Before studying this unit, I have never been thinking about how gaming can promote learning for young adults, and when I thought about this question, I recalled an experience I had in high school.
Back to Year 10, we had an on-line gaming system for Maths homework, where we have to do little quizzes and games for each unit. The game has a rewarding system which collects point if students are on-line for a longer time or if you are better ranked in the class for each quiz and for the highest ranked person, the teacher will give them a small prize and a bronze award. However we didn’t get penalties for not doing the games. Students was very engaged in this system, we got competitive and enjoyed the ‘games’.
Back then, this was an experimental learning system and in my viewpoint the technology successfully promoted learning.
I believe that today’s learning has changed a lot from my school experience already since technological developments are at full speed.
I believe that today’s learning has changed a lot from my school experience already since technological developments are at full speed. From this lecture slice, we can see that things has changed a lot from my generation to the new born generation already.
Youth get to use things like iPad and tablets before they goes to primary school. In fact there are a lot of games on iPad that promotes thinking and learning for kids such as
“Cut the rope”
or “1010!”
Thus our future challenge on learning with new technology is to teach youth how to use technology properly and also prevent them from access of unhealthy information on-line.
The Imitation Game is a 2014 American historical drama thriller film directed by Morten Tyldum. It is based on the true story of a British cryptanalyst Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) who decrypted German intelligence codes for the British government during World War II. (Wikipedia, 2015)
In 1939, the British intelligence agency recruits Cambridge mathematics alumnus Alan Turing to crack Nazi codes, including Enigma, which was the most advanced code at the time that the Germans uses to transfer secret messages. (Wikipedia, 2015) Turing faces a lot of obstacles in breaking the code and finally with the help of his team, he successfully develops another machine to decipher the enigma. However he didn’t remain a hero like his colleagues, in 1952, the quiet genius encounters disgrace when authorities reveal he is gay and send him to prison. (Mathieson, 2015)
One quote that touched me in the movie is that,
Sometimes it’s the very people who no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine.(The Imitation Game, 2014)
Though this was a tragic ending to a beautiful life, Turing’s work on the electromechanical decoding machine that cut the war short by up to four years. And in fact, this machinery he created at the time is THE WORLD’S FIRST COMPUTER.
The first reason why I chose this movie is just as it announces in the trailer, it based on a true story. It has historical context of World War II and shows viewer a true-life story.
Secondly, It contains aspects which youth are interested such as ‘racial tension, friendship, family, fun times, sexuality, fears, relationships, violence, gender, and substance abuse’ (Bailey, 2011) mentioned by Bailey.
Lastly, similarly to the critical multimodal literacyin Julisa’s astute use of digital video, The Imitation Game also conducts an analysis of social, cultural, historical and political arrangements both inward and outward. (Bailey,2011) By inward, the movie encourages feelings to emerge for the tragic ending of this war hero. By outward, his isolation and failure to connect to anyone highlights his homosexual identity, and it appeals to gay rights activists and sympathizers and promotes social justice towards homosexuality.
Reference:
Bailey, B. (2011). “When I make a film, it’s out of my head”: Expressing emotion and healing through digital filmmaking in the classroom. Digital Culture & Education, 3(2), 76-97. Retrieved from http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/uncategorized/dce1056_bailey_2011_html/
One of the most popular online photo-sharing and video-sharing social network. It has become a platform for celebrities to share their life and stay closer with their fans. E.g. On Taylor Swift’s Instagram page: https://instagram.com/taylorswift/, she has 42.7m followers.
Taylor Swift shared this photo on her Instagram page, and within 1hr, there has already been 270K likes and 3k comments. From this way, Instagram became the most effective way to communicate with fans.
These Instagram pages are controlled over the artists’ company to build a positive image and to lessen the distance between the artists and their fans. Although these might have commercial uses, it is very magnetic in youth’s eyes.
Rage Comics are series of web comics with characters, sometimes referred to as “rage faces”, that are often created with simple drawing software such as MS Paint. The comics are typically used to tell stories about real life experiences, and end with a humorous punch line. It has become increasingly popular to create the comics using web applications often referred to as “rage comic generators” or “rage makers”.
This video talks about the makings and the growing industry of rage comics.
The rage comic is a new literacy grows out from MEME. It is a new literacy due to its mass digital participation, collaboration and access.
A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using wiki software.(Wikipedia, 2015)
It is the most commonly used webpage for academic search. The English Wikipedia is now one of more than 200 Wikipedias and is the largest with over 4.9 million articles. There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of nearly 35 million articles in 288 different languages. (Wikipedia, 2015)
Estimation of contributions shares from different regions in the world to different Wikipedia editions.
Most collage students use Wikipedia as the first step to start a research. According to the article “How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course related research”, we can see that the majority of students uses Wikipedia to gain background information on the topics as it is very effective in finding meaning of terms and it is featured easy to use. (Head and Eisenberg, 2010)
Therefore Wikipedia is the most useful new literacy sites for academic researches.
Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”. (Wikipedia, 2015)
A very interesting culture on twitter would be #hashtag.
A word or phrase preceded by a hash mark (#), used within a message to identify a keyword or topic of interest and facilitate a search for it. So whenever a user adds a hashtag to their post, it is immediately indexed by the social network and searchable by
other users.
An example of this would be the Martin Place Siege 2014.
On Monday, a gunman stormed a cafe in Martin Place, entering a tense standoff with police. After the hostage-taker displayed an Islamic flag in the cafe’s window, many of Australia’s Muslims are understandably anxious about facing retribution.
And then a rise of the event #illridewithyou swept over twitter and showed the world how Australians responded to terrorism. It was started from a post that a young man asked to walk with a Muslim woman who was about to take off her hijab. People saw the post offered to ride with anyone who’s anxious in religious outfit and started the first hashtag of #illridewithyou (Valinsky, 2014). The campaign snowballed from there. Within 12 hours, the hashtag was measured more than 150,000 tweets (Valinsky, 2014).
Increasingly, individuals are experiencing a various type of interactions with the media and network through participatory culture. Twitter gives the opportunity for young people to be creative and connective to the world.
To link these new literacy sites to Laankshear’s article “‘New’ Literacies: Technologies and Values”, some points needs to be noted.
“New technical stuff” are social networks such as Instagram. Different to postmodern paradigm, modern-technological paradigm such as Instagram, can be seen simultaneously by millions of people all around the world, and the faster the communication becomes, the users participating need to use them more carefully.
Copyright needs to be considered when using informations on these social networks,
a work can be shared, remixed, or reused with attri- bution to the original work, but cannot be for profit, or can be used for commercial purposes, or can be reused but the resulting work must be made available for others to reuse, and so on (for more, see CreativeCommons.org).
“New ethos stuff” are considered stuff such as affinity spaces, where people are tied together online by common interests, this can be shown by #hashtags on twitter, where people use these hashtags of words, phrases and events to link to the common topic and communicate.
Overall, The 4 new literacy sites are all helpful and effective social media networks for young people to connect to the online world and participate to the larger community.
REFERENCE LIST:
Head, A. and Eisenberg, M. (2010). How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course-related research. First Monday, 15(3).
A word or phrase preceded by a hash mark (#), used within a message to identify a keyword or topic of interest and facilitate a search for it. So whenever a user adds a hashtag to their post, it is immediately indexed by the social network and searchable by
EDGU1002 Youth and Digital Culture 
