week 14 readings

Our reading this week talk about how the re-imagining of the self can enhance the learning excercize. This is important to note, because within the parameters of all video games is the design and implementation of the avatar. In Second Life, it can get pretty wild. People can make themselves up with wings, with crazy looking clothes, or make a body type completely opposite to the one they must wear on earth. Diehl (2008) posits that this can have unintended outcomes when playing, or can lead to a more free expression of the self. Dielh argues that technological and cultural literacy are unified, and that to participate most fully in a society, one must best understand the tools available and use them to one's best advantage. In other words, where there is radio, use radio, but when television comes to town, start watching it. thus, with Second Life, the parameters should be explored, and that when we can accept that avatars are what they are, then the language used can be the real language of the person. With this real language, we can then start to really communicate, if you have something you want to say.

We turn to Dr Van Lier again, and this time he wants us to look at affordances in an ecological way. He notes that we all love to prove things with science, because that makes it more concrete and less refutable. Since we know learning goes on in the brain, it would do well, sayeth the scientist, to study the brain. After all, it is something we can test and make number statistics about, so lets do that. And, finally, since all learning is processed by the grey matter in our skulls, we can think of the mind and the brain as the same thing, basically. Ecological learning challenges all of this! Lets forget science! Put away all those tools and devices of measurement! Rene DesCartes is back with his mind/brain division again! Well, ok that last point is too far, but essentially VanLier says here that, of course, we can not separate mind and brain, but that trying to understand learning processes by peering into the firing of neurons is not enough. A learner is stimulated by all around them, and some of that may be better or worse understood, processed now or later, or understood in a gradual way. In this regard, we can use Conversational Analysis to get into the negotiations necesary for communication, and use these as teachable moments. Van Lier then goes on to talk about Gibbson and affordance, which I am less clear about, to be honest. Then he switches to my new fav, Vygotskiy. I have made it a plan to read more about that crazy Russian, because I find his ideas intriguing, and more useful to pedagogic purposes than most. To that end, I also want to study more about John Dewey, because I think he has gotten lost in the shuffle, and, as influential as he was in the early part of the 2oth Century, he is now regarded as classic books are: everyone knows what they are, but no one reads them anymore. Well, unless you are like me, who will read the classics, like Moby Dick--which I thought was a well written exposition of the soul and its wanderings, but could be shortened considerably without all that stuff about whales!
Now, I am going on this diversion, because I think this is the point that Van Lier is making, in that the mind will not stay on topic, but becomes enchanted with all the input around it, and then only later goes back to make sense of it all. In its perigrinations, like on the Pequod. it finds its Ahabs and white whales, and makes sense of all the things it can.