Week 6

Tristan Dickison
Jul 10, 2017 · 8 min read

Reflection

Great videos and reading this week in examining new literacies! If anything, this class has only reaffirmed how much I have to learn to catch up, then keep up, with emerging new literacies. The Global One Room Schoolhouse: John Seely Brown (Highlights from JSB’s Keynote at DML2012) “The technology is the easy part, the hard part is what are the social practices around this and also the institutional structures?” According to Brown, the half life of skill today is 5 years. How to get kids to participate like they’re white water rafting as opposed to on a steam liner (and it’s the Titanic if they never embrace change; unlearn and relearn). JSB argues that Dewey’s (knowing, making, playing) and Montessori’s ideas (child-centered learning) can be recast and fully realized in the network age. We should look at infrastructure, social dynamics around the edge of games like World of Warcraft (WoW) in pursuit of our global one room schoolhouse.

Play within a safe space with permission to fail many times, as in sports, is essential to learning. Using digital media can now make contexts as well as content, a whole new dimension of creating meaning (i.e. blogging) joint context creation. We as learners need new strategies, tools to navigate this explosion of information. In Coding as the New Literacy — Mitchel Resnick, Resnick promotes coding as a new way for people to express themselves and share ideas, not just find increasingly in-demand work. Resnick compares coding to writing. As a society, we value the literacy, even if one doesn’t go on to write professionally, because being literate is essential to navigating everyday life. Writing also helps us organize and express our ideas to the world. Similarly, coding is not just about preparing for a job, programming can also be useful in everyday life as well as help us organize and think systematically about ideas. We don’t just “learn to write,” we “write to learn,” and similarly we code to learn. You have to be able to break down problems, troubleshoot, integrate others’ ideas, which are general problem-solving and design skills. You start to organize your thinking in different ways. No matter what you grow up to be, learning to code can help.

Resnick helped develop a programming language, “Scratch,” a graphical approach to programming that enables the layman to experiment with snapping blocks together in different combinations. In this way, anyone can start building games, stories, and animations while learning coding fundamentals along the way — including remixing, debugging, iterating, abstracting. In contrast to how Resnick himself learned to code, Scratch integrates users’ interests by allowing creative new combinations of various media, including its own social media network. Scratch endeavors to make programming more social by launching online community that serves as authentic audience and inspiration for new ideas. More than 4 million projects that people have shared. Resnick gives the example of 12 year old (username Red Neptune) who began animating characters, wrote in project notes that people could use her characters and suggest others, so that she was essentially an online consultant, even making online tutorials. Red Neptune eventually collaborated with 5 other children across 3 countries to make a game. By study more spontaneous group projects like this, educators could develop ways to better integrate coding into curriculum, just as traditional literacy is a critical part of every subject area. Just as the young brain acts as a sponge for language, an ability that diminishes with age, the sooner students are exposed to new literacies, the better.

Rethinking Learning: The 21st Century Learner | MacArthur Foundation Most important for future success of our students is to love change, be curious and have a questioning disposition. WoW gamers want to be measured to see how much they’re improving, hence the motto, “If I ain’t learning it ain’t fun.” Learning the tools and skills of remaking content, becoming creator and producer. Learning outside of school (informal learning with new media) is part of home, peer group, community essential for learning in schools. The question is how can we be more active about linking the two. Katie Salen, director of Institute of Play for Parsons New School for Design has the philosophy, “bring it out when we need it, put it away when we don’t need it,” so that young people learn appropriate limits for self-policing their use of technology. 21st century skills, including new literacies, aren’t just about technology/jobs; also about creativity, civic engagement, and our social lives. By valuing informal learning, we don’t abandon formal learning, but coordinate them in a much more effective way.

Takeaways from Code — The New Literacy. Vanessa from Girl Develop It, Importance of learning about software and computers, even if you don’t want to be a software developer: helps you understand how the world works today, affects purchases, how we eat and live, so that we don’t fall victim to others. William from Black Eyed Peas: It’s important for kids at 8 years old to be citizens of this planet, whatever country they’re from. In China, every student learns programming. In the U.S., less than 5%! This will come back to bite us hard!

Future Learning | Mini Documentary | GOOD: “World class education is a prerequisite for prosperity,” according to Obama. I agree. Biggest problem is our education system isn’t motivating kids, learning without authentic purpose. Sugata Mitra of Newcastle University: Reading, writing, arithmetic as traditionally taught is becoming an obsolete skill, much like we no longer must learn how to ride horses or shoot guns. These things are now “sports.” Khan Academy: education is just taking the latest technological gimmick without reconsidering the content to make it more engaging/motivating. He doesn’t make a video unless he finds it fascinating, and this excitement is conveyed to students.

Ntiedo Etuk, Founder and CEO of DimensionU argues videogames are some of the most powerful learning tools ever devised, because kids relentlessly keep trying despite (or perhaps because of) failure. In education, we continue to provide problems detached from the relevance/context in which these problems are actually used. Video games seamlessly integrate the two. Sugata Mitra placed a Computer in an Indian slum for free experimentation by kids who’d never been exposed to the technology; they quickly helped each other figure it out. Conclusion: children can teach themselves almost anything given the internet, a peer group, and the absence of a teacher (or outside pressure to engage in unsolicited learning). What we must do is begin to marry the ecosystem of technology with how the classroom works, so that teacher can focus on higher-order tasks. As adults, we think heuristically about learning; that is, you should learn something when you have a reason to learn it. But then we turn around and expect kids to sit still for eight hours a day completing decontextualized and underwhelming assignments.

Assignment: Syllabus w/ hypertext

For my assignment this week, I chose to do a mock-up syllabus that I hope to recycle in a month when I have real classes to plan out. I drew on a Chronicle of Higher Education article on creative approaches to the syllabus. For aesthetic inspiration in layout, I borrowed from elements of Tona Hangen’s post documenting an “extreme makeover” of her US History II syllabus. For course content, I watched Roberto Guzman’s TEDxED talk, “Teaching English without Teaching English,” and read through a creative syllabus for a course entitled, Calling Bullshit. I set out intent on using InDesign, and was hoping to stretch and learn more such that the workflow would speed up during the process. Instead, my worst fear was realized as I became bogged down in the minutiae, so that the tiniest steps turned into extended Youtube sessions. Out of frustration, I eventually abandoned InDesign because I the technical work was crowding out all my other ideas, or the actual meat of the syllabus. While initially I’d planned to create a syllabus for a “dream” class, I ultimately went with something I might actually teach. Doing it this way allowed for a) good practice with InDesign/thinking about planning a semester, b) a final product I’d have to eventually create anyway, and c) an addition to my portfolio since I’m still a first-year teacher on the prowl for a job this fall.

Great Week 6 Work from Others!

Critique

For Week 6, I chose to review and critique the online “alternate reality” game, World Without Oil (WWO), in the context of our theme about new literacies. The archived version of the original 2007 project as it unfolded may be viewed here. An embedded video in the case study, Welcome to a World Without Oil, includes plugs for the WWO project as well as interviews with some of its creators, who explain its allure and greater purpose for future problem-solving:

According to the video, the collaborative game spanned 32 days and included 60,000 visitors, including 1,800 players from 12 countries. The players were not operating in a conventional video game like World of Warcraft (i.e. represented by an avatar), but more as versions of themselves living and dwelling in the “as if,” (think Dungeons and Dragons brought online). In this case, the fictional reality to which all had subscribed begins as a dystopian oil shock not unlike the 1973 OPEC embargo, except things get worse to the point that individuals must change to adapt to the unfolding crisis. These lefty survivalists ban together in anarcho-syndicalist communities to enact solutions to problems from the mundane to the more serious. “‘The best way to change the future is to play with it first,’ Stefanie Olson, CNET News,” reads one review of the the WWO project. To me, it brought to mind Ender’s Game, in which children are trained to “play” battles of increasing complexity, most never realizing what they’re playing is no game. In creating an online community of people living “as if,” some real local solutions to future energy shortfalls bubble up from what began as merely an “alternate reality” game.

Digital technologists such as John Seely Brown have argued we should look seriously for insights on future productivity and innovation in the emergent infrastructure and social dynamics “around the edge of” games like World of Warcraft (WoW). As I see it, the “alternate reality” in World Without Oil would need more of the trappings of traditional gaming in order to be massively scalable and enjoy the popularity of WoW. The intentional online community is of course invested in the spirit of the game, and at 60,000 visitors the project attracted substantial onlookers (though not by comparison to some clip of Ariana Grande, for example), and yet the sort of person who actually became an active “player” remained pretty narrow. As JSB reminds us, kids playing video games love to be measured, to fail the same task or iterations and keep trying. It follows a general audience would likely be turned away from a highly ambiguous and subjective gaming experience. Moreover, beyond the storyline advanced by breaking bad news updates, there is no obvious unifying new literacy common to all players, rendering forums a hodgepodge of creative expression. If I were use WWO in my classroom, I’d want to compile a list of links in advance for students to explore in jigsaw fashion, breaking up the site somehow (for example, thematically) and allowing small groups of students to choose an aspect or portion to investigate, answering guiding questions along the way.

In general, I believe the WWO project notwithstanding its quirks and 10-year-old look endures as a poignant warning to our oil-addicted society. Simply exposing students to a list of the everyday items, not to mention the steps in our food system, derived from or reliant upon fossil fuels should be enough to surprise many and hopefully generate some proactive concern for the environment. The makers of the 2007 WWO project would never in their worst nightmares have believed that in 2017, Rex Tillerson would become Secretary of State. Or that in 2015 the Obama administration would see the reversal of a 40-year-old ban on US oil exports abroad, even before the real climate skeptics like Scott Pruitt (now head of EPA) arrived. Raising awareness about climate change remains more pressing than ever, and I believe WWO is due for a reboot.

    Tristan Dickison

    Written by

    Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
    Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
    Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade