No Logo and Gaming -- first year writing (fall, 2010)

Opening conversation:

Gonzalo Frasca, in “Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance, and Other Trivial

Issues,”    [Blackberry calendar sync]

With TED

Why/How games (Practice)

What are some other ways of thinking what a "worked example" might look like?

Alexander, Jonathan. "Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom." College Composition and Communication 61:1 (September 2009): 35-63

But Gee also believes that

participating in gaming can promote critical learning; specifically, he argues

that “[c]ritical learning . . . involves learning to think of semiotic domains as

design spaces that manipulate us . . . in certain ways and that we can manipulate

in certain ways” (43).

For Kress, though, the

end result of this change in writing’s dominance is clear: “One [engagement

with text] was the move towards contemplation; the other is a move towards

outward action” (59–60). Kress’s argument about such differences has a direct

relationship to our work as literacy specialists and writing instructors: How

can we simultaneously pay attention to and use these new modes of literacy

in our classrooms while maintaining and promoting “older” modes that we

know to be useful and productive of critical thinking, of the kinds of careful

and imaginative reflection that Kress, among others, associates with reading

long printed texts and writing essays?

Selfe and Hawisher’s Gaming Lives in the Twenty-First Century: Literate

Connections

“design grammars” in such semiotic domains—or, more specifically, “the principles

and patterns in terms of which one can recognize what is and what is not an

acceptable or typical social practice and identity in regard to the affinity group

associated with a semiotic domain” (30).