is doing it already, sucking kids into the army by making it part of the games they play and the domain of knowledge they master on their own time. The rest of us are only shooting ourselves in the foot by not working that turf to counter their propaganda. Why aren't you developing the video game that's going to teach kids critical theory, hmmm?

Didn't we just discuss that? Because I believe print on paper is a wondrous, revolutionary, paradigm-shifting technology whose potential hasn't even begun to be tapped. What can a video game teach about philosophy that a large pile of books can't teach better?

"I still think the book's important. Someone desperately needed to start a discussion of how video games can be used to educate."

Clearly this is the useful part of the Gee book -- that it exists and will start a discussion. I happen to disagree with the role you attribute to the military: aside from "America's Army" there is really very little direct military involvement in games, just as the military itself doesn't have to make idiotic war movies or write Tom Clancy novels. They have a whole ideology to do the work for them. And "the rest of us" can't necessarily "counter their propaganda," because of the enormous imbalances of power and capital between us and the military-industrial complex. Your argument sounds like Adbusters politics to me -- fighting advertising by taking out ads against it is a guaranteed losing strategy. "We," whoever the hell that is anyway, need asymmetrical political tactics.

More on Gee later, as time's available. The only thing that's obvious to me about the *video game* part of his book, actually, is how much he gets wrong. Why does he say "platform" instead of "console," and "arcade" instead of "action"? Why does he totally misunderstand the design and mechanics of game-saving in different kinds of games, and base a broad argument on his misinterpretation?

Hiya ladyhoo!!

Wow. I got a couple of mentions, which is pretty cooler and what was cooler was that I found out about that using a blog linking tool you can play with at www.technorati.com.

As far as the lit review and things you should absolutely read:
Adolescents and Literacies in a Digital World. Alvermann edited it. Anything by Lankshear and Knobel. Kevin Leander's recent work -- do an ERIC search and I have some of his in press stuff. All of the July 2003 issue of Reading Research Quarterly. Older stuff by George Landow that is still good like Hypertext 2.0 (also check out the University in Singapore where he works that has a hypertext literacies program)..

Ahhh so much to recommend. As far as posting my lit review, it still needs lots of work b4 I put it up. If it is any consolation, if the gods at TC are willing my entire dissertation will be a hypertext and you can play in it to your heart's content. I also have a *very* early draft of an article on wrinkling binaries in literacy and technology research that I think you would enjoy.

God. We need to get out more.

loves and kisses.