“Just Words”
November 20th, 2006 by trottahe
This week I am continuing my reading in James Gee’s book, back from a successful presentation on Supporting Virtual Teams Using Second Life at the NMC Regional Conference in San Antonio.
One point that Gee makes in his chapter on Situated Meaning and Learning relates to the role of text in the classroom. I remember struggling with assigned readings, especially those due before class. After an hour of reading, the paragraphs became “just words” for me. As Gee points out, not having any context, it is difficult to make sense out of words and concepts not present in one’s vocabulary yet assign readings before class is a comon practice. One can understand the text on some level, but the information just doesn’t seem to gel or stick around for long, at least not for me.
Some video games are quite text heavy. Gee, when looking at these games found that students had no problems understanding the meanings of text and phrases in these games because they were an integral part of the process of playing the game. These texts including notes, e-mail, IM, chats, diaries, quests, and user manuals. Students used text to solve problems they were encountering in the game, analyze their playing skills and compare their play to others… all higher level cognitive skills yet we don’t usually see students using their textbooks in the same way in the normal classroom. Isn’t this sad? Note also, “when” they were accessing texts which was after they had been playing the game for some length of time, not “before”.
So where does that leave us? In most educator’s minds, we think we are preparing students for class giving assigned reading before the class period yet now I am not so sure this should be “best practice”. Reading can be passive or active, depending on how we choose to use text in the curriculum. In our Virtual Team Project, we spent so much time getting resources together, only to find that our students didn’t even glance at them before the exercise, even when we posted reminders. When revising our virtual team experience, we need to rethink the purpose of the resources and timing of making these materials available. I’m all for making readings part of active learning! 
