Ito says that educators, no matter their stance, have "the tendency to fetishize technology as a force with its own internal logic standing outside of history, society, and culture. The problem with both of these stances is that they fail to recognize that technologies are in fact embodiments, stabilizations, and concretizations of existing social structure and cultural meanings."
Last year I subbed for a teacher for a week and I would go with the student to the computer lab for type of keyboarding class. After the students would finish the assignment for the day, there was a list of websites they could go to and play games. I remember asking the teacher of the lab about the websites and what sorts of games were there. She didn't know, but ensured me that there were appropriate.
I have thought of that experience since and wonder, "appropriate for what?" That would be like watching any film that's PG for no reason other than the fact that you are allowed to. Why aren't we talking about the media or using it in any productive way.
One of the more surprising sections for me was in the Squire article when he had the exchange between the two young people having a very legitimate conversation about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
"Gamer 1: Your main character just got out of jail, a black dude in LA joining back up with a
gang. All the gang members the skinny guy and the fat guy smoking bowls and passing shit.
It’s so stereotypical.
Gamer 2: Dude all the other GTAs are stereotypical. They’re about Italian Americans and
stuff. I heard that Vice City had one line that was really controversial. Kill all the Haitians. He
was being like “genocide.” It wasn’t bullshit that they threw in there. There was controversy
between those two groups in New York. When I played Vice City, it was like being in the
movie Scarface. Same movie, same city. They are all the same ones in Scarface. You pretty
much live in the same house it’s all down to the detail. When I played SA, the first movie I
thought of was Menace to Society. All their names are all brought from those characters. "
This is an honest conversation about racial representations. The "gamers" are also able to relate the game to other forms on media and history. They are not falling into the same pitfalls of not contextualizing that Ito warns of.
I am very interested in finding a game and attempting to use it in a positive way with the students. I love being able to take media they know (films, TV shows, etc. and now games) and put it into the framing of the classroom.
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovation/scientific-study-shows-skilled-gamers-have-bigger-brains-smaller-?partner=homepage_newsletter
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2 comments:
Umm...first of all, let me roll my eyes at that teacher. Now that it's done, my guess is that she meant that the websites/games were "morally appropriate" (we ARE in Utah, after all and in the educational realm, THAT is what appropriate often translates into). It could also mean that the sites in SOME way related to the curriculum, even if the relationship was only tangential. (Kind of like World History's connection to Oregon Trail.) I like your comparison to movie-watching habits, and I'm just curious as to whether or not you went on and looked at the students' options.
On another note, this article that you posted is REALLY interesting, and I think it ties back into the question that Amy asked on Tuesday. Is the game culture going to alter things to such a degree that the way people learn is going to be drastically altered? It certainly seemes possible, as does the possibility of using MRI for military recruitment.
She gave me some strange looks for getting on an empty computer and going to the same websites as the students.
The games were fine, but no particularly challenging. It was just a bunch of language puzzles, like word search, etc. But most of the students just played that marble game. Have you seen this? It's on every computer in every classroom. I have no idea why.
I thought the article was interesting because of the concept that education must change. If education changes then so will everything else.
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