Featured videos: language, literacy, writing

Reading Together

Perusall logoWe’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. Link here to Perusall. Instructions for joining on the Assignments page.

Calendar: link here

Author: Haley Hansen
Gaming Memo: All for one and one for all

Gaming Memo: All for one and one for all

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I really liked the chapter on social interaction in McGonigal’s Reality is Broken. Playing video games is a way to “hang out” with friends and I think that non-gamers forget that. Not just video games create a way to interact with friends and strangers but any sort of live action game. Games provide us with a way to reach out to strangers and not feel totally uncool. Rarely ever do people stop and strike up a conversation with a complete stranger, but people are more inclined to do that if they happen to be involved in the same game.

 

I think this idea is extremely important to our work with redesigning EPIC. We have the chance to have 250 students who are all strangers and have them work together to form what could be life long friendships. That being said, EPIC quests should not be something that can be done solo. The students should have to work together and step outside of their comfort zone just for a bit until the strangers they are surrounded by become their team members. What’s that saying, “Misery loves company” no… “The more the merrier”, that’s it. Games are more fun when you have more people to play them with.

The Ever Interesting Haley!

The Ever Interesting Haley!

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Hello you lovely people! My name is Haley Hansen (remember, the really cool girl that works at a bank…). I am a junior/senior, I’m not really sure what I am actually. Anyway, I’m an English Education major with a minor in Linguistics. Upon graduating I will receive my TSOL certificate (Teaching Students of Other Languages) and then I will be taking a couple years off with the hopes of joining the Peace Corps and teaching in South America. Afterward I will return to the beautiful campus of CSUC and work on my teaching credential. I love spending time with my family and spending time outdoors so I’m having a great day if I’m doing both!

 

” Insofar as learning really does consist in the development of portable interactive skills, it can take place even when coparticipants fail to share a common code. The apprentice’s ability to understand the master’s performance depends not on their possessing the same representation of it, or of the objects it entails, but rather on their engaging in the performance in congruent ways. Similarly, the master’s effectiveness at producing learning is not dependent on her ability to inculcate the student with her own conceptual representations. Rather, it depends on her ability to manage effectively a divsion of participation that provides for growth on the part of the student.”

 

So then this is basically saying that learning really isn’t the teacher trying to get a specific point across to the student, what learning really is is the student (through participation) coming to their own representations and conclusions which could be completely different than what the teacher was trying to convey in the first place. The common code being- “are you picking up what I’m putting down” from a teachers point of view. Just because a student doesn’t “pick up” the exact point that a teacher is “putting down” does not mean that the student isn’t learning. I think that is quite an idea, and I can definitely see where that could be the case.