(I'm going to play a bit today, mostly because I'm trying to write this blog with one cat insisting he sit on my lap and lick my fingers.)
I will vote with Pearce and argue that Gee is wrong when he states that technology is neutral. Since we cannot separate our minds from our bodies and the "logical" portions of our mind from the emotional, the concept of "objectivity" is a fiction. Technologies are therefore created by subjective people, with a specific use in mind. The result may be adapted to unforeseen uses (like satellites now being used for cell phones in the public sphere, instead of remaining strictly under government control), but the technology was created for a specific, subjective purpose. Gee's notion of neutrality is based on the concept of, "it is how we use them that matters." What he overlooks, though, is that technologies have very specific limitations, so we can't necessarily adapt any given technology to any given use. I can't print out this blog from my microwave. Just as no pedagogy can be neutral, no technology can be neutral. However, what I do really like about Gee's essay is his analysis of the types of learning and cognitive thinking that occur in the technologies of video games.
(Successfully booted the cat onto the return, thanks to the birds outside.)
This point came up in Chris Ritter's and Shawn Lamebull's colloquium last week. One literature professor in the audience could not understand how the learning principles and issues of sex, race, and gender in video games could be compared -- in nearly any way -- to the literacy involved in reading a book. As Monroe noted, "[g]enres from the entertainment domain employ different rhetorics of information that require complex literate behavior" (103) and Gee demonstrated with the example about Brian playing Pikmin: the boy "was aware that the changes signaled that he needed to rethink some of his strategies, as well as his relationship with the game" (27). How many six year old kids rethink their strategies of reading and relationship to a narrative in a book? I'm bringing this up because most of our students have grown up playing video games, and analyzing the learning strategies and the rules of the games can, I believe, help us find a "way in" to academic discourse for those children whose home discourses are at odds with what is expected of them in school.
In my "remedial" ( I hate that word) writing course that I taught in California, I had a young black man that had a terrific sense of humor, he could tell stories to the class, he was great at interjecting some satirical comment while I or anyone else was speaking (and then we'd all be laughing), but he really struggled to write. Following the structure for that course, the students read from a text that was composed of personal narratives written by students from other cultures who were struggling with American society and the American school system. One of the first big assignments was a personal narrative, and while this student had a great story to tell, his sentence structure and punctuation were, in the "traditional" academic sense, atrocious. I had him work with a tutor in the writing lab each week, in addition to the one class our the entire class spent working with tutors every week. His writing improved a bit, but his persuasive and expository essays were still poorly structured. He tried very hard, but having grown up in a very oral culture, as with some of the examples we reviewed in class last week, structuring what he was saying was very difficult. But as an extra-credit assignment, he had co-written (with another "poor" writer) a poem that was beautifully done. Since it just had line breaks and no punctuation, there were only minor spelling errors, and he was able to communicate exactly what he wanted. He turned in another poem that was again, beautifully written, and I knew that I had a very talented poet on my hands. When I submitted his portfolio for review, I had him include the two poems because I knew the panel of teachers would immediately fail him if it wasn't made obvious that he was an excellent writer, just not a "standard" writer.
(The cat is back and now his front paws and his head are on my left forearm.)
In the same course I had a Chinese girl who wrote beautiful essays, but in the traditional Chinese way: her points were never stated outright and the essay would sort of spiral it's way around what we wanted to say. Being familiar with that style allowed me to appreciate her writing and compliment her on it, while also showing her how the Academy would want her to structure her essays. The textbook also helped with these issues, because the authors complained about the same things: not understanding how they could write well enough to earn A's in their country, and then not even get into FYC here.
(Just booted the cat. Again.)
What I really liked about Monroe's article was the discussion of what-questions versus why-questions, and the parallels she draws between the why-questions and different cultures, as well as the individual computer usage versus family computer usage. My personal experience with students and a Mexican boyfriend completely align with her generalizations (always aware of there being exceptions)
(the cat came back)
about different cultural literacies at home, but I'd never broken it down into "what" versus "why." I used to frustrate my mother with why-questions because I always had to find another why (as a result, I was frequently sent outside to play, or off to read a book, so that she could have some time free of a pestering child). But so many of my friends from other cultures did not question; they simply accepted, and so for them, not only did many of them struggle with written academic English, they also never saw the ideologies at work in their lives, which meant they simply accepted the cards they were dealt without realizing they could discard some and hope for a better hand.
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