A Non-believer in the Gaming Industry Sees an Alternative Light

So my mind's running a million miles a minute after watching all those videos...especially the McGonigal one. Chris Anderson was fabulous too, but it was McGonigal that really connected to two things for me.

I've never been able to look at gaming in another light; my brother has done it for years (headset and all - I would've been interested to see what she had to say about Call of Duty in that Ted Talks as well),and I've always been that girl who feels that, when friends complain to me that they have to compete with a game for their boyfriends attention, she is lucky enough to not have to deal with that relationship issue in her own. So...I've been on the "too much gaming, not enough outdoor activity" bandwagon. I mean, seriously. 5.93 MILLION YEARS of WOW gaming time? What about the trees and the mountains, man?

So the idea that McGonigal presents kind of made me look at all of this in a new light. We've kind of lost the battle on this one; gamings not going anywhere (and has apparently been around for thousands of years, though I'd argue that sitting on your bum for hours on end is slightly different than dice or tag...), so why not embrace it in the way that she suggests? By using gaming to change the way we look at the world and it's "unsolvable" problems?

I think her notion of the Super Empowered Hopeful Individual is a really important one - and I think the reason I connected to her in that video was because of the word "empower." I did a big project on child marriage and girls' education in impoverished countries last year, and when I was researching solutions for what could be done about the situations in which these issues exist, the one word that kept cropping up was empowerment. Over and over and over again. If we can empower these girls to feel confident, if we can give them educational opportunities, we can empower them to change the way they look at problems in their cultures (such as child marriage), and it goes on. So empowerment, that hope that things can get better, is where it's at.

I agree with that. I believe it - but I believe it more so in countries where the event of child marriage is taking place, where education is a hard won right if you are born female. The issue then, falls over here. And when we watch videos like McGonigal's, we feel that empowerment. We get it and we want to help. The problem is...how do we sustain that? How do we sustain that motivation to change the world? I really believe it can be done. I'm just not sure how, quite yet, we can pull gamers out of situations like the ones Call of Duty or WOW offers, and put them into others games like the ones she used examples at the end of her talk. How do we achieve that lasting empowerment?

Hillary

"Those who invade the linguistic domain of men must overcome their own sense of the inadequacies of a woman's speech. Unsurprisingly, then, political women are more "assertive, more venturesome, more imaginative and unconventìonal, and more liberal in their attitudes” than women in the population at large. The pressures of deviating from expected social roles exact a price. Female politicians tend toward "a serious and  manner and . . . a fretful uncertainty about themselves and their situation." "
-Jamieson (5)

It's awesome to see topics from three of my classes pulled together in Jamieson's article: eloquence and Margaret Fuller/women's issues. The thing that I can't quite get past is, if Fuller was writing in the 19th century (and I wonder what the date of this article is?) and we've evolved and matured and become more enlightened through the years, why do we still need articles and books expounding on this subject?

Apparently, because not too much has really changed.

The whole last part of Jamieson's article put me in mind of Hillary Clinton - that line about "women paying in shriveled uteruses for political standing" made me think about all of the comments I've heard about Hillary over the years, and and especially when she ran for president. There is only one guy I know who has anything good to say about her - even supports her political endeavors. But almost everyone else tone revolves around "she's a shriveled up witch" essentially, and "it's not that we don't want a female president, we just don't want her" which I doubt would change if another woman stepped up to the plate.

Hillary went from being the First Lady/mother to a high ranking politician in her own right - but that has not come without a price - and that price seems to be obvious from what I hear said about her.

It's interestingly terrible that female politicians have to give up so much of their femininity in order to run for office. The pant suits, the short hair that most women sport in those roles are all what we would traditionally consider "manly" changes to appearance - but why should women have to make those changes? Why should they have to sacrifice that part of themselves?

It's in circumstances like these that it seems like gender issues are even more apparent, and far from ever being over.

Our Dear Friend Wikipedia

"50% of all examined case of vandalism on Wikipedia were repaired with 2 or 3 minutes." (Kohl, 170)

Haha not so in Miles City, MT, Wikipedia, not so. Somewhere around my sophomore year of highschool, two guys that I know and was going to school with at the time, decided it would be awfully funny to test Wiki's "author" boundaries. They managed to change the knowledge in the government section of the Miles City page to read their names as president and vice-president of said town, along with a few other personal touches. A print out of that page, last I know, was hanging on their walls.

Wikipedia didn't find the inaccuracy for almost a full 24 hours - probably because Miles City isn't high up in the importance department of maintenance but still. That begs the question of just how well Wikipedia is contained - and when, and which pages are more important? If someone did something like that (albeit in a subtler manner) and I read two different things in two different days, which to believe? Sigh.

I know this isn't even close to the recommended 500 words, or very "deep" persay, but thinking about that story still makes me grin. My apologies. I will do better in the morn.

Infograph

Child Marriage

CPE

My critical photo essay (which may be a video, I'm not sure yet) is going to deal with the psychology behind font choice in different book genres. This may (most likely) feed into the way in which digital texts are created as well. I'm still working out the fine details, but that is the main gist.

Mid-October

"By studying actual texts as they function in particular contexts, we can gain an improved understanding of what constitute appropriate, effective strategies of rhetorical organization. At the same time, we can learn from such studies how successful texts are composed and what part schools can play in encouraging students to become able, creative composers" (Bernhardt).

I found this article extremely appropriate given what I've been discussing in my blogs most recently, which is how font and visual features affect the way we read things (most notably for me, in the way I distinguish fiction or novels from essays and academic articles). The way the Wetlands handout is structured is often how I wish that some of these articles could be structured - in broken up chunks of information that are more easily digested than long form paragraphs. The amount of information that I'm able to retain from short form pieces like that is pretty different from what I can grasp from many of the articles we've covered this year.

It makes me wonder if I should break down my notes from these into formats like that example. I'll experiment and see what happens, I think.

"Through these laws of gestalt, visual features take over the load of structuring and organizing the reader's processing, thus reducing the role of those semantic features which organize a form like the essay. Instead of a smooth, progressive realization of the text through initial previewing and a chain of logic which ties each paragraph or section to the preceding or following one, the visible text relies on localization, on a heightening of the boundaries, edges, and divisions of the text. ... In the visible text, the goal is to call the reader's attention visually to semantically grouped information, focusing the reader's attention on discrete sections." (Bernhardt)

Though it's a different topic, the above paragraph drew my attention to something else that's come up in conversation with my roommates a couple of times: the psychology of restaurant menus. Random? Yes. Relevant? Also yes. Food for thought.

Mishra

So, basically Mishra is telling me that all the illustrations in childhood textbooks, etc...were all a lie? KIDDING. Mostly.

I find it really interesting that not many studies have been done on how illustrations affect education, whether it be on a small elementary scale or a university level. I would think that, in relation to the different ways people learn, whether it be visual, hands-on, aural, or any of the other methods, there would have been a couple of different ones. Based on the way Mishra sums up the article, it's seems like a pretty fascinating area of study, especially regarding how well we learn something when we see it in front of us in an image and not spelled out in words.

How useful are images for learning though? When two people see on one image, they come away with different constructions of it in their minds - and the point the image is trying to convey may take root in different ways in different minds. So maybe images are less of learning tool (at least at a higher education level - I think they are invaluable in kindergarten classroom) and more of a jump off point for discussions that they might inspire? A starting point for the swapping of ideas?

It actually makes me think a little bit about the responses to the McCloud pieces we read last week. They didn't really have a midway point, at least from the people I talked to; they either liked it or didn't like it, which is something I've heard a lot in discussions about the different ways we learn (i.e. the person who says, "I can't stand teachers who read off powerpoints to teach a class! I can't focus" or the person who really likes dissection labs because of the hands-on aspect). While I found the visual images of the comic really helpful when trying to understand the material, other people didn't. So how does that affect me as someone who is learning? Am I doomed in my line of study because it largely favors picture-less texts?

I think I got a little away from the main point of the article, but these were some of the things I was thinking about as I was reading it.