Godzilla

Hello All,

I just saw this short post from kotaku.com (a videogame news site, run by Gawker Media) that cites another story from Gamespot.com that says that a visually impaired man is suing Sony for not making its virtual worlds more easily navigable for those with disabilities.

Sony's Home, a frequently used virtual world for Playstation 3 owners.

Here’s some info on a cool virtual world that shared by Clemson University and University of South Carolina- Greenville.

Essentially, the suit argues that Sony’s virtual worlds are not accessible for the visually impaired, and thus are in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. We know websites are must now follow guidelines that make them more easily navigable to those with disabilities. This suit is arguing that virtual worlds should follow this standard as well.

The MIT-Gambit Game Lab, an experimental game design studio in Singapore, is experimenting with making its games more accessible to those with disabilities.

But getting back to the first issue, I’m not sure how I feel. While I understand that any “public accommodations” need to be made available for people with disabilities, I wonder whether virtual worlds should be held to the same standard. In a way, it is similar to arguing that music should be made more accessible to those with hearing difficulties, or visual art should be more accessible to those with visual impairments. I am not trying to sound insensitive here. I just believe that we need to ask these kinds of questions with media of all types.

With the advent of new technologies, it is clear that many laws will need to be revised, or even re-written, to accommodate these new technologies.

After sifting through the collaborative essay structures that you sent me, the consensus reveals itself in the below structure. I have summarized your ideas and added some further suggestions for subjects to be discussed in each section. Each section will, I think, require some additional research to make it thorough, but that is a good thing:

Introduction
general consensus that we should build on and revise Anthony’s introduction; here we also need at least a brief introduction/definition of new media

Literature Review
general consensus that this is where we introduce the frame texts (Selber, Kress, Brooke, Jenkins, and I would add Wesch on YouTube in here) to provide an historical perspective on the main questions: What is literacy? The goal of the rest of the paper is going to be to building to an understanding of how new media challenges that understanding.

Case Study #1: Blogging
Discussion of blogging and its literacy practices, including both examples of and—and this is the most important part—how one constructs such spaces. This is the largest of the case studies.

Case Study #2: Microblogging
Discussion of twitter and its literacy practices, including both examples of and—and this is the most important part—how one constructs such spaces (including the 3^rd party app community, API, and cellular usages)

Case Study #3: Video and Remix
Discussion of YouTube and remix culture, including both examples of and—and this is the most important part—how one constructs such spaces (including copyright, intellectual property, Creative Commons, and idea of video as a text)

Case Study #4: Video Games
Discussion video games (1 video game would be best) and its literacy practices, including the games as texts but also how users construct such spaces through their interaction

Case Study #5: Information Processing
Here is the real Web 2.0 discussion, where we think about how we understand, organize, structure, and deal with the massive amounts of information out there. Examples to think about using are We Feel Fine, RSS readers, and so on)

Conclusion, or What To Make of This?
This is going to reveal itself after we put together the other sections, but it will also need to include a brief discussion of the kinds of things that are not covered so that readers understand that it is a limited discussion (that the limited space of the article does not allow for a lager discussion).

We’ll discuss this in class tonight and will divvy up the responsibilities for each section.

We’ve already discussed how multimodal computer games promote interaction and participatory culture for the expanding minds of children. Henry Jenkins, Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison thoroughly discuss the coupling of pedagogical uses of new media technology, such as computer games, with the development of literary skills in their research text, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.

Teachers and researchers recognize hands-on learning as often being a preferred and faster method of learning for school-age children. “Metagaming” and simulated programs, such as The Sims, help broaden experiences and skills that cannot be taught effectively through verbal lectures (Jenkins 40). Countless other simulation games are valued by teachers for their help in building problem-solving skills, such the early 1991 game, Myst.

Perhaps the most impressive game that I’ve seen, however, is Crayon Physics. Michael Thompson’s review of Crayon Physics offers a great description of the game and what skills it builds in its players:

“The basic idea behind Crayon Physics is that gamers have to get a ball to a point that is marked by a star. This is accomplished by drawing a number of different items that can act in a variety of ways to help get the ball from Point A to Point B. On a basic level, the drawings act as ramps or barriers, while more advanced implementation accomplishes a number of feats like creating weights and levers, as well as malleable platforms that can be affected by other creations.”

Thompson calls the object a “puzzle,” identifying the game’s real pedagogical value – players can solve these puzzles by “drawing” innovative solutions, instead of relying on items already provided by the game. There will obviously be more than one way to solve each “puzzle.” Thompson says players can be “creative and solve each puzzle through whatever means they can conceive, as opposed to only having one convoluted method as the only solution.”

Jenkins may have valued knowledge of Crayon Physics in arguing for Ian Bogost’s theory of “procedural literacy, a capacity to restructure and reconfigure knowledge to look at problems from multiple vantage points, and through this process to develop a greater systemic understanding of the rules and procedures that shape our everyday experiences” (Jenkins 45).

Jenkins stresses the value of simulation in games, arguing that schools need to build on skills afforded in each to help students become both literate and  critical readers. His idea of “distributed cognition” explains how students learn the affordances of different tools and information technologies (Jenkins 65). Crayon Physics perfectly argues his case for the use of computer games, as players must choose apply different solutions to different problems based on context.

When you Google “free twitter backgrounds” you get tons of results – not all of them, however, go to truly free sites. Then I found freetwitterdesigner.com:

In a few simple steps on this site I was able to take a photograph that I took and create a new twitter background. Here’s my twitter page now:

This was an awesome, easy to use twitter app

Having re-read, again, the collaborative essay I noted that there are portions that appear to be more book review, but by and large most of the text is not (in a good way). The problem that the essay suffers from most is organization – the problem was a result of us each writing about one book.

In the following basic outline, all relevant ideas from all the texts utilized, should be intertwined. For example, in discussion history, all relevant historical discussion should occur in the same section with representational portions from each text.

Here is the way I think this should be organized:

1. Utilize Anthony’s intro – it was well organized and represented a broad spectrum of what was to come
2. History of Rhetoric and technology/media literacy – it is essential to know where we came from so that we can understand where we are headed
3. How media literacy has grown and changed with technology – we need to know where we are going
4. End with social networking and beyond

I wish I had seen this while we were still talking about Vaidhyanathan’s, Copyrights and Copywrongs. Participatory Culture Foundation’s MIRO Community ties in Vaidhyanathan’s ideas of free, open spaces to share creativity, while working toward more participation. The non-profit’s mission is to build a service allowing people to become more engaged in their culture.

Here’s a little about it from the site, http://www.participatoryculture.org/:

“In addition to providing simple and convenient access to diverse video content from anywhere on the web, it creates a unique, personalized video site in minutes. Best of all, it is free to create a site (and it’s open source, so you can host your own).

Miro Community tackles two fundamental issues facing online video—the navigation of content dispersed all over the web, and the difficulty for less tech savvy producers to establish their own attractive video site. Audiences and creators know all too well the hassle of searching unsuccessfully for a video or maintaining unified video content across a growing number of popular hosting platforms.”

Recently I read an article about how we are influenced by our digital social networks. I assume that most of us are familiar with the proverbial phrase “you are who your friends are”. This same idea may also be applicable to your digital friends and your friends digital friends and your friends friends digital friends. And if you are active in one or more social networking cites than that is probably a whole lot of individual many of whom you have probably never meet either face to face or digitally.    The article, Obesity, STDs flow in social networks by Elizabeth Landau, reiterates the idea that we are impressionable creatures and that those impressions may just as easily be made digitally as in person.  “New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too,” states Elizabeth Landau in the article  Happiness is contagious in social networks and the video The Power of Social Networks . The same may be true for your eating habits, voting preferences, etc. However Landau explains “at the fourth degree the influence substantially weakens.” Dr. Nicholas Christakis the author of “Connected,” and Dr. James Fowler an associate professor at the University of California, have expanded on this new theory to explore the trends in cigarette smoking and obesity. An article by Fowler and Christakis in New England Journal of Medicine stated that when an individual quits smoking than their friends’ likelihood of quitting smoking was 36 percent. Moreover, clusters of people who may not know one another gave up smoking around the same time”.

These theories are still in their initial stages and somewhat experimental.  But, it will be interesting to see how their might affect other areas such as marketing and advertisement placing.  Already Facebook advertisers target their ads to individuals based on their personal information, tastes, hobbies, opinions, etc. so that their ads will be more appealing and you are more inclined to make purchases.  It will be interesting to see if knowledge of your friends and social spheres will increase that.

However, some people are unnerved by this influence or find that the lines between different aspects of their lives have become too blurred.  Christopher Butcher is an employee of The Beguiling a comic book store and has a Facebook group for the Toronto Comics Arts Festival. Butcher explains that when Facebook was just for college students it “provided a inbuilt system of boundaries” but when everyone was able to join, Facebook “lost the aspect where what network you’re in defines the information you get.”

Similarly Fowler and Christakis have proposed that even though individuals may call hundreds of people on Facebook and other social networks their “friend”, or an equivalent term that points to some sort of connection or interest in an individual, the number of close friends that a person has did not necessarily change.  Christakis and Fowler found that people had approximately “between six and seven close friends on Facebook, which is not far from sociologists’ estimate that most people have four to six close friends in real life”.  They believe that a better measure of friendship is found though pictures.  If individuals tag each other in posted photos than they are more likely to have a close relationship not just the person you sat three rows behind one semester in class but never talked to.  Overall Fowler states that social networks like Facebook and Myspace are “just yet another way through which humans exert their inherent natural tendency to try to connect to other people that they care about.” With this knowledge it will be interesting to see how social networks evolve in the years to come.

The incorporation of new media in the classroom has been an ongoing process.  In the mid-1960s, bulky vacuum tube computers were establishing a presence on well-to-do universities, and smaller miniframes and minicomputers were starting to be used.   According to Catherine Schifter’s 2008 article, “A Brief History of Computers, Computing in Education, and Computing in Philadelphia Schools,” computers were often used in the 1960s for computer-assisted instruction.  Many teachers were hesitant to use this new technology and preferred educating with tools they knowledgeable with rather that this “alien” technology.

It wouldn’t be until the rise of Apple and their donations of computers to schools and universities would a class rely on computers as an educational tool.  In the 1980s, computer classes, or “labs”, became part of the curriculum.  However, the use of computers was still very constricted to the teaching of computer literacy.  This was so because computer skills weren’t needed in other classes, or if they were at all, they were used on a very basic level (simple math problems, science quizzes, etc).  Their use for higher level teaching was not popular outside of programming courses at universities.  Apple’s development of a decent word processing program, the Apple Works suite, became a common in 1984, but high school typing classes wouldn’t be until 1990.

Then textbooks began supplementing their material with 3.5in floppy disks and CD-ROMS.  The multimedia program, Hyperstudio, introduced high school students to multimodality in text.  Computer rooms in school were becoming more and more common as this “Internet” thing was slowly being realized as more than just a fad.

Now, computers and education have become integrated down to the elementary level.  The importance of computer literacy and teachers who are knowledgeable with computers have facilitated that integration.  A first grade teacher at Prairie South School in Central Saskatchewan, Canada, uses technology daily with her six to seven year old students.  They routinely use the Internet and even have their own blog, Blogmeister.  The following video was made by the class and is an example of just how fundamental new media has become in our schools.  (Pardon the music)

However, even though schools across the nation have created a multitude of computer classes and classes have worked computer use into their respective studies, there is still a need for a more systemic educational standards.  The participatory nature of new media presents many obstacles and questions that children, if left on their own, may or may not successfully navigate to became active and intelligent members of this new culture.  This is the argument Henry Jenkins et al. have constructed in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.  They stressed that young people need to develop a certain set of skills to achieve such a participatory status.  Those skills are play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, judgment, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation.

They ask and address three questions on page 56 to which the aforementioned skill set need be applied to:

• How do we ensure that every child has access to the skills and experiences needed to become a full participant in the social, cultural, economic, and political future of our society?
• How do we ensure that every child has the ability to articulate his or her understanding
  of the way that media shapes perceptions of the world?

• How do we ensure that every child has been socialized into the emerging ethical standards that will shape their practices as media makers and as participants within online communities?

These questions raised by Jenkins and his colleagues are one that educators and scholars have been asking since computer technologies were seen as an important and ignored learning tool.  It would seem that teachers all over the world have been grappling with this problem and have been adjusting their courses accordingly, however new media have advanced incredibly fast in the last decade.  Administrations have be hard pressed to adjust so quickly and teachers may be more capable for impromptu adaptations, but the educational system is a slow giant.  We need to look at how schools are helping students become active participants in our “Web 2.0 culture” and determine what we can do to improve that transformation.

With advances in the internet and the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, individuals can better utilize digital recourses.   The features of this evolution according to Tim O’Reilly include; “Services… with cost-effective scalability, control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them, trusting users as co-developers, harnessing collective intelligence, leveraging the long tail through customer self-service, software above the level of a single device, and lightweight user interfaces, development models, and business models.” Users of Web 2.0 have greater ability to interact with content.  Thus, they have moved from a consumer driven culture to a participatory one where users actually produce content and inform others.

A participatory culture according to Henry Jenkins and the other contributors of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture is “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices… [a culture] in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection” (p. 3).  In this text Jenkins, provides an in depth look at how technology is impacting our culture. I was particularly interested in the idea that individuals that have moved from consumers of information to producers of information may have done so primarily because of popular culture and to some degree societal pressures not as much because of their education.

Jill Walker Rettberg also pointed to these changes in Blogging; Digital Media and Society Series. From the title of the text we can guess that Rettberg is talking mostly about blogs and their functions as a means of self exploration, citizen journalism, creating a dialog between the author of the post and those who wish to comment, etc.  However, these same ideas are relevant to other aspects of digital literacy.

Such is the case with Jenkins discussion of video games and their possibility to communicate valuable information to players. Jenkins states that “contemporary video games allow youth to play with sophisticated simulations and, in the process, to develop an intuitive understanding of how we might use simulations to test our assumptions about the way the world works” (p. 23).  Jenkins continues on to highlight a conversation between a boy and his father that shows that the game provided valuable historical and political information.  We can see this sort of participation in an ever growing number of spaces including but certainly not limited to music such as with youtube and sampling as is described in Copyrights and Copywrongs; The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity by Siva Vaidhyanathan.

Henry Jenkins et al., in their e-book, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, discussed some of the more significant features of participatory cultures and how they pertain to education. By definition, participatory cultures are groups of people who share a common interest, and work collaboratively, informally, to share information about this interest, and improve their skills within the field. Jenkins et al point to middle school students who write fan fiction, elementary age students who design their own maps in Sim City, and how these examples point to a shift in the way young people consume, and now, produce media.

It is amazing to see that popular culture is providing young people with such valuable texts to work with. Whereas I always felt guilty when I was a kid spending hours reading Sports Illustrated or Electronic Gaming Monthly, and ignoring the work I should have been doing in my English class, I was really building my literacy skills that was just as good as the kids who did their homework. If I began writing my own feature articles, maybe I could have been better. In any event, the scholarship on participatory culture the the super-literacy of alienated youth always strikes a chord with me.

One of the features about the book I found most telling is how the authors look at such diverse and varied skills as writing, game playing, video editing, and music editing  all falling under the umbrella of “new media literacy.” But really, this makes a great deal of sense when we consider the remediation of older media on the web and the carbon copy nature of digital reproduction. We can make limitless copies of any media on the web. To creative and industrious youth, they are quickly becoming indispensable tools, just as much as words and numbers to the generations before.

However, Jenkins et al. make the seemingly obvious, but all-too-rare statement that new media literacies cannot simply replace the old, but most augment them. They explain: Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Just as the emergence of written language changed oral traditions and the emergence of printed texts changed our relationship to written language, the emergence of new digital modes of expression changes our relationship to printed texts” (p. 19). This is a sticking point with many. We cannot throw  away the wonderful utility and cultural richness of centuries of traditional written language. At the same time, however, we cannot stand pat and ignore the changes technology has wrought on communication, learning, knowledge, and meaning-making. I think the position that Jenkins et al. take, which builds on the definition of literacy by the New Media Consortium covers all the bases.

Jenkins et al will take this argument a step further, and argue that traditional literacy skills are even more important than they were previously. They explain: “If anything, these traditional skills assume even greater importance as students venture beyond collections that have been screened by librarians and into the more open space of the web” (p. 20). Fair enough. Information that students encounter in schools is largely sterilized, approved, and largely trustworthy. Such is not the case in the Wild, Wild, Web, and I believe that Jenkins et al are correct in saying that traditional literacy skills take on a much greater importance because it is that much more difficult to ascertain where a give piece of information came from.