No Logo and Gaming -- first year writing (fall, 2010)
Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 03:32PM Gonzalo Frasca, in “Videogames of the Oppressed: Critical Thinking, Education, Tolerance, and Other Trivial
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
“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).
