Multiliteracies in ELA Classrooms

While I understand that it is the process and principals of video games that Jim Gee is interested in, I would like to speak for a moment about their content, and the possible applications of it. I spoke briefly in class about video game narratives, as a genre, and I would like to expand on that idea here.

When I was young and had the urge to write a story, I only ever wrote in one form: video game narrative. I would spend weeks or even months on one idea: drawing maps and pictures of the world, writing notes about the environment, discovering characters and creating histories. My notes were extremely detailed, because the assumption was that the player would be able to interact with all aspects of the world, and I had to devise exactly how the world would respond to this interaction. In addition to this type of writing, I would also create a somewhat linear narrative that would serve as the central narrative for the game. This narrative kind of resembled a tree, as it would have changing parts, depending on player action.

While the process of writing this narrative may or may not have resembled that of someone in the beginning stages of devising a novel, I HAD to consider it as the start of a game, specifically. I had to imagine the story as one that would be experienced specifically by playing through it. The way one experiences a narrative in the form of a video game seems to be specific to the genre; you have to work for the story. You cannot learn what happens next until you earn that information; you are very actively engaged in discovering the narrative.

Additionally, because video games are primarily a visual genre, there are aspects of the writing that would be similar to that of writing for the stage or the screen. The aesthetic of the game, visually, contributes significantly to how the game is read. I spent a lot of time imagining and trying to put down in words the intended atmosphere of the game: the way it looks, the way it sounds, how players move through space, how items react to being touched. All of the these components contribute to how the player reads the game and experiences the narrative, just as how angels, lighting and music affect the viewing of a film. I would have notebooks full of notes and pieces of prose dedicated to games I was writing, focused on these details.

I bring this up to suggest that my experience of pleasure writing video games cannot be more sophisticated or intensive than the process of writing a video game that is actually made. What I am trying to say is that this thoughtful engineering lies behind all games with rich narratives. As such, they are just as valid as film, literature, or theatre for study and critique.

Participating in T

Participating in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: A Synesthetic Experience

In collaboration with my 2 and 4 year old sons, we experimented with using text, images and paint to participate with T. S. Eliot while he recites passages from section V of his poem “The Wasteland”, “What the Thunder Said”.

I first used Audacity (free audio editing software) to establish the timing associated with quotes I wanted to display using text. I then selected photos that might support some of the imagery evoked by the poem.

My sons and I then listened to the poem in segments, taking turns participating with the recording using paint, text and photo image. I took a photo of each visual element as it was added to our master collage/graffiti work. Once we had made our way through the poem segment, I downloaded the photos into iPhoto then imported them to iMovie, which allowed me to create a slowmation film very easily.  Finally, I overlaid the mp3 of T. S. Eliot reciting the poem. All in all, a fun project!

I hope that you enjoy watching our film.

https://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=V2zBnI4q3FE

The notion of “fun and games” often alludes to children playing games and having fun in their spare time outside of the classroom environment. If children and adolescents have fun outside the classroom, shouldn’t they be able to have fun inside the classroom too? In James Gee’s article, Good Video Games and Good Learning, he articulates the value in playing games in a classroom setting in order to develop a particular skill set involving problem solving, risk-taking, and exploration. Gee states that students “cannot apply their knowledge to solve problems or understand the conceptual lay of the land in the area that they are [currently] learning” (Gee 34). Rather, students are often taught to develop memorization skills and in turn, their ability to regurgitate facts. Although memorization may be a valuable skill, it does not prepare students for entering a world that requires the ability to problem solve and think critically on a daily basis. Students should be taught skills that are transferable to real life situations. The incorporation of games of all forms in the classroom environment will allow students to take risks and have fun in the class and will thereby motivate students to become more engaged in classroom activities.

Prior to reading Gee’s article, I can’t say that I had thought much about incorporating gaming into my own classroom environment. Yet, I think that many of the skills that you can learn from gaming are incredibly valuable and would be beneficial for an individual as they move forward in their life. For instance, one key skill learned when gaming is risk-taking which I think is a skill that many people overlook. Gee states that gaming encourages students to “take risks, explore, and try new things” (Gee 35). Gaming can allow students to create narratives based on the stories they create within the gaming world. Gaming also gives students the opportunity to fail and try again. I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Gee argues that in the gaming world “failure is a good thing” (Gee 35). In many online games, an individual may lose a level and then be given the opportunity to restart that level shortly after. In this type of environment, students get the chance to make mistakes, learn from them, and then apply their new skills when they try the level over again. With age, students will learn that much of life is about trial and error. Learning how to take the knowledge learned from one’s mistakes and how to use that knowledge to find success in future endeavors is a life skill that is applicable to any person’s life.

Classrooms around the world are often filled with bored and unengaged students. Games have the ability to engage students for hours on end and encourage students to consciously think about the decisions and choices they are making online. The modern classroom should engage students and make them excited to come to class. Gee writes in his article that “Humans actually enjoy learning, though sometimes in school you would not know it” (Gee 34). I think that using gaming in the classroom has the potential to give students agency and will give students a sense of control and ownership ownership over what they are doing (Gee 36). I don’t believe that games should make up the entire curriculum for any particular course. However, I believe that if educators use games in the classroom environment in conjunction with traditional methods of teaching, student will become more engaged and more likely to remember the material they are taught.

References

Gee, J. (2005). Good Video Games and Good Learning. Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 85(2), 33-37.

 Instant Messaging and the Future of Language

This article accurately and poignantly addresses a growing concern in our society caused by the astounding prevalence of instant messaging among youth. The concern is that the constant use of IM—which, in its essence, has many users employing an excess of shorthand, incorrect spelling, grammatical errors, and the incorporation of numbers in their messages. The fear is that this shorthand will, and in some cases has, bled into the arena of academic writing.

I feel that this fear is an irrational one, and that we ought to give students more credit than they are being given. This article addresses this fear as though it is impending, but the article was written in 2005, and nine years later this isn’t as big of a problem as the author has forecast. Beyond this, it is far more important to teach students the importance of different registers, and when it is important to use each one. Seeking to shut down this new language of the youth of today will ultimately stifle their own creativity; it is more reasonable to educate them on the different situation to use these different registers.

There can actually be benefits to embracing students continuing to text in this fashion. One example of this is that most smartphones today come equipped with an auto-correct feature. With students persisting to use this new form of literacy, they would at least see the correct version of the word they are spelling on their phone, and the correct spelling will be engrained in their mind for when they have to complete a writing assignment in class, obviously with the appropriate register.

Another benefit is that we as educators can harness this emerging form of literacy to use for motivational purposes. Constructing a writing assignment where students create a conversation between two characters texting each other is a great example of this, and students would react well to being able to write in this style. We can then reinforce the more traditional style of writing by having students translate a partners assignment into proper, grammatically correct prose with the right spelling.

Something else to consider is the priority we are placing on these students’ written outputs. We ought to be more concerned with the content that students are writing, with less of an emphasis on syntax, grammar and spelling. While it is obviously of importance to teach the correct rules of grammar and correct spelling, we should be paying more close attention to the content of what our students are writing, given that the poor grammar and spelling doesn’t detract from the meaning of the written output.

References:

Baron, N.S. (2005). Instant messaging and the future of language. Communications of the ACM, 46(7), 30-31.

LLED 368 Media Project 2

 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep7znxJ6dAQ

-Rachel, Kelly, Jenny K.

Hamlet Game

Hamlet rubric

Although I didn’t get a chance to teach Shakespeare during my practicum, I can appreciate how difficult it must be to make it interesting for students who several hundreds of years removed from the original context in which the plays were written an performed.  I know that I personally didn’t show a real interest in Shakespeare until I studied it during my undergrad at the University of Victoria (thanks to a very good professor).

When approaching Shakespeare’s tragedies, I always start with one question: Is this a “tragedy of bad luck” or a “tragedy of bad choices”?  While I don’t want to necessarily limit Shakespeare’s writing to those two schema, I find that they are a good place to start to get the conversation rolling.  As soon as you can start pin-pointing what lead to the fall of the protagonist in these plays, they become much easier to read (especially once you start recognizing patterns).

That being said, I read Hamlet as a “tragedy of bad choices.”  Not only does he make bad choices, but the choices occur simultaneously (he is damned if he does and he is damned if he doesn’t); that means that it is also a tragedy of “bad luck” because he is only left with two really bad choices that will get him into trouble, no matter what choice he makes.  My approach to this project, therefore, is the possible beginnings of a project that students could do to explore what would have to happen in the play in order to give Hamlet a happy ending (if a happy ending is possible).

Since this is very much a game of “what if,” I felt that a roleplaying game or a “choose-your-own-adventure narrative” would be the best medium for this assignment, since these are both genres with an emphasis on choice and what happens when those choices are made.  I tried out some free software for making simple roleplaying games, but these proved to be way too challenging for me and I could only imagine how difficult it would be for my students to have to figure out how these platforms worked.  I wasn’t  sure how much band-for-their-buck they would get from that approach so I decided to do something simpler.  I found that using hypertext in powerpoint proved to be quite useful.  It may not produce the fanciest game, but it is a good project to introduce the students to the process of using hyptertext and making powerpoints (which are media literacy skills that they can use) as well as give them an interesting and meaningful way to engage with the text.

Since I was only using the most basic bread and butter of the plot of Hamlet  to inform my prototype, storyboarding wasn’t a huge issue.  My focus was on where the pivotal choices were made, why they were made, how they might be made differently (and what would have to take place in order for that to take place), and what would happen afterward.  For that purpose, I broke my “storylines” into the following scenarios (SPOILER ALERT!!)

Bad Choice #1: Hamlet stabbed Claudius.  

Throughout the play, Hamlet is provided with clues and evidence that indicate that killing Claudius (in spite of what he did) was not the best course of action.  He was being ordered around a ghost who was described as appearing to be sinister in nature and action (also, as a side note, good kings don’t usually get assassinated, sent to Hell, and come back as ghosts).  But the pivotal moment in the play is when he sees Claudius praying to God for forgiveness for what he has done; when presented with the chance to be merciful, he chooses vengeance instead.  Because he has made this choice, his death is inevitable for two reasons: he is motivated by revenge (which is a privilege that belongs to God) and he is killing a king (even though he isn’t exactly a righteous one).  Assuming Shakespeare didn’t want to be put out of business for writing plays where people got off scott-free for killing kings, Hamlet had to die.

There are two ways I was thinking of playing around with this question.  The first is what would happen if Hamlet didn’t kill Claudius.  These scenarios either had to involve Hamlet avoiding the conversation with the ghost altogether, having a change of heart in the chapel scene, or deciding right away that ghosts are scary and that it is best not to listen to them (making Hamlet a coward, but a living coward).  For the purposes of this project, I only focused on the choices that Hamlet made at the beginning of the play; in this case, he either makes nice with Claudius and Gertrude right away or he runs away from the ghost (because ghosts are scary, evil, and don’t offer good advice).  At the ends of these storylines, Hamlet and Ophelia live happily ever after.  If we learned about the assassination, King Claudius dies of an un-suspicious heart attack.

Bad Choice #2: Hamlet doesn’t kill Claudius fast enough.

The problem with the “Hamlet  kill Claudius” scenario is that we know that Claudius murdered King Hamlet.  As I mentioned before, you are not allowed to have murdered kings go unanswered for so it has to be resolved somehow; Hamlet has to be the one to do it because he is the “man of the family” and therefor needs to be the one to avenge his father’s death and kill his father’s murderer.  In this situation, Hamlet makes the mistake of waiting too long to kill Claudius.  Arguably, he could have killed him in the chapel and the stage would have been a whole lot less bloody at the end of the play.

For the options that I provided for Hamlet to be sneaky and careful about how he went about to kill Claudius, the story pretty much went in the same direction as the play usually goes, which is that Hamlet goes crazy and kills and/or terrorizes the household before the final scene, where we find Fortinbras surrounded by dead bodies on the stage.

Again, since I was focusing on choices Hamlet could have made at the beginning of the play, I just decided to have Hamlet push Claudius down a flight of stairs.  Again, the problem here is that Hamlet has just killed a king (which is bad) so Hamlet had to get caught and executed for his crimes (as noble as they were).

As with my first media project, I would probably leave assessment pretty open and flexible when it comes to the scenes and alternate endings that the students come up with.  My main criteria for this is that the artistic choices are clearly informed by the text and the social, moral, and religious conventions of Shakespeare’s day were adhered to (even if the characters are somewhat modern-looking, as was the case with mine).  Since this is also a “powerpoint project,” I would also be assessing the quality of their powerpoint (if all the hyperlinks work, if the font is readable, etc.).

Also like my last project, a good chunk of the mark would come from an artist’s statement that would accompany this project.  This is where I can really tell where the students’ thoughts are and how well their ideas are grounded in the text and period of the work which is what I’m assessing in the first half of the assignment (which also makes it useful for a cheat sheet).

I think that the main challenge for this project is that it runs the risk of becoming huge and too big to be completed because there are so many directions where it could go and it is easy to want to do everything.  To avoid this problem, I would maybe limit the students to exploring one of the problems that I presented earlier and one or two alternate endings.  The students will also need very specific instructions on how much of they play they should quote directly from the text and how much they should summarize.  I think this could be addressed by giving them a “slide count” for their powerpoints to give them some boundaries.

Here is a PDF of our artwork, write up, rubric, and bibliography:

LLED 368 Media Project 2

Here are all Justin’s sources from his collage:

Twelfth Night Collage Sources

-Danielle, Anna, Ashley, Becca, Amanda, Justin

When I think about it I can’t find any evidence that the “visual” aspect of literacy has ever been separate from our general literal abilities. Even if we discount the fact that people once drew pictures on stones to function in tandem with their stories, there is no one who could argue that we do not all imagine some visual image in our minds when we read text or hear stories. The visual is essentially inseparable from literacy and as Messaris says, “it can be argued that, by acquiring visual literacy, people enrich their repertoires of cognitive skills and gain access to powerful new tools of creative thought.” I personally think that we’ve already been engaging cognitively with with the visual, however what Messaris is getting at is that with new forms of media this literacy is growing ever more complex. I like how how Messaris uses the cinematic form to emphasis this, especially in his analysis of the “close up” or movement of the camera and its effects on the viewer. Messaris states that “By controlling the viewer’s positioning vis-a-vis the characters, objects, or events in an image, including the image sequences of film or television, the images producers can elicit responses that have been conditioned by the viewer’s experience of equivalent interrelationships with real-life people, things, and actions.” What Messaris is referring to here is the analogical aspect of so prevalent with the visual form, especially the moving cinematic form. In real life we have access to “close-ups.” Our eyes work like cameras. The focus in and out of objects and people in our periphery, and even scan across lines so that we can position ourselves in place and even time. The cinematic visual functions in much the same we. The camera can examine a face and elicit emotion in the viewer much like a person can with say the face of a lover a desired object. In fact we’ve been doing this from the beginning, as we can see when babies deeply examine and scan their mother’s faces to understand emotion and respond emotionally. In fact we learn how to “read” faces long before we learn how to read words. I see what Messaris is saying more as a going back to our roots and in doing so, developing cognitive skills, related to “reading” (understanding emotional cues, intent, and even literary elements like foreshadowing) by incorporating a new form of literacy. Yes as the article states, the viewer already naturally does this but does not know it. Messaris emphasis, with regards to the the visual film form, that “because they appear to be simple extensions of our every day, real-world perceptual habits, we may interpret them without much conscious awareness or careful scrutiny.” And here I think that this is all the more a reason to tach visual (film) literacy in the classroom, since we are already naturally equipped, at least subconsciously, with the skills and techniques to engage with the medium. All that remains for us is to bring these skills to the fore and from there who knows what other forms of visual literacy may emerge.

Work Cited

Messaris, P. (1998). Visual Aspects of Media Literacy. Journal of Communication, 48(1), 70-80

Naz

For our second media project we decided to create a big Art Attack à la Neil Buchanan’s show Art Attack.  We have attached our rationale and write up for this project below.  Pictures and video to come.

Media Project #2

Here is a small portion of what we started with: a stack of sheets, pillow cases, blankets, towels and t-shirts.

So on our first day we decided to create a camera. Here is a look from above at our progress. (We later realized because of the colours we had, a camera might not work out so well.)

Then we decided on an iPhone, playing on the idea of the audience taking pictures of a social media art attack to later post on social media. Here is the process we used to create an app (simply a folded up t-shirt).

And finally, here is an artist’s view of our final product.

A big thank you to all those who tweeted, instagramed and hashtagged during and after our presentation. It was a great experience to see your perspectives 🙂

Carrington states that Standard English and txting are “oppositional positions” with “txting represented as the abnormal intruder” (2005). While Carrington makes the case that txting is a reflection on the media that we use, and that we need to be flexible to allow for new modes of expression, I personally believe that txting belongs in the world of mobile phones, and needs to stay there. In a way, I do think that txting IS the “abnormal intruder.”

During Shakespeare’s time, spelling was not regulated, allowing writers to use endless different ways to spell their works. The problem with non-standardized rules of language, however, is that meaning may be lost along the way. For example, when I read the “essay” written by the Scottish girl, I thought that “FTF” meant “F*ck that family” or some other variation using the expletive (as in abbreviations such as FML, LMFAO, OMFG, etc). Consistency, for me, is an important thing. I am not saying that all instances of the letter “F” in abbreviations need to stand for “F*ck,” but there is a point at which I ask: was that abbreviation necessary? Is it worth the extra time to have your reader try to understand it?

In the face of so much txting, most of us laugh off funny spelling and grammatical errors, point them out to students, and continue on with our teaching. While I don’t think that txting is decimating the population’s ability to write properly, I think that we need to look more seriously at the errors that do occur in formal circumstances. Schooling is formal, and thus it must be done in a formal language. I wonder, sometimes, what happened to the emphasis on learning grammar and spelling in school. Of course students need to be able to express themselves and make mistakes. But this does not mean that we need to ignore the need to teach this formally in school. When I was teaching in China, I was ashamed to learn that many ESL students knew English grammar better than your average English first language, Canadian-born student.

With this impoverished grasp of the English language, then, can we take lightly the fact that students often prioritize their grasp of txting lingo over that of Standard English? Txting is a great way to expand social networks and develop identity through language. This I don’t deny. But we cannot look at grammar and spelling errors in school with the same lightness of attitude that we use to look at txting.

I also believe that txting cannot be held solely responsible for the proliferation of an I-don’t-care-attitude towards the rules of language. Say what you want about the constantly changing landscape of the English language, but the fact remains that those who write a resume or essay with faulty spelling and grammar will still be looked down upon (or not taken seriously as a scholar), regardless of age or generation.