gee’s field building project
DESCRIPTION
Gee’s Field Building Project. Main Focus of the Book. This is a discipline-building book: How does a new area of study emerge? How can scholars help it emerge? The “new” area: Digital Media and Learning (DMAL). Book Overview. Definitions of field, discipline, thematic discipline - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Main Focus of the Book
This is a discipline-building book: How does a new area of study
emerge? How can scholars help it emerge?
The “new” area: Digital Media and Learning (DMAL)
Book Overview
Definitions of field, discipline, thematic discipline
What DMAL is Stories about the emergence of
fields related to DMAL Using exemplars and worked
examples for field-building Gee’s example worked example
Field: loosely associated group of people studying a generally defined area
Discipline: more specialized area of research with particular methods, questions, and ways of understanding
Thematic discipline: area centered around a theme that cuts across many different disciplines and disciplinary specializations.
Failed Discipline Building: Literacy Studies Scholars couldn’t agree on whether
literacy has specific effects or a range of different effects
“scholars studying literacy never came to share a core set of perspectives, principles, and tools” (7).
DMAL should become a thematic discipline“…work in this area will become a field,
a thematic discipline, or eventually a discipline of its own or a disciplinary specialization of some larger new discipline (e.g., digital culture) depending on how integration happens. In my view, the ‘deepest’ thing that could happen to work in digital media and learning would be for it to become a thematic discipline” (5).
Do we agree with Gee that scholars should attempt to make DMAL into a more coherent field?
Question
Digital media and learning cannot and should not, in my view, drop the strong tie to learning and become just digital media studies as a branch of cultural studies” (8).
Definition of DMAL
“It is, rather, the study of how digital tools and new forms of convergent media, production, and participation, as well as powerful forms of social organization and complexity in popular culture, can teach us how to enhance learning in and out of school and how to transform society and the global world as well” (14).
What are other possible ways of defining DMAL?
Question
New Literacy Studies
Argued that literacy is affected by many social and cultural factors
People have multiple literacies Never became a full-fledged area
Situated Cognition Studies Thinking is based on previous
experiences, not abstract concepts Situated cognition studies is a
coherent area
New Literacies Studies
Studies the different types of literacies
New Media Literacies Studies Studies how digital media are
transforming society and culture
“ In fact, the way forward to more commonality, sharing, collaboration, and accumulated knowledge is not through more reading and citing of formal literature; rather, it is through being more overt with each other in DMAL about our assumptions, influences, and approaches”(39).
“Transformative work in new areas or old ones often shows up at the margins of established areas, sometimes in forms rejected by established authorities, before it redefines what counts as a center” (50).
Exemplars
Work that comes to be regarded as a “best example” of what work in a field should be
What are our “exemplars?”
“Play Exemplars”
Instead of waiting for exemplars to emerge, we should make bids for work to be accepted as exemplars through “worked examples”
Worked Examples
http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/time_dil.pdf
http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab_we/ http://worked_examples.crlt.indiana.
edu/
Is Gee’s concept of “play exemplars” idea a good way to build a discipline?
Question
Gee’s example: Yu-Gi-Oh!
“Yu-Gi-Oh! involves complex language that is relevant to young people’s success in school and society”
*Did the formatting of the worked example confuse anyone else?
Is Gee’s “example worked example” a solid contribution to the field building he proposes? Does it work?
Question