New Digital Media and Learning as an Emerging Area and "worked Examples" as One Way Forward

by James Paul Gee

A proposal to move the academic area of digital media and learning toward more coherence. In this report, noted scholar James Paul Gee discusses the evolution of digital media and learning (DMAL) from its infancy as an "academic area" into a more organized field or coherent discipline. Distinguishing among academic areas, fields, disciplinary specializations, and thematic disciplines, Gee describes other academic areas that have fallen into these categories or developed into established disciplines. He argues that DMAL will not evolve until a real coherence develops through collaboration and the accumulation of shared knowledge. Gee offers a concrete proposal of one way scholars in DMAL could move the area forward to a more cohesive, integrated, and collaborative the production of what he terms "worked examples." In Gee's sense of a worked example, scholars attempting to build the new area of DMAL would publicly display their methods of valuing and thinking about a specific problem, proposing them as examples of "good work" in order to engender debate about what such work in DMAL might come to look like and what shape the area itself might take. The goal would not be for the proposed approach to become the accepted one but for it to become fodder for new work and collaboration. Gee concludes by offering a sample worked example that illustrates his proposal.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education, Research

81 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2009

About the author

James Gee is a researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee is currently the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. Gee is a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a member of the National Academy of Education.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

How is this for a special offer? Not just a review, but a link as well to the book on-line!

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/full_pd...

I had to read this yesterday for an English Lecture I’ve to attend in a couple of hours and enjoyed it so much you are going to get a quick review.

This is a very interesting piece. It starts slowly, mostly with lots of academic definitions around how we define a discipline, a field or an area of study – most of which were of only passing interest. I used to work in archives and the Records Managers would always have conferences where the main topic of conversation was whether they were a profession or not. The simple answer would be to ask what they professed (surely a reasonable criteria for such things), but invariably after convoluted and self-serving logical twists and flaps they would decide they, in fact, were a profession – now, if only they could convince the rest of the world that was the case. I was worried this was going to turn out much the same way – the big question seemed to be ‘is digital media and learning worthy of being called a new discipline and how would we know if it was? Naturally enough, I tend to have a prior question to this one, and why would we care?

But I was wrong – and hence the link to the free book I’ve giving you in this once only offer (as Tom Waits would say, Step right up, it never needs ironing).

This becomes very interesting very quickly. Firstly, he says that one of the reasons ‘literacy’ never quite made it as a separate discipline was that people just couldn’t get their heads around the idea that literacy is multi-disciplined. Nor that there isn’t ‘a literacy’, but many literacies. (oh, look, my spell checker doesn’t recognise a plural for literacy – my point is made!) The problem was that literacy is linked to reading and writing and we have people who teach reading and writing already (English teachers) and they tend to see literacy as something internal to the heads of those who either can or cannot read. This helped to undermine those who saw literacy as socially constructed and culturally dependant. Now, before you start to worry that I’m about to go all Foucaultian on you – which I still might if you don’t start bring good – this is one of those ideas that I struggle not to see as pretty well self-evident. When you become a lawyer you do so by becoming literate in the language that lawyers speak and write. This is not the same as those who become physicists by learning the language that physics communicates in. These are, quite simply, different literacies.

His big move is in saying that literacy is a technology – I can’t get over how often I’ve heard this lately. First my mate Richard mentioned it in reference to some book that is doing the rounds about the Internet making us all dumb and quoted Socrates about the dangers of learning to write. Then Technopoly discussed this idea at length and now this guy. His point is that Digital Media is definitely a new technology – but is it just something that allows us to do much the same stuff as we did previously or is it a ‘game changer’?

Again, I think game changer is probably where I would put my money. But this time there is no question about the multiple literacies necessary to use this new media. The other really interesting thing is the amount of collaboration these new media demand. The days of individual assessment are increasingly becoming meaningless in the real world – I wonder how many centuries will need to pass before schools catch on? What does that mean? Well, I can write this review more or less on my own, but to make an interesting film working alone isn’t a good idea. And do you know what – if you are interested in overcoming global warming or third world poverty or any of the other complex problems facing the world working alone isn’t a good idea there either. It is The Lonely Crowd, Revised edition: A Study of the Changing American Character writ large – we need to become more collaborative and digital media is providing exactly the tools we need just as we need them.

One of the questions that needs to be asked is why are students able to deeply engage in computer games (games that require serious reading and problem solving skills) and yet not engage in school subjects which require precisely the same skills? Why does class and race impact so negatively at school and yet not appear to impact at all in cyberspace? Surely, as people interested in the education of people in society (now, there’s an assumption) we need more of the enthusiasm kids display when playing computer games and less of the drudge they feel when studying maths.

Then this book does a very interesting thing. He says he wants to create a new discipline – a multi-discipline that looks at digital media literacy and essentially says (with the typical academic get out of gaol free cards one would expect) we need a new paradigm (yes, Kuhn of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions fame). But how do we get such a thing.

Well, he says that one of the things Kuhn identified in all paradigm changes were examples that became ‘exemplars’. Like Galileo showing things keep moving unless acted on by a force to stop – examples that fundamentally change the way we look at the world. Digital Media needs exemplars and he recommends that the best way to get an exemplar is via what he calls ‘worked examples’.

Now, if you look at a maths book it will have lots of good worked examples. That is, a problem will be selected by an expert to explain to a novice the best way to understand how to solve a particular set of problems. I really like this idea. His point is that by asking ‘what sort of worked example would lead to an exemplar that would move digital media from a interesting intercept in the Venn Diagram of academia to a new discipline all on its own?’ we may be able to see if such a project is actually worth pursuing or not.

He provides a tentative worked example in this paper of a multimedia card game – focusing mostly on the linguistic questions it raises, but pointing to the further multi-disciplinary areas of inquiry it presents.

All in all this was a very interesting little book. Now, off to my first lecture for the day.

[Mark Freeman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The start of this book seemed like academic navel gazing, but he's clearly coming from a much more complex understanding of the evolution of what I know now as Digital Media and Learning. At present I'm much more interested in the work, than how the work is defined.
But the book is short and lucid, teaches me about literacies and and gets to the point: an exemplar, or worked example looking at Yu-Gi-Oh! and complex language. He breaks down the language on the cards, showing the complexity specialist language needed to understand them - and if you're playing you need to understand them quickly. And he suggests these are useful skills for learning, pointing to some literacy studies.
While he see's Yu-Gi-Oh! as an example of convergent media I think it's basically a card game - predating, I think, much of the web. Which argues that gaming in itself can be a great learning tool, outside of digital media. I think one reason why these games work is that they are played socially, competitively. The social dynamic makes a tremendous difference to their effectiveness. Would they work as well played alone? Can the computer act as an effective opponent?
Fun stuff and I'm off to read more!