_Im too situated

1
_Im too situated

• Computers and English
• Matt Barton

2
_telling and doing

• Overt information and immersion in practice are
  two fingers on the same hand.

3
_Jump by pressing A

• Gamers often hear language that confuses the
  virtual world and the real world.
• The solution is to give information in context
  and couch it in ways that make sense in the
  context of embodied action.

4
_the quick and the PAUSED
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_patterns of learning

• The issue here is not starting children with easy
  cases.
• Start them with basic cases that let them
  discover and practice fruitful patterns and
  generalizations.
• Good videogames offer concentrated samples.
• They concentrate in the early parts of the game
  an ample number of basic artifacts and tools the
  player needs to learn to use.

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_concentrated samples
7
_license to think

• Leaving children to the mercies of the real world
  by just letting them loose to think and explore
  is not education.

8
_cultural models

• Videogames either reinforce or challenge players
  taken-for-granted perspectives on the world.
• There are (besides still others) two different
  models of what counts as being good or doing
  good.
• What counts as being or doing good is determined
  by a characters own goals, purposes, and values,
  as these are shared with a particular social
  group to which he or she belongs.
• Cultural models are images, stories, principles,
  or metaphors that capture what a group finds
  normal.

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_cultural models

• Cultural models are not true or false.
• They only capture a partial view of reality, one
  that helps groups go about their daily work
  without a lot of thought.
• If many things were not left on autopilot, we
  would spend all our time thinking and never
  acting.

10
_make sense of it

• Videogames have an unmet potential to create
  complexity by letting people experience the world
  from different perspectives.
• Making sense of a virtual world admit not just
  thought but action amounts to experiencing new
  and different cultural models.

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_fable
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_cultural models

• The same capacity that will allow us to enact new
  identities and cultural models can also allow us
  to renew our hate or learn new models of hate.

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_the social mind

• What is most important about thinking is not that
  it is mental, something happening inside our
  heads, but rather that it is social, something
  attuned to and normed by social groups.
• Thinking is also distributedeach of us lets
  others do some our thinking for us.
• The really important knowledge is in the network.

14
_you know what?

• If we want to know how good students are in
  science-
• What is in their heads?
• How well can they leverage knowledge in other
  people and tools?
• How are they positioned within a network with
  other people and tools?

15
_new capitalism

• We must come to see ourselves not in terms of a
  linear progression up a career ladder in one
  single job.
• Instead, we are a portfolio composed of the
  rearrangeable skills and identities we have
  acquired through diverse projects inside and
  outside of workplaces as we move from job to job,
  project to project, and career to career.

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_pay us to work for us

• Good videogames allow players not just to be
  passive consumers but also active producers who
  can customize their own learning experience.

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_declawing the canon

• Schools have, by and large, tamed the canon.
• They have made it into the stuff of tests,
  multiple-choice answers, and standardized
  responses.

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_games as art

• Video games are a new form of art.
• They will not replace books they will sit beside
  them, interact with them, and change them and
  their role in society.