When I act in the game (embodied by my character) I always know why I am doing what I am doing and I understand what my actions mean in the “emotional economy” of the story.
....makes for immersive and powerful game play.
....an important cognitive state for humans when they are learning and performing at their best.
....probably both connected to and more important than “flow” in both gaming (of the sort I am talking about here) and science and other forms of accomplishment.
...a very different view of language than the traditional one.
...words are just labels for files full of experiences, images, texts, and dialogue.
....the result of where our minds and bodies have been in the world...our trajectories through social space and time.
...this view of language renders most of how we teach and learn language, literacy, and second languages in school odd.
How could people be “learning” language and literacy if they are not moving through the world and negotiating with others about how their experiences in the world do or do not “square” with that of others and how and whether they need new experiences in the world?
...researchers have not focused much on how children acquire new styles of academic language.
We know much more about how they learn to decode print, which is ironic because more children fail or quit school because they cannot handle academic language than because
they cannot decode.
By the time children come to school, they are well versed in using conversational styles of language to think about, talk about, and act on the world of their daily experience.
The dilemma for teaching...how such conversational styles can serve as a foundation for
students’ learning in science and, in parallel, their acquisition of academic styles of language.
Bridges must be built through language between the identities students have developed outside
school and new ones they are being asked to take on in school.
bridging their conversational style of language and a more academic style as they work out possible meanings for scientific ideas they actually care about understanding.
Failing to build on students’ conversational dialects is a recipe for destroying their interest in and affiliation with school and schooling.
At the same time, failing to teach all learners new ways with words privileges those whose conversational styles already incorporate aspects of academic language.
It places at a disadvantage those students whose early language socialization has not incorporated aspects of academic language that are valued
if this is true... what about
this ... then everyone starts off better.
Standardized tests are used for what policy makers call "accountability", that is, they are used to hold schools and teachers accountable for the achievement of all students, rich and poor alike. This testing and accountability agenda has often been tied to calls for a return to "basic skills" and even to scripted forms of instruction in reading, math, and science. The view of learning and assessment on which this whole agenda is based is a profoundly impoverished one.
opportunity to learn. If two children are being assessed on something which they have not had equivalent opportunities to learn, the assessment is unjust (unless, of course, the purpose of the assessment is to demonstrate this disparity in opportunity to learn).
...producers (people who can actually engage in a social practice) potentially make better consumers
(people who can read or understand texts from or about the social practice).
...A corollary of this claim is this: writers (in the sense of people who can write texts that are recognizably part of a particular social practice) potentially make better readers (people who can understand texts from or about a given social practice).
....reading tests that ask general, factual, and dictionary-like questions about various texts with no regard for the fact that these texts fall into different genres (that is, they are different kinds of texts) connected to different sorts of social practices. Children can often answer such questions, but they learn and know nothing about the genres and social practices that are, in the end, the heart and soul of literacy.
Schools will continue to operate this way until they (and reading tests) move beyond fixating on reading as silently saying the sounds of letters and words and being able to answer general, factual, and dictionary-like questions about written texts (Coles 1998, 2000). You do, indeed, have to silently say the sounds of letters and words when you read (or, at least, this greatly speeds up reading). You do, indeed, have do be able to
answer general, factual, and dictionary-like questions about what you read: this means you know the "literal" meaning of the text. But what so many people—unfortunately so many educators and policy makers—fail to see is that if this is all you can do, then you can't really read.
Fifth Principle
People have not had the same opportunity to learn a given social language unless they have had equivalent experiences dialogically with people who know that language and who have used it in rich enough contexts to allow the learners to "guess" what perspectives the word and forms being used mean.
Sixth principle
People have not had the same opportunity to learn unless they have equivalent opportunities to "play the game" connected to the texts they are reading. Here "game" applies equally to video games and to different semiotic domains relevant to school.
In the end I claim this:......The solution is not more tests or "accountability". The solution cannot be accomplished only at and by schools. The solution lies where we always knew it did—social justice
wow - and the new standard idea we have - fits that... everyone having access to what is needed to learn and play and flow..
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i need more time to read....
also reading diy u - excellent so far.
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