Conhece? Sabe o que é uma Maquinima?
Não? Bem, hoje vou mostrar, depois eu explico!
Mostrando postagens com marcador Transmidia. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Transmidia. Mostrar todas as postagens
Outros Blogs
Este não é o único blog que eu tenho, criei ou participo. Na verdade, tenho alguns outros, pois blogs de uma maneira geral é uma ótima forma de aprendizado, roteirizar uma informação de modo bem próprio!
http://bullyingpeloralo.wordpress.com/
este é um blog mais cívico do que qualquer outra coisa, existe por duas razões ajudar quando alguém procura algo sobre bullying e para monitorar o número de acessos ao tema.
chinasteampunk.wordpress.com
trata-se de um working process de criação em ficção científica, misturamos dois temas: China e Steampunk, com isso buscamos a criação, a organização das informações, registros de experiência. Tal qual uma house de produção de idéias ou sonhos (como eu prefiro dizer).
galeriavitrine.wordpress.com
é um blog feito com dois integrantes do blog anteriormente citado ( o Ricardo e a Karyn), a idéia é ser um Portfólio virtual, explorar o potencial de criação de criação e um cardápio de opções.
beautyforashesp.wordpress.com
blog feito para divulgar a passagem do artista plástico Duda Penteado. Haverão exposições, palestras e até um manifesto, além disso o blog também funciona como um working process e galeria virtual de seus trabalhos!
http://bullyingpeloralo.wordpress.com/
este é um blog mais cívico do que qualquer outra coisa, existe por duas razões ajudar quando alguém procura algo sobre bullying e para monitorar o número de acessos ao tema.
chinasteampunk.wordpress.com
trata-se de um working process de criação em ficção científica, misturamos dois temas: China e Steampunk, com isso buscamos a criação, a organização das informações, registros de experiência. Tal qual uma house de produção de idéias ou sonhos (como eu prefiro dizer).
galeriavitrine.wordpress.com
é um blog feito com dois integrantes do blog anteriormente citado ( o Ricardo e a Karyn), a idéia é ser um Portfólio virtual, explorar o potencial de criação de criação e um cardápio de opções.
beautyforashesp.wordpress.com
blog feito para divulgar a passagem do artista plástico Duda Penteado. Haverão exposições, palestras e até um manifesto, além disso o blog também funciona como um working process e galeria virtual de seus trabalhos!
2 lembretes de coisas bem legais
Esse post é breve a correria está apertada - mas... vou deixar aqui duas coisas interessantes, ok?
Um texto do professor Henry Jenkis sobre o Demolidor e um texto sobre Storytelling e Ensino, recomendo a leitura de ambos.
http://henryjenkins.org/2010/06/man_without_fear.html
http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/SITEStorytelling2006.pdf
Boas leituras!
Um texto do professor Henry Jenkis sobre o Demolidor e um texto sobre Storytelling e Ensino, recomendo a leitura de ambos.
http://henryjenkins.org/2010/06/man_without_fear.html
http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/SITEStorytelling2006.pdf
Boas leituras!
He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia
He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia (Publicado originalmente em http://henryjenkins.org/2010/05/he-man_and_the_masters_of_tran.html)
The other day I flew back to Cambridge at the request of Scot Osterweill, the research director for The Education Arcade, in order to participate in the Sandbox Summit, a fascinating gathering of game designers, toy makers, television producers, children's book authors, and educators drawn together through their shared interests in "how media is changing our play and how play is changing our media." I had been asked to give a keynote address which would share some of my thoughts about transmedia entertainment in a way that might be relevant to people who were shaping children's culture.
As I was pulling my thoughts together for the talk, I stumbled onto an article in I09, one of my favorite blogs about geek culture, which listed the "ten most unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys." I shared the blog post with my son, now 29, who had grown up as part of the "He-Man" generation and we both took great pleasure in realizing that he had at one time had almost all of their examples in his collection and that we both remembered all of these toys. There was, for example, Moss-Man, an action figure covered in green fuzz; Stinkor, an action figure that smelled and looked like a skunk; and Mosquitor, an action figure which contained a red blood-like fluid.
And I began to ponder why these toys had been such a memorable part of his childhood and what it meant that the generation of young men and women who were, in many cases, controlling the production of transmedia entertainment had come of age playing with this particular media franchise. In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.
Peggy Charren, who formed Action for Children's Television and lobbied the Federal Communication Commission to regulate childrens programming, would have had an explanation. At the time, she argued that Heman and similar programs were simply "half hour commercials" which had no redeeming value, because they "blur the distinction between program content and commercial speech. Children are attracted to the concepts of the shows and don't fully understand the selling intent behind them... [This has become] a gold mine to station managers and toy manufacturers, but a commercial nightmare to most parents." She and her allies argued that the stories and characters, she feared, were being sacrificed in order to turn the cartoons into advertisements for tie-in toys and as a consequence, these toys were going to stifle youngsters' imaginations. Charren's critique of these toys has taken deep roots among the professional classes, as was reflected by the many different ways these concerns got evoked by speakers at the Sandbox Summit. I do not mean to make light of these concerns, though I have also always found myself resistant to the language used to critique these toys, which often assumes that the play around these fictional narratives necessarily reproduces the terms of the original stories without creating a space for the child's own imaginative contributions.
There is no denying that Mattel had a clear commercial interest in producing the program and extending our experience of watching the show into a line of associated toys. And the same can be said of contemporary transmedia entertainment content which is often funded by the branding and promotional budget for the media property. Minimally, transmedia extensions are selling the "mother ship." Often, they are creating alternative sources of income - they are products in their own right just as the He-Man dolls are.
Yet, I don't think we can reduce the experience which young people had playing to He-Man to simply the selling and buying of commercial commodities, however distasteful such toys seem to many academic parents. After all, all of us have bought many commodities in our lifetime, most of which we forgot as soon as we had consumed them, yet these particular toys have become part of the shared memories of my son's generation in part because they were tokens of stories and entertainment experiences which were deeply meaningful to them. More than that, though, these toys became resources for their own imaginations, tokens which they used to claim a space for themselves within the stories.
Whether they fully recognized it or not, when media producers sold these toys to our children, they also told them things about the nature of the story - the story you saw on the screen was not complete and self contained; these characters had a life beyond the stories we've been sold and told, and what happens next is literally and figuratively in the hands of the consumer. These toys were in effect an authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.
Children have long played with the core narratives of their culture, as might be suggested by the fact that Tom Sawyer played Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables King Arthur, and Meg of Little Women Pilgrim's Progress, each central stories of their own time. In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional stories, but it does not follow from this that children's play with narrative was none the less meaningful to them as a way of trying on adult roles and asserting their own ability to build on and revise core stories that matter to them.
As a father during that period, I have vivid memory of the intense pain of stepping barefoot on some molded piece of plastic when I was called into my son's bedroom at night to comfort him about a bad dream. I'd pick up the plastic shield, sword, or pick ax, and grumble, "grrrmble snarl Teela" and my son, a stickler for details, would correct me, "No, Dad, that belongs to Sorceress." These details mattered. I often reflected at such moments (or at least I did when the pain of my punctured flesh subsided!) on the ways that this attachment to distinctive shields, say, mirrored the detailed descriptions of the shields and weapons of the different Greek heroes found in Homer, suggesting that heraldry in some forms remains an active element in stories across history.
The accessories were extensions of the characters, reflections of their personalities, artifacts of their stories, and signs of their capacities for action. Each character was connected to every other character through complex sets of antagonisms and alliances and each character bore their own mythology which could become the point of entry for a new as yet unrealized story. He-Man was teaching his generation to think not just about individual stories but about the process of world-building and part of the pleasure of collecting these toys was to demonstrate their mastery over the lore of these worlds.
In some cases, the characters would be deeply embedded in the aired episodes and in other cases, they would exist only in the background or only in one episode and often these were the characters most vividly remembered because they became the child's own possession, their backstory fleshed out from their own imagination, their personality constructed from their own playful performances. Each of the characters had different personalities (and thus demanded different voices) and over time, you would learn their verbal ticks, the quirks of their personality, and the sound of their voice, even though no two children would necessarily perform these characters in the same way. We might think of these characters as in effect avatars, an extension of the child into a virtual or imagined world, and see these constant shifts between personalities as a predecessor of what we would describe as identity play in adolescence.
Of course, the performance doesn't end there. The child themselves might become He-Man or some of the other characters through Halloween dress-ups and the web is full of yellowing family photographs of children of my son's generation physically embodying the heroes of their programs. Their mothers (or in my son's case, their grandmothers) might be coaxed into decorating birthday cakes with images copied from He-Man coloring books. And those lacking coloring books (or possessing artistic temperaments) would draw their own pictures of these characters which gave another tangible form to their fantasy lives. My son wrote countless stories which he dictated to his mother and I about He-Man and in the process, he moved from playing with physical objects to playing with words and with the basic building blocks of narratives.
In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmnation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figures, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books, each of which gave us a chance to learn a little something more about Eternia, Castle Grayskull, and the other places where these stories took place.
And of course, He-Man was only one of the many media franchises which were producing action figures. My son collected figures from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and the World Wrestling Federation, not to mention a smathering of Transformers, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and many other toy lines. Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories, which might involve meet-ips and cross-overs unlikely to occur in commercial media (though there was at least one DC comic where Superman and He-Man combined forces) but almost inevitable once kids got their hands on the toys.
Sometimes an action figure would stand in for another character not yet acquired much as an actor plays a fictional role and in other cases the pleasure was in experimenting with the boundaries between texts and genres, with the mixing of characters forcing them to rethink the scripts. The cross-over points to the generative dimensions of this action figure play - the ways that kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.
I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son's imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.
So, is it any surprise that as this generation has grown older, they have continued to use these stories, characters, even the toys themselves as resources for their own creative expression? The web is full of amazing fan art in which artists lovingly recreate the assemblage of action figures and accessories they enjoyed as a child, much as earlier generations of artists sketched or wrote stories about the stuffed toys of their childhood imagination. (Think Winnie the Pooh or Raggedy Ann and Andy for earlier kinds of toy focused stories.)
There is a whole genre on YouTube of action figure movies, movies which may lovingly recreate the specific images the filmmakers remembered from the source material but may also playfully evoking the mixing and matching of characters that were part of toyroom play.
This same aesthetic of action-figure cinema gave rise to Adult Swim's successful Robot Chicken series, which also mixes and matches characters or recasts them to achieve desired effects. Here's one of their spoofs of the He-Man characters.
And I am particular fan of the web-based Skeltor Show, which remixes and remasters footage from the original He-Man cartoons for irreverent comedy.
All of this suggests that these toys left a lasting imprint on the imaginations of the generation that grew up playing with them.
When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.
From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.
In that sense, the action figure is very much the harbinger of the transmedia movement.
The other day I flew back to Cambridge at the request of Scot Osterweill, the research director for The Education Arcade, in order to participate in the Sandbox Summit, a fascinating gathering of game designers, toy makers, television producers, children's book authors, and educators drawn together through their shared interests in "how media is changing our play and how play is changing our media." I had been asked to give a keynote address which would share some of my thoughts about transmedia entertainment in a way that might be relevant to people who were shaping children's culture.
As I was pulling my thoughts together for the talk, I stumbled onto an article in I09, one of my favorite blogs about geek culture, which listed the "ten most unfortunate Masters of the Universe Toys." I shared the blog post with my son, now 29, who had grown up as part of the "He-Man" generation and we both took great pleasure in realizing that he had at one time had almost all of their examples in his collection and that we both remembered all of these toys. There was, for example, Moss-Man, an action figure covered in green fuzz; Stinkor, an action figure that smelled and looked like a skunk; and Mosquitor, an action figure which contained a red blood-like fluid.
And I began to ponder why these toys had been such a memorable part of his childhood and what it meant that the generation of young men and women who were, in many cases, controlling the production of transmedia entertainment had come of age playing with this particular media franchise. In some ways, contemporary transmedia is being produced by kids who grew up playing with He-Man to be consumed by kids who grew up playing Pokemon.
Peggy Charren, who formed Action for Children's Television and lobbied the Federal Communication Commission to regulate childrens programming, would have had an explanation. At the time, she argued that Heman and similar programs were simply "half hour commercials" which had no redeeming value, because they "blur the distinction between program content and commercial speech. Children are attracted to the concepts of the shows and don't fully understand the selling intent behind them... [This has become] a gold mine to station managers and toy manufacturers, but a commercial nightmare to most parents." She and her allies argued that the stories and characters, she feared, were being sacrificed in order to turn the cartoons into advertisements for tie-in toys and as a consequence, these toys were going to stifle youngsters' imaginations. Charren's critique of these toys has taken deep roots among the professional classes, as was reflected by the many different ways these concerns got evoked by speakers at the Sandbox Summit. I do not mean to make light of these concerns, though I have also always found myself resistant to the language used to critique these toys, which often assumes that the play around these fictional narratives necessarily reproduces the terms of the original stories without creating a space for the child's own imaginative contributions.
There is no denying that Mattel had a clear commercial interest in producing the program and extending our experience of watching the show into a line of associated toys. And the same can be said of contemporary transmedia entertainment content which is often funded by the branding and promotional budget for the media property. Minimally, transmedia extensions are selling the "mother ship." Often, they are creating alternative sources of income - they are products in their own right just as the He-Man dolls are.
Yet, I don't think we can reduce the experience which young people had playing to He-Man to simply the selling and buying of commercial commodities, however distasteful such toys seem to many academic parents. After all, all of us have bought many commodities in our lifetime, most of which we forgot as soon as we had consumed them, yet these particular toys have become part of the shared memories of my son's generation in part because they were tokens of stories and entertainment experiences which were deeply meaningful to them. More than that, though, these toys became resources for their own imaginations, tokens which they used to claim a space for themselves within the stories.
Whether they fully recognized it or not, when media producers sold these toys to our children, they also told them things about the nature of the story - the story you saw on the screen was not complete and self contained; these characters had a life beyond the stories we've been sold and told, and what happens next is literally and figuratively in the hands of the consumer. These toys were in effect an authoring system which encouraged young people to make up their own stories about these characters much as the folk in other time periods might make up stories about Robin Hood or Pecos Bill.
Children have long played with the core narratives of their culture, as might be suggested by the fact that Tom Sawyer played Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables King Arthur, and Meg of Little Women Pilgrim's Progress, each central stories of their own time. In the 20th century, mass media displaced many traditional stories, but it does not follow from this that children's play with narrative was none the less meaningful to them as a way of trying on adult roles and asserting their own ability to build on and revise core stories that matter to them.
As a father during that period, I have vivid memory of the intense pain of stepping barefoot on some molded piece of plastic when I was called into my son's bedroom at night to comfort him about a bad dream. I'd pick up the plastic shield, sword, or pick ax, and grumble, "grrrmble snarl Teela" and my son, a stickler for details, would correct me, "No, Dad, that belongs to Sorceress." These details mattered. I often reflected at such moments (or at least I did when the pain of my punctured flesh subsided!) on the ways that this attachment to distinctive shields, say, mirrored the detailed descriptions of the shields and weapons of the different Greek heroes found in Homer, suggesting that heraldry in some forms remains an active element in stories across history.
The accessories were extensions of the characters, reflections of their personalities, artifacts of their stories, and signs of their capacities for action. Each character was connected to every other character through complex sets of antagonisms and alliances and each character bore their own mythology which could become the point of entry for a new as yet unrealized story. He-Man was teaching his generation to think not just about individual stories but about the process of world-building and part of the pleasure of collecting these toys was to demonstrate their mastery over the lore of these worlds.
In some cases, the characters would be deeply embedded in the aired episodes and in other cases, they would exist only in the background or only in one episode and often these were the characters most vividly remembered because they became the child's own possession, their backstory fleshed out from their own imagination, their personality constructed from their own playful performances. Each of the characters had different personalities (and thus demanded different voices) and over time, you would learn their verbal ticks, the quirks of their personality, and the sound of their voice, even though no two children would necessarily perform these characters in the same way. We might think of these characters as in effect avatars, an extension of the child into a virtual or imagined world, and see these constant shifts between personalities as a predecessor of what we would describe as identity play in adolescence.
Of course, the performance doesn't end there. The child themselves might become He-Man or some of the other characters through Halloween dress-ups and the web is full of yellowing family photographs of children of my son's generation physically embodying the heroes of their programs. Their mothers (or in my son's case, their grandmothers) might be coaxed into decorating birthday cakes with images copied from He-Man coloring books. And those lacking coloring books (or possessing artistic temperaments) would draw their own pictures of these characters which gave another tangible form to their fantasy lives. My son wrote countless stories which he dictated to his mother and I about He-Man and in the process, he moved from playing with physical objects to playing with words and with the basic building blocks of narratives.
In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmnation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figures, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books, each of which gave us a chance to learn a little something more about Eternia, Castle Grayskull, and the other places where these stories took place.
And of course, He-Man was only one of the many media franchises which were producing action figures. My son collected figures from Pee-Wee's Playhouse and the World Wrestling Federation, not to mention a smathering of Transformers, Thundercats, Silverhawks, and many other toy lines. Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories, which might involve meet-ips and cross-overs unlikely to occur in commercial media (though there was at least one DC comic where Superman and He-Man combined forces) but almost inevitable once kids got their hands on the toys.
Sometimes an action figure would stand in for another character not yet acquired much as an actor plays a fictional role and in other cases the pleasure was in experimenting with the boundaries between texts and genres, with the mixing of characters forcing them to rethink the scripts. The cross-over points to the generative dimensions of this action figure play - the ways that kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.
I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son's imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.
So, is it any surprise that as this generation has grown older, they have continued to use these stories, characters, even the toys themselves as resources for their own creative expression? The web is full of amazing fan art in which artists lovingly recreate the assemblage of action figures and accessories they enjoyed as a child, much as earlier generations of artists sketched or wrote stories about the stuffed toys of their childhood imagination. (Think Winnie the Pooh or Raggedy Ann and Andy for earlier kinds of toy focused stories.)
There is a whole genre on YouTube of action figure movies, movies which may lovingly recreate the specific images the filmmakers remembered from the source material but may also playfully evoking the mixing and matching of characters that were part of toyroom play.
This same aesthetic of action-figure cinema gave rise to Adult Swim's successful Robot Chicken series, which also mixes and matches characters or recasts them to achieve desired effects. Here's one of their spoofs of the He-Man characters.
And I am particular fan of the web-based Skeltor Show, which remixes and remasters footage from the original He-Man cartoons for irreverent comedy.
All of this suggests that these toys left a lasting imprint on the imaginations of the generation that grew up playing with them.
When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.
From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm. From the beginning they thought of stories as resources out of which they could create their own fantasies, as something which shifted into the hands of the audience once they had been produced and in turn as something which was expanded and remixed on the grassroots level.
In that sense, the action figure is very much the harbinger of the transmedia movement.
Transmidia, Games e Educação
Um texto longo, porém ótimo que aborda Transmidia, Games e Educação.
Originalmente publicado no link http://vgalt.com/2009/10/13/reading-comprehension-as-a-transmedial-sub-medial-trait/
Reading comprehension as a transmedial (sub-medial) trait.
VIDEO GAMES, READING , AND TRANSMEDIAL COMPREHENSION.
Games represent a high interest accessible medium to build comprehension, and in using games we can continue to engage in topics that are complex, provocative and motivating, and not often found in texts designed to be simplified for the sake of decoding. Games will also help to get these students to reconnect with reading and learning, and create a basis for developing and using comprehension strategies. With this in mind, this knowledge and experience of theory can provide an opportunity for educators to bootstrap traditional print-based literacy and engage students in comprehension development.
Brock Dubbels
The University of Minnesota
The Center for Cognitive Sciences
305 Elliott Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 747-0346
(612) 626-7253
Dubbe003@umn.edu
Abstract: In this qualitative study, literacy practices of “struggling” seventh and eighth graders were recorded on videotape as they engaged in both traditional and new literacies practices in an after school video games club. These recordings were analyzed in the context of building comprehension skills with video games. The students struggled with reading and are characterized as unmotivated and disengaged by the school, which may be at the root of their inability to use comprehension strategies. Playing video games is viewed here as a literate practice, and was seen to be more engaging than traditional activities (such as reading school text, writing journals, etc.). The conclusion of this observation makes connections to current research in comprehension and provides a basis for teachers to use games to develop comprehension and learning.
Key Terms: situation, event indexing model, causal integration model, ludic, interaction, comprehension, knowledge act, decoding, agency, engagement, identity, self-monitoring, metacognition, transmedial, walk-through, level-up, button-mashing
This selected excerpt comes from:
Dubbels, B.R. (2008) Video games, reading, and transmedial comprehension. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.),Reference. Information ScienceHandbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education.
Why games?
Regardless of whether we are talking about comprehension in novels, articles, sculpture, or dance, comprehension comes from dialogue and interaction, where the learner gathers information and must act upon it in some way—feedback and reflection are essential.
Feedback and interaction were central to the work of Lev Vygotsky, as depicted here in Figure 1. (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, p. 35).
In this model called the Zone of Proximal Development, the external dialogue created by interaction in stage 1, eventually becomes internalized, and through this internalization individuals go through a process where they learn to self-monitor, learn to observe, learn to practice, learn to receive feedback, and ultimately they learn to refine the process of comprehension through questioning and verifying what they know in what can be called a knowledge act.
Vygotsky (1978) maintained that children imitate what they see adults do, and this gradually develops into the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. In teaching something new, we need to start with where the student is at with their ability to solve problems, and then under the guidance of a more experienced problem solver, their ability is extended—this is called the Zone of Proximal Development. The mentor’s role, according to Herb Simon is to align a problem so that the solution can become transparent, and this can then be extended and deepened.
Games can provide this interaction, provide relevant feedback, help to create and align a problem, and demand mastery in the same way a competent instructor can scaffold a learner through the Zone of Proximal Development. In a classroom situation, where a teacher has thirty or more students, and fifty-five minutes to work with them–an interactive game can be quite effective, as it is often unlikely that teacher will be able to work one-on-one with each student in a meaningful way every day. But it is possible that games can provide the kind of accessibility, interaction, and instruction to develop comprehension that young people who struggle to decode might benefit from, but more importantly, games may give incentive to reengage in developing essential reading skills.
What makes the idea of a game so compelling as a method for developing comprehension is the amount of regular feedback and the necessity of mastery of complex situations that might offer a variety of solution sets from combinations and permutations of different tools, rules, cooperation, and knowledge of the narrative goals and character arcs. This complex interaction scaffolds the player through difficulties until they are able to perform the task with knowledge through the developing awareness that failure and recovery from it (learning) are part of developing knowledge, strategy, and competence.
What Teachers Need to Know
The big idea here is that games are built upon many of the same comprehension elements that are incorporated in reading printed text. There is a tradition of consideration of video games as new narratives; Laurel (1993), Murray (1997), Aarseth (1997), Frasca (2003) and Crawford (2005) agree that there are narrative elements, but that games are also designed to be interactive in the way that they tell stories. As Frasca (2003) describes, the aspects of simulation and problem solving components of the game are also very compelling, and are what he called the ludic aspects of the game: the elements that instigate play—see also Salen & Zimmerman (2004).
These elements create the feedback and demand knowledge acts, where the player must gather information, decide what is useful, and use it to act to get through a puzzle. This process of game play demands that the player acquire and act upon the information they gather. This view of games, play, and learning presents a highly flexible and powerful form of comprehension, and it is generally instinctual, but often needs mentoring, modeling, and practice to develop.
The table above to the right shows a direct and close relation to situation model research– typical literary categories often used in reading comprehension assessments; I am familiar and have worked on the Minnesota MCA2 for four years– and state and national standards. This alignment of the dimensions of a Situation Model from the Event Indexing Model allows for close proximity and correlation between what are often considered traditional and customary literary terms and an empirically validated comprehension models such as from Walter Kintsch (1968) and participants in the Discourse Processing tradition.
Although these connections have not been made yet on the level of the state and nationwide assessments, as I believe they should, this study assumed that connecting empirical comprehension research from the Discourse Processing tradition would be useful in connecting the culturally mediated competencies of the state assessments (that are often only validated through inter-rater reliability: selected teachers sitting around a table rating and compromising about what is what) and language arts standards to an empirically validated theory of reading comprehension. This enables a more regimented look at comprehension, narrative, discourse, and connection to problem solving and decision making as made popular by Kahneman and Tversky (2001).
In addition. this connection makes the case for The Compensation Model (Stanovich, 2000), and also connects to more recent work on the Indexical Hypothesis and Embodiment Theory (Borghi 2005; Glenburg, 1997; Zwann 2003; Barsalou 1999).
Learning and Play are Inseparable
With this connection to discourse processing and comprehension, play might be seen as an evolutionary adaptation (Sutton-Smith, 1997) useful in transferring culture, knowledge, and developing proficiency in tool use, as well as the creation of knowledge, culture, and tools, (Mumford, 1945). Above all, play represents an opportunity for exploration and inquiry in a context where the cost of failure is the opportunity to learn from a mistake. In play, knowledge is gathered and acted upon, a very powerful process to develop experience and comprehension. Play is visible evidence of comprehension. It is an expression of and toward comprehension. It is a knowledge act.
Play is one of the building blocks of comprehension, and games are the way that we ground cognition and pass on cultural knowledge and skills sets through off-loading cognitive work into the environment, thus making he environment part of the cognitive system through place-holders and computational devides like toys and tools–Vygotsky (176) called these pivots.
With play, children and adults seek and explore through observation, manipulation, and imitation. When we play, we take our prior knowledge and attempt to create order and demonstrate competence. With toys, children are interacting with a representation of something that adults use.
My own son likes to play with cars. He makes engine sounds and drives them around with screeching tires. He also likes to take on roles and imitate with toys that are representations of the tools we use for productivity. Above we saw him in his own office with the same tools mom and dad use. What he was doing was building a repertoire of how things work and what they are used for in his memory.
From an evolutionary perspective, he is using his imagination to prepare for a time when he will drive and also to share, communicate, and produce culture through knowledge of cultural artifacts like cars and computers. This process of visualization, belief systems and cultural roles are important aspects of learning. Williamson Shaffer (2006) in his description of Epistemic Games provides depth and detail on how these elements work in games (and this is exemplified and contextualized later in Figure 2).
Games are a structured form of play, and what teachers need to understand is that play is learning, and by structuring play, we can create a higher degree of engagement and effort. Games allow for the kind of learning that encourages mastery, builds resilience and tenacity, innovation and creativity, as well as practice solving problems. Play creates comprehension through knowledge acts, whether the learner is performing or investigating.
Games, Play, and Learning are Inseparable.
As children develop and grow, their play becomes more complex, and we begin to see imaginative play, with language and visualization, use of complex ideas, actions, tools, and language, and interaction and shared play with others.
If you look at a game, it generally is composed of a number of elements that are structured to create the interaction and experience that children and adults enact in play (such as imagination, role playing and identities, rules, branching and choice, as well as incorporating the use of probability and chance.
Games are tools for learning, but what is important for educators to know is how to use games that structure and extend play and create reflection. Often tools are useful in helping individuals to learn complex problem solving and pass along cultural knowledge, but what we often fail to account for is that tools are not as powerful until used in an activity with intention. Kids may have grown up in a digital age, but this does not make
them digital natives. They may just be strangers in a strange land that they want to know more about—we can provide the passport.
We need to consider play as the foundation in an approach to using video games, and we need to recognize that games may represent an activity that is complex and relevant enough to engage students in learning and developing comprehension skills.
But games are not enough. In education, we often talk about the tools, because the tools are often the measure of what we take to be progress in education. Often the tools we use such as tests and software are thought to be capable of definitive assessment. And if the software helps improve test performance, it must be improving learning over all. This is not always the case, and more often than not, it is the way the tool is used that is important.
We are foolish to think we can just give out the tools and easily replicate this (Cuban, 1986),. It is important to understand that tools are only as powerful as the way they are employed. The central role of the tool may be one of the major obstacles educators will need to overcome in the classroom if schools and teachers are going to remain relevant for preparation of young people for the new global labor force. Games should not be seen as a panacea, but they may be used as powerful tools.
Play and the way that we learn to use tools should be the focus. Play changes the discourse around learning. It implies making mistakes, trying new things, and creativity, and innovation— traits necessary for knowledge workers. It also takes the pressure off children who are already under tremendous pressure to perform in school settings that regularly insist on going faster and covering more ground because we are all so far behind.
Play can bring some more humanity into our classroom teaching, and it is also a proven method for learning and developing cultural competency—and games represent more formalized and structured approaches to this cultural learning often found in informal learning environments often known as the wilds away from school.
The take home message
Play is how we share and transfer physical and intellectual tools to our young and other community members. Johann Huizinga (1938), the author of Homo Ludens, stated that play is the basis of culture. According to Lewis Mumford (1954), it was imitation, role play, the creation of miniature environments and the symbolic fields of play where every function of life was modeled as a game to develop competency and advance what was known and will be known.
Perhaps play and representation are the factory of our conceptual abilities, and if play involves the creation of abstractions and models of the world, then sharing play necessitates complex communication as well as a means for innovation and production. This makes it the perfect method for developing comprehension.
A Model for Comprehension
In terms of understanding the elements of comprehension, the tradition of Discourse Processing provides ample opportunity to look at comprehension as transmedial. Kintsch (1988, 1998) in presenting the Construction Integration Model suggested that there were three levels of representation of text.
Two additional levels of discourse processing were later added by Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, (1995), and account for literary elements often associated with genre and the author’s purpose and style that are used for top-down processing. These levels are:
The text genre level, which accounts for the kinds of information presented, how the information is presented, and the ways in which the information is to be interpreted,
And the communication level, which involves the reader constructing a representation of the writer of the text.
The Event Indexing Model, which includes all five boxes from Figure 3, provides insight on events, or situations as portrayed in a variety of media, which are the made up of the interrelated elements. This level can be very useful for teachers to know how to develop comprehension in their students and create transfer between different media experiences; and it is the basis for the transmedial nature of comprehension.
If students have struggled to decode, games and film can provide a more accessible entry point at the situation model level, (level 3 experiences), where they can interact with complex texts and narratives without the cognitive load of decoding text and making meaning from it (bottom up processing).
With games, much of the action, the context, and the actors are depicted ( they are shown in pictures), and also described through the action and narrative text in the print and audio of character dialog and narration. This depiction with description allows for clarification for how we should view the context and understand the situation with the directing of our attention (Kress, 2003) and may lessen demand on the propositional level from the text to make a mental image representing what is being described in the text.
This contextualization of images with printed traditional text informs and focuses the player, and offers the experience and information to embody the reading and comprehension experimentally. Thus, the learner makes a more robust model of the situation to develop and build the representation as the narrative evolves. This might allow for the student to draw from prior experience and use top-down processes to make meaning of the events and comprehend without the taxation on processing from decoding, therefore utilizing and further developing comprehension.
But how does this help decoding?
When a reader has well-developed comprehension skills, they can recruit prior knowledge to bootstrap lower level processes (Stanovich, 2000) and this is an important idea for making a case for using more accessible texts that are relevant and interesting to the learner. Once again, the reader can use higher-level process in order to support lower level process (Stanovich, 2000).
What makes teaching with games to develop comprehension meaningful are the second and the third level, called the Propositional and Situation Levels. The Propositional Level is where we decode communications into the Situation Level. The Situation level is where the reader represents many of the elements and descriptions that go into making a mental model of a situation. On this level, the learner constructs a mental representation of the situation experienced, remembered, read, perceived, or described in a real or imaginary world, (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwann & Radavansky, 1998).
When working to teach reading with this information, it is important to connect to prior knowledge and build and compare the new information to prior situation models, or prior experience. Consider a story board, or a comic strip where each scene is defined and then the next event is framed. Readers need to learn to create these frames when comprehending text. Each event in a text should then be integrated and developed as an evolution of ideas presented, as each scene builds with new information, the model is updated and expanded.
“If the event that is currently being processed overlaps with the
events in working memory on a particular dimension, then a link
between those events is established, then a link between those
events is stored in long-term memory. Overlap is determined based
on two events share an index, (i.e., a time, place, protagonist, cause,
or goal).”
(Goldman, Graesser, & van den Broek, 1999, p. 94).
Thus, we must build our understanding. The attributes of a situation model can be made much more robust and much more easily accessible when prior knowledge is recruited and connected into what we already know, and less effort will be made of finding the familiar.
Two types of prior knowledge that support this in the Event Indexing Model are:
· General world knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about concept types, e.g.,
scripts, schemas, categories, etc.)
· Referent specific knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about specific entities).
These two categories represent experience in the world and literary elements used in defining genre
and style as described from the Event Indexing Model. The theory posits that if a reader has more
experience with the world that can be tapped into, and also knowledge and experience about the
structure of stories, they are more likely to have a deeper understanding of the passage.
Genre Expectation
It is possible that when we are familiar with “once upon a time”, we will be familiar with the structure
and purpose of fairy tale stories. Thus we begin to expect certain events, characters, and settings that
we may be able to predict, and can therefore be surprised and entertained when the story has a twist,
or an element that was unexpected is presented.
Further, van den Broek et al (2001) reports that readers engage in a different style of reading according to genre expectations, and, that reading purpose will inform the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of the text—so when readers have familiarity, they generally have a tactic or strategy for engaging with the text. It would be expected that a reader with little or no familiarity would use a button mashing style of trial and error when playing a game just as a reader would cast about for meaning when trying to comprehend a passage in a challenging text.
To sum this up, comprehenders parse clauses of texts into events on five situational dimensions: time, space, causation, motivation, and the protagonist. There are four central assumptions this model is built upon:
1. Events are the central units of situation models ( the event-centrality assumption)
2. Events can be linked on five dimensions
3. The events are either related or not related on a particular dimension
4. All dimensions are equal.
With this in mind, the Event Indexing Model is an equal opportunity model of comprehension. It works across media and is just as applicable with pictures as it is with text. It is transmedial — or perhaps sub-medial, working as a form of categorical organization to go from high fidelity, fine-tooth detail, to more generalized levels of organization — chunking and schema building. That we create the same types of memory based upon pattern recognition, and that print-text is not the only way to develop reading comprehension. In this sense, reading is thinking queued by text, and that the key to being a successful reader is not automaticity with decoding, but the ability to match new information with prior experience.
When, for example, a learner is presented with
Once upon a time . . .
They often expect other narrative features like
Happily ever after.
These elements of story structure and narrative are called Story Grammars,
and these exist based upon our prior experience with text and our ability in
pattern recognition.If you think about a narrative as a labyrinth or maze
you may want to consider the view from the top to accelerate the journey
This is what Daedalus did for Icarus, in helping him to escape the labyrinth– and this use of to-sight may be useful through improving the knowledge of novice narrative comprehenders through teaching with more accessible and high-interest media which offers feedback, interaction, and multi-modal sensory input, as well as inference making, resource management, and strategy generation. In addition, games can provide the social capital that will reinforce engagement and quality time on task. In addition, games provide a much more complex narrative.
Just consider as a branching example a game as simple as Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders to UK folks):
The game movement can influence the narrative attributes and remove the barriers of decoding to the generation and development of literary elements and pattern recognition for cognitive chunking and schema building reflected in the categories listed in the Event Indexing Model. It was this exploration of theory that led to the study of struggling readers using video games as methods for observing upper levels in student comprehension and the ideal of using high motivation narratives such as video games like Metroid Prime to examine the comprehension abilities of students who had been removed from traditional classroom instruction for reading comprehension issues,who were self-reported gaming enthusiasts to see how they did with a complex game. In this sense, if a novel is a linear experience where the choices of context lead from one scene to the next based upon the author’s order of choice, a game can be offered based upon player choices, and may offer multiple possible arcs of experience, thus:
More to come . . .
Originalmente publicado no link http://vgalt.com/2009/10/13/reading-comprehension-as-a-transmedial-sub-medial-trait/
Reading comprehension as a transmedial (sub-medial) trait.
VIDEO GAMES, READING , AND TRANSMEDIAL COMPREHENSION.
Games represent a high interest accessible medium to build comprehension, and in using games we can continue to engage in topics that are complex, provocative and motivating, and not often found in texts designed to be simplified for the sake of decoding. Games will also help to get these students to reconnect with reading and learning, and create a basis for developing and using comprehension strategies. With this in mind, this knowledge and experience of theory can provide an opportunity for educators to bootstrap traditional print-based literacy and engage students in comprehension development.
Brock Dubbels
The University of Minnesota
The Center for Cognitive Sciences
305 Elliott Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55408
(612) 747-0346
(612) 626-7253
Dubbe003@umn.edu
Abstract: In this qualitative study, literacy practices of “struggling” seventh and eighth graders were recorded on videotape as they engaged in both traditional and new literacies practices in an after school video games club. These recordings were analyzed in the context of building comprehension skills with video games. The students struggled with reading and are characterized as unmotivated and disengaged by the school, which may be at the root of their inability to use comprehension strategies. Playing video games is viewed here as a literate practice, and was seen to be more engaging than traditional activities (such as reading school text, writing journals, etc.). The conclusion of this observation makes connections to current research in comprehension and provides a basis for teachers to use games to develop comprehension and learning.
Key Terms: situation, event indexing model, causal integration model, ludic, interaction, comprehension, knowledge act, decoding, agency, engagement, identity, self-monitoring, metacognition, transmedial, walk-through, level-up, button-mashing
This selected excerpt comes from:
Dubbels, B.R. (2008) Video games, reading, and transmedial comprehension. In R. E. Ferdig (Ed.),Reference. Information ScienceHandbook of research on effective electronic gaming in education.
Why games?
Regardless of whether we are talking about comprehension in novels, articles, sculpture, or dance, comprehension comes from dialogue and interaction, where the learner gathers information and must act upon it in some way—feedback and reflection are essential.
Feedback and interaction were central to the work of Lev Vygotsky, as depicted here in Figure 1. (Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, p. 35).
In this model called the Zone of Proximal Development, the external dialogue created by interaction in stage 1, eventually becomes internalized, and through this internalization individuals go through a process where they learn to self-monitor, learn to observe, learn to practice, learn to receive feedback, and ultimately they learn to refine the process of comprehension through questioning and verifying what they know in what can be called a knowledge act.
Vygotsky (1978) maintained that children imitate what they see adults do, and this gradually develops into the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. In teaching something new, we need to start with where the student is at with their ability to solve problems, and then under the guidance of a more experienced problem solver, their ability is extended—this is called the Zone of Proximal Development. The mentor’s role, according to Herb Simon is to align a problem so that the solution can become transparent, and this can then be extended and deepened.
Games can provide this interaction, provide relevant feedback, help to create and align a problem, and demand mastery in the same way a competent instructor can scaffold a learner through the Zone of Proximal Development. In a classroom situation, where a teacher has thirty or more students, and fifty-five minutes to work with them–an interactive game can be quite effective, as it is often unlikely that teacher will be able to work one-on-one with each student in a meaningful way every day. But it is possible that games can provide the kind of accessibility, interaction, and instruction to develop comprehension that young people who struggle to decode might benefit from, but more importantly, games may give incentive to reengage in developing essential reading skills.
What makes the idea of a game so compelling as a method for developing comprehension is the amount of regular feedback and the necessity of mastery of complex situations that might offer a variety of solution sets from combinations and permutations of different tools, rules, cooperation, and knowledge of the narrative goals and character arcs. This complex interaction scaffolds the player through difficulties until they are able to perform the task with knowledge through the developing awareness that failure and recovery from it (learning) are part of developing knowledge, strategy, and competence.
What Teachers Need to Know
The big idea here is that games are built upon many of the same comprehension elements that are incorporated in reading printed text. There is a tradition of consideration of video games as new narratives; Laurel (1993), Murray (1997), Aarseth (1997), Frasca (2003) and Crawford (2005) agree that there are narrative elements, but that games are also designed to be interactive in the way that they tell stories. As Frasca (2003) describes, the aspects of simulation and problem solving components of the game are also very compelling, and are what he called the ludic aspects of the game: the elements that instigate play—see also Salen & Zimmerman (2004).
These elements create the feedback and demand knowledge acts, where the player must gather information, decide what is useful, and use it to act to get through a puzzle. This process of game play demands that the player acquire and act upon the information they gather. This view of games, play, and learning presents a highly flexible and powerful form of comprehension, and it is generally instinctual, but often needs mentoring, modeling, and practice to develop.
The table above to the right shows a direct and close relation to situation model research– typical literary categories often used in reading comprehension assessments; I am familiar and have worked on the Minnesota MCA2 for four years– and state and national standards. This alignment of the dimensions of a Situation Model from the Event Indexing Model allows for close proximity and correlation between what are often considered traditional and customary literary terms and an empirically validated comprehension models such as from Walter Kintsch (1968) and participants in the Discourse Processing tradition.
Although these connections have not been made yet on the level of the state and nationwide assessments, as I believe they should, this study assumed that connecting empirical comprehension research from the Discourse Processing tradition would be useful in connecting the culturally mediated competencies of the state assessments (that are often only validated through inter-rater reliability: selected teachers sitting around a table rating and compromising about what is what) and language arts standards to an empirically validated theory of reading comprehension. This enables a more regimented look at comprehension, narrative, discourse, and connection to problem solving and decision making as made popular by Kahneman and Tversky (2001).
In addition. this connection makes the case for The Compensation Model (Stanovich, 2000), and also connects to more recent work on the Indexical Hypothesis and Embodiment Theory (Borghi 2005; Glenburg, 1997; Zwann 2003; Barsalou 1999).
Learning and Play are Inseparable
With this connection to discourse processing and comprehension, play might be seen as an evolutionary adaptation (Sutton-Smith, 1997) useful in transferring culture, knowledge, and developing proficiency in tool use, as well as the creation of knowledge, culture, and tools, (Mumford, 1945). Above all, play represents an opportunity for exploration and inquiry in a context where the cost of failure is the opportunity to learn from a mistake. In play, knowledge is gathered and acted upon, a very powerful process to develop experience and comprehension. Play is visible evidence of comprehension. It is an expression of and toward comprehension. It is a knowledge act.
Play is one of the building blocks of comprehension, and games are the way that we ground cognition and pass on cultural knowledge and skills sets through off-loading cognitive work into the environment, thus making he environment part of the cognitive system through place-holders and computational devides like toys and tools–Vygotsky (176) called these pivots.
With play, children and adults seek and explore through observation, manipulation, and imitation. When we play, we take our prior knowledge and attempt to create order and demonstrate competence. With toys, children are interacting with a representation of something that adults use.
My own son likes to play with cars. He makes engine sounds and drives them around with screeching tires. He also likes to take on roles and imitate with toys that are representations of the tools we use for productivity. Above we saw him in his own office with the same tools mom and dad use. What he was doing was building a repertoire of how things work and what they are used for in his memory.
From an evolutionary perspective, he is using his imagination to prepare for a time when he will drive and also to share, communicate, and produce culture through knowledge of cultural artifacts like cars and computers. This process of visualization, belief systems and cultural roles are important aspects of learning. Williamson Shaffer (2006) in his description of Epistemic Games provides depth and detail on how these elements work in games (and this is exemplified and contextualized later in Figure 2).
Games are a structured form of play, and what teachers need to understand is that play is learning, and by structuring play, we can create a higher degree of engagement and effort. Games allow for the kind of learning that encourages mastery, builds resilience and tenacity, innovation and creativity, as well as practice solving problems. Play creates comprehension through knowledge acts, whether the learner is performing or investigating.
Games, Play, and Learning are Inseparable.
As children develop and grow, their play becomes more complex, and we begin to see imaginative play, with language and visualization, use of complex ideas, actions, tools, and language, and interaction and shared play with others.
If you look at a game, it generally is composed of a number of elements that are structured to create the interaction and experience that children and adults enact in play (such as imagination, role playing and identities, rules, branching and choice, as well as incorporating the use of probability and chance.
Games are tools for learning, but what is important for educators to know is how to use games that structure and extend play and create reflection. Often tools are useful in helping individuals to learn complex problem solving and pass along cultural knowledge, but what we often fail to account for is that tools are not as powerful until used in an activity with intention. Kids may have grown up in a digital age, but this does not make
them digital natives. They may just be strangers in a strange land that they want to know more about—we can provide the passport.
We need to consider play as the foundation in an approach to using video games, and we need to recognize that games may represent an activity that is complex and relevant enough to engage students in learning and developing comprehension skills.
But games are not enough. In education, we often talk about the tools, because the tools are often the measure of what we take to be progress in education. Often the tools we use such as tests and software are thought to be capable of definitive assessment. And if the software helps improve test performance, it must be improving learning over all. This is not always the case, and more often than not, it is the way the tool is used that is important.
We are foolish to think we can just give out the tools and easily replicate this (Cuban, 1986),. It is important to understand that tools are only as powerful as the way they are employed. The central role of the tool may be one of the major obstacles educators will need to overcome in the classroom if schools and teachers are going to remain relevant for preparation of young people for the new global labor force. Games should not be seen as a panacea, but they may be used as powerful tools.
Play and the way that we learn to use tools should be the focus. Play changes the discourse around learning. It implies making mistakes, trying new things, and creativity, and innovation— traits necessary for knowledge workers. It also takes the pressure off children who are already under tremendous pressure to perform in school settings that regularly insist on going faster and covering more ground because we are all so far behind.
Play can bring some more humanity into our classroom teaching, and it is also a proven method for learning and developing cultural competency—and games represent more formalized and structured approaches to this cultural learning often found in informal learning environments often known as the wilds away from school.
The take home message
Play is how we share and transfer physical and intellectual tools to our young and other community members. Johann Huizinga (1938), the author of Homo Ludens, stated that play is the basis of culture. According to Lewis Mumford (1954), it was imitation, role play, the creation of miniature environments and the symbolic fields of play where every function of life was modeled as a game to develop competency and advance what was known and will be known.
Perhaps play and representation are the factory of our conceptual abilities, and if play involves the creation of abstractions and models of the world, then sharing play necessitates complex communication as well as a means for innovation and production. This makes it the perfect method for developing comprehension.
A Model for Comprehension
In terms of understanding the elements of comprehension, the tradition of Discourse Processing provides ample opportunity to look at comprehension as transmedial. Kintsch (1988, 1998) in presenting the Construction Integration Model suggested that there were three levels of representation of text.
Two additional levels of discourse processing were later added by Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, (1995), and account for literary elements often associated with genre and the author’s purpose and style that are used for top-down processing. These levels are:
The text genre level, which accounts for the kinds of information presented, how the information is presented, and the ways in which the information is to be interpreted,
And the communication level, which involves the reader constructing a representation of the writer of the text.
The Event Indexing Model, which includes all five boxes from Figure 3, provides insight on events, or situations as portrayed in a variety of media, which are the made up of the interrelated elements. This level can be very useful for teachers to know how to develop comprehension in their students and create transfer between different media experiences; and it is the basis for the transmedial nature of comprehension.
If students have struggled to decode, games and film can provide a more accessible entry point at the situation model level, (level 3 experiences), where they can interact with complex texts and narratives without the cognitive load of decoding text and making meaning from it (bottom up processing).
With games, much of the action, the context, and the actors are depicted ( they are shown in pictures), and also described through the action and narrative text in the print and audio of character dialog and narration. This depiction with description allows for clarification for how we should view the context and understand the situation with the directing of our attention (Kress, 2003) and may lessen demand on the propositional level from the text to make a mental image representing what is being described in the text.
This contextualization of images with printed traditional text informs and focuses the player, and offers the experience and information to embody the reading and comprehension experimentally. Thus, the learner makes a more robust model of the situation to develop and build the representation as the narrative evolves. This might allow for the student to draw from prior experience and use top-down processes to make meaning of the events and comprehend without the taxation on processing from decoding, therefore utilizing and further developing comprehension.
But how does this help decoding?
When a reader has well-developed comprehension skills, they can recruit prior knowledge to bootstrap lower level processes (Stanovich, 2000) and this is an important idea for making a case for using more accessible texts that are relevant and interesting to the learner. Once again, the reader can use higher-level process in order to support lower level process (Stanovich, 2000).
What makes teaching with games to develop comprehension meaningful are the second and the third level, called the Propositional and Situation Levels. The Propositional Level is where we decode communications into the Situation Level. The Situation level is where the reader represents many of the elements and descriptions that go into making a mental model of a situation. On this level, the learner constructs a mental representation of the situation experienced, remembered, read, perceived, or described in a real or imaginary world, (Zwann, Langston, & Graesser, 1995; Zwann & Radavansky, 1998).
When working to teach reading with this information, it is important to connect to prior knowledge and build and compare the new information to prior situation models, or prior experience. Consider a story board, or a comic strip where each scene is defined and then the next event is framed. Readers need to learn to create these frames when comprehending text. Each event in a text should then be integrated and developed as an evolution of ideas presented, as each scene builds with new information, the model is updated and expanded.
“If the event that is currently being processed overlaps with the
events in working memory on a particular dimension, then a link
between those events is established, then a link between those
events is stored in long-term memory. Overlap is determined based
on two events share an index, (i.e., a time, place, protagonist, cause,
or goal).”
(Goldman, Graesser, & van den Broek, 1999, p. 94).
Thus, we must build our understanding. The attributes of a situation model can be made much more robust and much more easily accessible when prior knowledge is recruited and connected into what we already know, and less effort will be made of finding the familiar.
Two types of prior knowledge that support this in the Event Indexing Model are:
· General world knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about concept types, e.g.,
scripts, schemas, categories, etc.)
· Referent specific knowledge (pan-situational knowledge about specific entities).
These two categories represent experience in the world and literary elements used in defining genre
and style as described from the Event Indexing Model. The theory posits that if a reader has more
experience with the world that can be tapped into, and also knowledge and experience about the
structure of stories, they are more likely to have a deeper understanding of the passage.
Genre Expectation
It is possible that when we are familiar with “once upon a time”, we will be familiar with the structure
and purpose of fairy tale stories. Thus we begin to expect certain events, characters, and settings that
we may be able to predict, and can therefore be surprised and entertained when the story has a twist,
or an element that was unexpected is presented.
Further, van den Broek et al (2001) reports that readers engage in a different style of reading according to genre expectations, and, that reading purpose will inform the notion that readers differentially allocate their processing resources according to their expectations about the genre of the text—so when readers have familiarity, they generally have a tactic or strategy for engaging with the text. It would be expected that a reader with little or no familiarity would use a button mashing style of trial and error when playing a game just as a reader would cast about for meaning when trying to comprehend a passage in a challenging text.
To sum this up, comprehenders parse clauses of texts into events on five situational dimensions: time, space, causation, motivation, and the protagonist. There are four central assumptions this model is built upon:
1. Events are the central units of situation models ( the event-centrality assumption)
2. Events can be linked on five dimensions
3. The events are either related or not related on a particular dimension
4. All dimensions are equal.
With this in mind, the Event Indexing Model is an equal opportunity model of comprehension. It works across media and is just as applicable with pictures as it is with text. It is transmedial — or perhaps sub-medial, working as a form of categorical organization to go from high fidelity, fine-tooth detail, to more generalized levels of organization — chunking and schema building. That we create the same types of memory based upon pattern recognition, and that print-text is not the only way to develop reading comprehension. In this sense, reading is thinking queued by text, and that the key to being a successful reader is not automaticity with decoding, but the ability to match new information with prior experience.
When, for example, a learner is presented with
Once upon a time . . .
They often expect other narrative features like
Happily ever after.
These elements of story structure and narrative are called Story Grammars,
and these exist based upon our prior experience with text and our ability in
pattern recognition.If you think about a narrative as a labyrinth or maze
you may want to consider the view from the top to accelerate the journey
This is what Daedalus did for Icarus, in helping him to escape the labyrinth– and this use of to-sight may be useful through improving the knowledge of novice narrative comprehenders through teaching with more accessible and high-interest media which offers feedback, interaction, and multi-modal sensory input, as well as inference making, resource management, and strategy generation. In addition, games can provide the social capital that will reinforce engagement and quality time on task. In addition, games provide a much more complex narrative.
Just consider as a branching example a game as simple as Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders to UK folks):
The game movement can influence the narrative attributes and remove the barriers of decoding to the generation and development of literary elements and pattern recognition for cognitive chunking and schema building reflected in the categories listed in the Event Indexing Model. It was this exploration of theory that led to the study of struggling readers using video games as methods for observing upper levels in student comprehension and the ideal of using high motivation narratives such as video games like Metroid Prime to examine the comprehension abilities of students who had been removed from traditional classroom instruction for reading comprehension issues,who were self-reported gaming enthusiasts to see how they did with a complex game. In this sense, if a novel is a linear experience where the choices of context lead from one scene to the next based upon the author’s order of choice, a game can be offered based upon player choices, and may offer multiple possible arcs of experience, thus:
More to come . . .
Professor Henry Jenkins + Games + Educação
Mais um vídeo do Professor Henry Jenkins do MIT.
Falando sobre jogos e educação.
Falando sobre jogos e educação.
Transmidia, voce já ouviu falar??
Henry Jenkins, diretor da área de Estudos de Midias Comparadas do Mit, aborda nesse vídeo a necessidade da Transmidia. Para quem não se lembra, Henry Jenkis, é aquele acadêmico que fala no documentário A Era do Video Game.
Henry Jenkins on Transmedia - November 2009 from niko on Vimeo.
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