Epilogue: Some reflections on the process

Writing this “essay” has been fun. It’s a very different process to the many other essays I have had to write during the course of my life and, as a teacher of English who is learning about the process of learning in new communication forms, I feel I want to comment.

Posting a comment is something different to writing an essay. It can be a lot less formal, for starters. It’s interesting for me to look back over this blog and notice the changing nature of my style and approach. Lots has been written about how technology is changing the way we communicate and I am regularly coming across articles decrying the destruction of our language in the hands of texting adolescents. The outcry that followed the inclusion of a text message in the NSW HSC exams last year is a case in point. I am more likely to use the first person in my blog writing, but I am finding that I am making more use of the first person in essays as well and I feel this is increasing my power to communicate, not decreasing it. What I have particularly enjoyed is the ability to add links and images to my writing and this has added a whole new level to the capacity to communicate.

This is not much of a blog, mind you, because, to date it is pretty static without any comments or interaction from others that I am aware of (and I pity the poor sod who decides to read it all and isn’t being paid for the privilege). The possibilities open to me to link to others who are blogging on similar topics and to turn this into something much more dynamic seem really interesting. This is where I need to go next.

By the way, this image comes from Wikipedia and is a chart of part of the Internet. There's an aesthetic beauty to it that takes my fancy.

Thanks for reading!

Part 3: “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players” As You Like It II,vii,140

Playfulness is common in Shakespeare’s plays. In As You Like It, we are reminded by the character of Jaques that life is a kind of performance and that each of us must take roles and act parts. This idea is taken to extremes in the play when the female character “Rosalind”, disguised as the male character “Ganymede” confronts Rosalind’s suitor Orlando and attempts to cure him of his love for her by pretending to be Rosalind. Confused? Given that all parts in Elizabethan theatres were acted by men (or boys often for women), what we end up with is a boy playing Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind; in social class terms, a lowly actor playing a noble woman playing a nobleman playing a noble woman; in gender terms, a boy playing a woman playing a man playing a woman. What is most striking for me in all these layers is how, as an audience, we are able to sustain our understanding of the complexity of the interaction between characters and how the multi-layered identities of Rosalind (but of anyone playing a part for that matter) are accessible and acceptable to our intellect.

In a previous essay for my MEd studies I wrote about the roles students take in a program my school runs for our Year 9 students in the city. Our students don’t wear a traditional school uniform and in the early days of our program we ran into trouble with students being mistaken for street kids and not being allowed into a number of venues or not being taken seriously by some of the people they met. Our solution was to ask the students to “dress up” into the uniforms of the city – to dress in suits and formal clothes – and the results were remarkable; not primarily in terms of the way others in the city saw our students, but in the way the students saw themselves. By adopting the costumes of business, students started to step away from the parts they played at school and became engaged in the city with a whole new level of commitment.

Research into learning in the “middle years” (for example MYRAD and MYPRAD) tells us that adolescent students lose interest and focus in traditional learning environments and become much more interested in collaborative, long term, project based learning which is embedded in “real life” contexts. Research on adolescent cognitive development highlights the hormonal changes that students are going through and the increased focus on forming identities through social interaction. Gender and sexual attraction become major foci as any Middle Years teacher knows only too well. Our experience of student behavior in the city suggests to me that it is not so much that students need “real life” contexts to work in (whatever these may be) but that they need contexts that allow them to explore the world and their identities in settings other than those framed as “school” where their roles are those of “students”.

The playful environments of computer games offer the opportunity for students to put on a different “suit” and explore the world creatively playing parts other than that of a “student”. I am reminded of a favorite quote which formed the centerpiece of yet another MEd essay.

When children fail at school, drop out, repeat, they are likely to be positioned in a factual world tied to simple operations, where knowledge is impermeable. The successful have access to the general principle, and some of these – a small number who are going to produce the discourse – will become aware that the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable. But the long socialization into the pedagogic code can remove the danger of the unthinkable, and of alternative realities.
Basil Bernstein (Bernstein, 1996, p. 26)

Bernstein’s explication of pedagogic codes highlighted for him the way schools limit the creative possibilities available to students by – to continue my metaphor - dressing them in such restrictive uniforms. Allowing students to creatively and playfully engage with different roles allows them the possibility of engagement in the language of their culture not just as passive recipients, but as active agents.

What I think computers and virtual environments may have the potential to provide to learning that traditional classrooms usually cannot, is the kind of playful engagement with identity that is needed to allow for Bernstein’s desire that students have access to the “unthinkable”. As Rieber et al argue: ‘the time has come to apply what we know about learning, motivation, and working cooperatively given the incredible processing power and social connectivity of computers.’ (Rieber, Smith, & Noah, 1998, p. 2) Like so many of our readings for this unit, Rieber et al argue that computer environments can facilitate a kind of ‘serious play’ that is engaging and empowering for students. Software such as “SimCity” “Civilization III” and “Age of Empires” allows students to engage in a complex and meaningful environment where they must adopt roles quite different to those usually required in a classroom. In these games the computer becomes, in Mitchel Resnick’s terms, a ‘paintbrush’ (Resnick, 2006) with which students can actively explore and shape their environments. Resnick invites his readers to compare the three terms:

Television. Computer. Paintbrush.

And decide which two should go together. He wants computers to be seen not just as passive ‘information machines’ akin to TV, but as a ‘new medium for creative design and expression’; as ‘paintbrushes’ (p.1). Kurt Squire makes a similar plea in his discussion of video games as ‘designed experience’ (Squire, 2006) where he argues that there is a need for a ‘mature body of games scholarship’ which can address the ‘critical study of games as participation in ideological systems, “learning as performance” and educational games as designed experiences.’ (p.20) Squire rightly points out, it seems to me, that it is not enough to critique the ‘text, image and animations’ (p. 21) of games, we need much more complex models for discussing the kinds of roles that students take in particular gaming environments. My view is that the work of sociologists like Habermas may be a good starting point for constructing such models (see my previous post).

For Squires it is what he describes as the ‘functional epistemology’ of games – the fact that learning is about ‘doing’ – that is one key component to their uniqueness. There seems to me to be a strong parallel here with my earlier description of my Year 9 students dressing in suits to visit the city. By changing the script, as it were, for their performance, we seemed to be allowing students to actively play a new part as they engaged with a series of tasks in the city; they were out there doing their learning – not in a classroom having the learning done to them. Quoting Clinton, Squires argues that ‘figuring out “what the body can do in the world is figuring out who you are in that world”’(Clinton. 2004, p.3 in Squire, 2006, p. 22).

Figuring out who you are in any world is a primary concern for an adolescent. Computer games and virtual worlds seem to me to have great potential as a space for safe, creative, playful and meaningful exploration not just of alternative worlds, but of alternative selves. Perhaps then we might see less of:

‘the whining schoolboy, with his satchel/ And shining morning face, creeping like snail/ Unwillingly to school'. (As You Like It II,vii,146)

...and instead see more engagement and empowerment in our classrooms.

Bernstein, B. 1996. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. London, Taylor and Francis.
Castell, S. D. & Jenson, J. 2003. Serious Play, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Vol. 35.
Pusey, M. 1987. Jurgen Habermas. Chichester, Ellis Horwood.
Resnick, M. 2006. Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society. In D. Singer & R. Golikoff & K. Hirsh-Pasek (Eds.), Play = Learning: How play motivates and enhances children's cognitive and social-emotional growth.: Oxford University Press.
Rieber, L., Smith, L., & Noah, D. 1998. The Value of Serious Play. Educational Technology, 38(6), 29-37.
Squire, K. 2006. From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience. Educational Researcher, 35(8), pp. 19-29.

Part 2: Second Life, First Life – How do we get a Life?

Web 2.0 is said to be characterized by the way the web has transformed from a static medium to a dynamic one in which contributors are in constant dialogue rather than just posting data on a digital wall (see this neat YouTube video on the history and nature of Web 2.0 for example). Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, takes the dynamic nature of the Web 2.0 one stage further in his ethnography work. Implicit in his notion that the web ‘is us/ing us’ is an idea that cultural meaning becomes a collaborative construction perhaps a bit like the notion of “The Invisible Hand” in economics.

“The Invisible Hand” is a metaphor used to describe the mechanism by means of which a balance is established between supply and demand in a market economy; on the web, suggests Wesch, the constant tagging and recording of activity serves to highlight particular areas of interest and activity. When, for example, the Google search engine notes that many people searching for a particular topic choose to go to a particular website and so Google prioritises that website in future search results, a form of cultural equilibrium for meaning is established (see the Google widget on the sidebar of this blog for data on current searches and the graph from "Google Zeitgeist" showing top searches for 2007) A democratic process of social prioritisation brings some parts of the web to the fore and allows others to drop into obscurity. Much like The Invisible Hand of the first-life-world market place, this second-web-world Invisible Hand serves to establish patterns of meaning because the web “is us/ing us” to make judgements about who we, as a web culture, will define ourselves as being. (see Wesch’s 5 minute video “The Machine is Us/ing Us) Again, this is nicely illustrated by the "Digg" widget on the sidebar which invites viewers of news items to click on a raised or lowered fist to determine which are the most interesting news items of the time.

In this context there is an eerie prescience in watching this video about Jurgen Habermas on Youtube. Habermas is a central figure in the sociology of culture who argues that meaning is culturally constructed as a product of interaction between subjectivities (Pusey, 1987). When Habermas ends his interview by highlighting the value of democracy, I am left pondering the potential that Web 2.0 may have for instilling a kind of cultural rationalization increasingly free from the corporations and political structures that have had so much sway over the means of meaning production previously.

I’m sure I’m naïve, but I wonder what potential the web may have to accelerate Habermas’ ‘possibility for collective learning as the (gradual) institutionalisation of reason in Society’ (Pusey, 1987, p. 32) If the web is achieving a level of creative independence beyond the grasp of commercial and institutionalised political interests, then there is a real responsibility that I have as an English teacher to encourage my students to be a part of this process and to be confident and competent in their capacity to walk within its walls.

I’m exploring here the idea that the very nature of the web is to create and evolve meaning in a way which is dynamic and relatively free from many of the traditional ideological constraints on our culture. In this world, students may be able to “get a life” that they have an increasing power to direct. There are so many questions left begging, however, about the nature and quality of that “life” and culture and about those who it excludes (the large part of the world without computers for a start). Engaging students in an exploration of these moral questions is another of the opportunities and responsibilities I see myself as having. For the purposes of this blog these questions need to wait until I have completed my assignment, however.

In my next post I plan to explore what it might mean to be “playful” and how playfulness is an important part of adolescent identity – on and off the web.

Pusey, M. 1987. Jurgen Habermas. Chichester, Ellis Horwood.

Introduction - An assignment for MEd

The perception of presence has a powerful sway over our subjective sense of self. Who I am is powerfully linked to the sense I have of an immediate and physical presence – a body here in this place and space where at the present time I am writing. Much of our cultural and legal traditions are predicated on subjectivities that are concrete and immutable: if “I” steal your sheep or fail to pay my bills, “I” can be held to account in our court system, for example. My name, my birth-certificate, my family and my history are all elements of my subjectivity that I wear as a kind of armour to protect me from the uncertainties of an existentially ambiguous world.

In a playful world many of these certainties are brought into question. Further, in a playful, virtual world, the concrete certainties of traditional notions of subjectivity seem almost to be systematically undermined. In this blog I plan to explore some of the ways playful and virtual learning environments might be understood to be impacting on our personal and collective identities. There has been much discussion in the media about the way virtual worlds such as “Second Life” may be threatening our “first” life world through the ephemeral nature of the identities that are created. Writers such as Castel and Jenson comment that there is a substantial literature discussing a perceived deficit in the moral fiber of gaming worlds (Castell & Jenson, 2003). I’m particularly interested in the attraction virtual environments have for adolescents, who I will argue are very focused on exploring and developing their identities. As a teacher of “Middle Years” English, I see a core component of my job to be fostering in students the confidence and capacity to actively contribute to the process of “making” their identities. Instead of leaving them to be shaped passively by the world around them, I believe I have a responsibility in my teaching to help students take an active role in deciding who they want to be. In this context “literacy” is about empowerment; the opportunity to rehearse and explore identities through writing (about) reality is a core component of teaching and learning. “Writing”, in the context of this discussion, is a very broad term; I use this term much as it is used in semiotics to encompass all forms of creative symbolic construction. If I write a play I create a character in language; in a broad sense, when I construct an avatar in a virtual world, I am also writing a character within the language of semiotics.

Central to the concerns of this blog will be an exploration of the idea that there is very little, in fact, that is new in the idea of playful and virtual realities and that now, as in the past, playful and virtual environments form a cultural space for individuals to test and build identities that are creative, meaningful, productive and healthy. Placed in a cultural tradition of playfulness and creativity, the modern world of computer gaming and virtual interaction can be seen as simply the most recent in an evolving (or revolving?) tradition of imaginative play. Whilst computers and the Internet offer some fascinating new possibilities, I will argue that they also share much with past creative and playful traditions and there is much to be gained from attempting to understand this continuity with the past.