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September 26, 2004
A Multiliteracies Manifesto
I just wrote this up and posted it to the group of students and professors I will be working with on video games research. It's been weighing on me for a couple of days, as I started to explain this the other day at our meeting and ended up feeling royally misunderstood. Feels like the weight has been lifted now; I think I said what I needed to. The article I reference below feels to me like the best crystallization of the ideas I went to grad school to work with. Thought I'd throw this out there for commentary from the broader community (I am trying to enable
I want to clarify what I was trying to say when I referred to the idea of "available designs, designing, and the redesigned" towards the end of the meeting last week. This idea is very important to me. I believe a curriculum involving these aspects is critical to educating citizens for the information-rich societies currently being born.
The idea comes from the article "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures." Jess and Chuck have read it, and I hope I can convince John and Zhou to as well. The authors (the New London Group) explain that they are setting out a new definition of literacy to fit the needs of increasingly multicultural societies and to address the increasing disparity between the world's rich and poor.
On p 77 of the article the authors state a central aim of theirs: developing "a metalanguage that describes meaning in various realms. These include the textual and the visual, as well as the multi-modal relations between... different meaning-making processes.... It should be seen as a tool kit for working on semiotic activities, not a formalism to be applied to them.... [T]he primary purpose of the matalanguage should be to identify and explain differences between texts, and relate these to the contexts of culture and situation in which they seem to work."
They continue: "The metalanguage we are suggesting... includes the key terms 'genres' and 'discourses,' and a number of related concepts such as voices, styles, and probably others.... More informally, we might ask of any Designing, What's the game? and What's the angle?"
It is this metalanguage that I want to teach through video games.
I went through the article thoroughly and developed a list of concrete pedagogical aims to try to make it clearer what I mean and what I think the authors mean. I also included some elements from the book "Smart Schools" by David Perkins. This isn't complete, but I hope it will help:
Students should be able to:
* identify which discourses are being drawn on or contributed to in a text (and by extension: compare Redesigned products or messages to the Available Designs on which they draw)
* identify the source of a text
* understand the text creator's intent (what "the game" is, in the New London Group's terms)
* identify what genre or genres are being employed
* be able to read the text from a number of critical perspectives (feminist, marxist, etc) and genres
* understand the interests at stake in a given discourse
* know how to identify and practice the forms of evidence required by a given discourse
* employ the tools for critical language awareness the New London Group describes on p 80
* employ analogous tools for use with other modes of meaning (spatial, visual, audio, gestural, etc)
* critically understand the ways in which dialect is socially situated
* innovate and otherwise constructively act in light of all the factors described above
To clarify my ideas with a metaphor from pop culture: I want people to be able to see the Matrix. I want to foster the reading of elements of our environment and media which do not generally get read. It is that idea of seeing hidden meaning in the world around us -- the "code" which Neo sees -- which I think is the most compelling and useful metaphor for teaching these skills.
I have also, in describing this idea to Jess at some point, used the metaphor of "lenses," which seems to me to correspond to the New London Group's idea of discourses. If you look at your neighborhood through your biologist lens, you see something different than if you look through your journalist lens, or your historian lens, or your feminist lens, or your Judeo-Christian lens. And what if you transpose a couple of lenses?
I should be clear -- I don't just want to teach these skills so that students can use them solely on video games. I want to teach them these skills in a highly transferrable way, so that they can apply them to any text, in the traditional sense of 'text' or otherwise (public space designs, performances, television advertisements, household objects, clothing labels, etc.) I would be happy to try to teach this using any medium, including face-to-face instruction, but since we're working with video games here, that's the medium which I'm going to have to use.
Posted by me at 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 25, 2004
Glory Be To God For Pied Things
I just pried myself away from the Matrix and the Animatrix on TV. Watching the Animatrix, I just couldn't believe how realistic computer animation has become. I always think back to Tuber's Two-Step, one of those little animation-festival pieces, from the days before Pixar, with colored polygons bouncing weightlessly around the screen.
I remember when screen savers were actually necessary and After Dark's Satori module, with its rippling colors, was just the most engrossing thing ever. I would have that experience where you come away from the computer screen and look at the world and see the computer in it. For a while during that period I couldn't look at sunsets; they paled by comparison.
I came away from the movies today and couldn't believe in the world around me. Certainly the linoleum could be simulated -- tiling patterns, even in perspective is easy. The play of the lamplight, the water dripping from the tap; even the streaked and blobby paint on my apartment doorjamb, uneven though it is, could be unreal. For a second there my own hand seemed to stretch before me like a gun in first-person perspective. Maybe we're already in the Matrix.
Estrellita brought me back to my senses, her splotched back the only real thing in the world as she did a figure-eight around my ankles. There is no faking the movement of an animal broken in some unrecorded, unexplained moment of history. The wobble of her tits and her uncertain legs. No animator would bother with the awkward shift of her weight as she swivels to look me in the eye; it's not good acting. And that fur... they can animate down to individual hairs now, but not those ones. Her pattern changes daily.
I was able to recall most of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that a curmudgeonly high school teacher insisted we memorize in defiance of evidence that in short order none of us would ever need to rely on our own frail memories again:
Glory be to God for pied things,
For skies as couple-color as a brinded cow,
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls, finches' wings,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,
All things fickle, freckled...
...adazzle, dim,
He fathers forth whose...
Praise him.
Posted by me at 11:11 PM | TrackBack
September 20, 2004
Hello Mudduh Hello Fadduh Redux
Dear Mom and Dad,
I know I don't write as much as I should to let you know what's going on. I imagine you're a little worried that you've never gotten a chance to meet most of my friends. So I thought I'd send along a picture of us all partying (not too hardy! cmon you know we stay safe mom and dad) in our usual hangout.
Left to right:
(back row) Matt, Peter, Wade, Bill, Other Matt, Charlie
(second row) Jen, Chuck, Christine, Steve, Juan
(bottom row) Mack, Itamar, Jessamyn, Sarah, and we have no idea who this weiner is, he just wandered in and made that weird face and basically ruined the picture. (and I'm taking the picture. duh.)
I miss you. Text me if you have a sec. ttfn.
G *^_^*
Posted by me at 1:31 AM | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
house clown
You know you've arrived when you can afford a house clown. --SarahPosted by me at 1:34 PM
September 8, 2004
Free To Be Whatever Gender Your Parents Artificially Choose For You
So I'm writing this article for Bitch about the musical Free To Be You And Me, and having a blast getting in touch with my old Poly classmates.
Most recently, I heard from Misasha Suzuki, who, like most other people I've talked to, had something to say in particular about the sketch in which two babies try to figure out which of them is a boy and which is a girl. (OK, this has clearly become a cultural touchstone: check out how many hits Google comes up with for the exact phrase "bald as a ping-pong ball", and how many of them specifically reference Free To Be.)
Seeing as I am doing most of my FTBYAM business in Gmail, Misasha's mail came up with the following in the margin:
Sponsored Links
Want A Boy? Want A Girl?
Choose your baby's gender. Safe, Effective & Natural.1-888-4-GENDER
www.GenSelect.com
Gender Roles
Article in Psychology Today Read it online. Free Trial!
www.KeepMedia.com
Related Pages
MnSCU - Board Policy 2.6 Intercollegiate Athletics
Board Policies Chapter 2 - Students 2.6 Intercollegiate Athletics ...
www.mnscu.edu
Report Finds Massachusetts Girls Lag Behind Boys in Sports ...
Report Finds Massachusetts Girls Lag Behind Boys in Sports ...
www.hsph.harvard.edu
Ironic, and further proof of the bludgeon simplicity of web ad buys. I am guessing that the first link was summoned by the phrase "baby girl" in her message, and the latter two came about from multiple references to the EEOC.
Posted by me at 10:13 PM | TrackBack
September 6, 2004
The Love Song
In high school I was briefly obsessed with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as I imagine many artsy types were. At the time my excitement about the poem had much to do with Eliot's reputation and my ability to grok his stuff, but it was the sound and imagery of the poem that set my love of the poem in motion. My head was filled with its louder music -- shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach -- to the extent that the sense of the quieter phrases (how should I presume? That is not it, at all.) were drowned out.
I read it again today and realized how little of the poem I had understood. In fact, I think its specific meaning escaped me entirely. From the context of an English class where I was struggling to be the best student, I conceived of Prufrock as struggling some overarching goal of artistic self-fulfillment, as I was. I somehow guessed Eliot was tilting at his own poetry.
Today Eliot's actual intent seems poignantly obvious to me. It's strange. It's not like I didn't have love on my mind when I first read it. Far from it; I used to beat myself up over how much more I thought about my love life than my schoolwork. I guess I just never thought to ask "do I dare?" Of course I dared. I dared; obviously I was going to succeed. Something I was doing was proving quite successful with men, though I understood it about as well as I understood Prufrock.
(There was no question about success in beginnings. The compelling question was whether any given romance was worth forcing through its crises. The question has endured and is my undoing.)
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells;
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
but I think I get it now. maybe I get it now.
Posted by me at 2:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 1, 2004
rear entry!
Sly (to Nick): I'll buy or do something nice for you.
Me (silly little voice): I'm going to eat now.
Sly: (pause) OK, not your business!
Me: Huh?
Sly (silly little voice): "Reer 3ntry!"
Me: What?!
Sly: I said I'd do something nice for Nick, didn't you say "reer 3ntry"?
Posted by me at 12:57 AM