Digital Game Involvement

Calleja, G (2007) Digital Game Involvement: A Conceptual Model, Games and Culture 2(3), 236-260

In this article Calleja argues for the need to re-conceptualize game involvement normally represented through the metaphor of ‘immersion’ as a sort of uni-dimensional ‘mental’ (noetic) plunging into the virtual world. Involvement in game playing is physical in addition to mental, and also multifaceted rather than uni-dimentional. It involves several dimensions of game playing—strategic (engagement with all forms of decision-making within the game), performance (with all modes of avatar or game piece control in the digital environment), affective, sharing (with all aspects of interaction with other agents in the game world), narrative (with design-based and/or player-generated stories), and spatial (with a wider game area than what can be seen on the screen). These dimensions are experienced in a “complected fashion” with various degrees of intensity and fluid shifts in the relevance of one dimension over another. Game involvement is thus better represented in the metaphor of ‘incorporation’—“the subjective experience of inhabiting a virtual environment facilitated by the potential to act meaningfully within it while being present to others”(p. 257, my emphasis). ‘Incorporation’ is thus the result of “this fluid intermingling of players’ experiential intensities” and the notion attempts to account for the mental inhabiting of the virtual world as much as for our actual physical embodiment to and embodied interaction with others in that world through avatars. This re-conceptualization of the metaphor for gaming and online world experience —from ‘immersion’ to ‘incorporation’—also entails less of a separation between the virtual and immediate physical environment of the player.

Calleja adopts Goffman (1974) ’s notion of ‘frames’ through the work of Fine (1983) who redefines these ‘schemata of interpretation’ through which we organize and label experience as “worlds of meaning”, and establishes the above mentioned dimensions of involvement as “involvement frames”. He cautions us to remember that they are only described separately for heuristic purposes since in actuality they are never experienced in isolation but always in relation to each other, with some acquiring more relevance than others at certain stages of the involvement development. An important argument made against prior theoretical stances in game theory is that game activity (or ‘ergodicity’) should not be seen as a simple function of direct action or input by the player visible on the screen, potential and readiness to act are also crucial indicators, only perceivable from the multidimensional model of player involvement proposed here.

I very much like Calleja’s multicomponential and fluid or emergent perspective on involvement (which I closely associate with ‘motivation’). It seems much more useful than the classical intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy. It allows for a very systemic perspective on what causes or encourages it. However, the multidimentionality of the matter also makes it very challenging to believe that as teachers and designers of learning experiences we can have any real control over it. And yet, game design theory—to which Calleja is contributing—as well as gaming experiences show that ensuring and enhancing involvement is possible, at least in the game. How different can leveraging involvement in L2 learning really be?

Book review on New (digital) literacies

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2006) New Literacies: Everyday Practices & Classroom Learning, 2^nd edition, Berkshire: McGraw Hill

 Summary

In the (revised) second edition of their widely acclaimed book New Literacies: Everyday Practices & Classroom Learning Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel explore the impact of the massive growth of electronic information and communication technologies on the practice and concept of literacy to then discuss its implications for formal instruction. The authors’ contribution—as reflected in the tripartite organization of their book—is at once ethnographic, conceptual, and programmatic. From an insider (or emic) perspective they thoroughly account, on the one hand, for the ‘digital’ or technical novelty of the multiple new ‘post-typographic’ forms of texts, text production and dissemination afforded by the rise of the Internet and its associated technologies. On the other hand, (on the shoulders of former New Literacy Studies scholar) they further develop the concept of ‘new literacies’ locating novelty in the unprecedented forms of texts and text production afforded by the new technologies—the new ‘technical stuff’—as well as in the new collaborative, participatory and distributive paradigm—the new ‘ethos stuff’— underlying current ways of producing and exchanging texts. Lastly, they explore the insights that the study of young people’s out-of-school literacy practices might yield for classroom learning. New literacies, according to Lankshear and Knobel, are attached to a new logic of social interaction, a drastically new mindset about the world centered on the values of collaboration, participation, distributed expertise, and—most importantly—relatedness (not information!). These new literacies are being strongly embraced by young people outside of school and yet largely ignored by educational systems. New Literacies’ potential contribution to formal instruction can be vast yet it remains subject, the argument goes, to educators’ deep understanding, value and experience of the new paradigm. Their work attempts to contribute to such understanding by describing, classifying and analyzing the nature and possible educational impact of new online and digitally-mediated literacy practices.

Website review--Onestopenglish.com

Macmillan English Campus. (2010) One stop English Number one for English language teachers. Retrieved from www.onestopenglish.com

One Stop English: EFL material developers in contact with the users of their products

One Stop English is a teacher’s resource website published by the Macmillan Education Group. In its subscription version (available for about 60$ a year) the website offers a large amount of fairly good quality resources in all skills of EFL teaching. Materials are designed from a Communicative Language Teaching paradigm by “ELT authors” with Macmillan who also keep their own blogs on the site or link out to other relevant one on different tips and resources for teachers (like one on web resources to improve your classroom practice (http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2011/04/17/visualization-update/ and another one by the author of “An A-Z of ELT”, a McMillan dictionary of terminology on English language teaching who felt his publication would benefit from an online update and enrichment from practicing classroom teachers. (http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/). All activities have a section for users’ comments which according to their authors shape activities update and design. Materials address all skills as well as grammar and vocabulary work and have some sort of agreement to use news published issues from the british newspaper The Guardian, whose stories tend to feature lesson activities. Materials offered on this site are highly multimodal with an emphasis, however, on aural than iconographic information. They come in multiple-level versions and can be searched and retrieved according to age of learners, levels of proficiency, age of learners, ESP areas, skills, and assessment purpose.

A feature of particular interest from an intercultural competence as well as World Englishes perspective is their brief (3-5 minutes) “Live from… authentic interviews” podcasts which gather the views of all kinds of English-speakers (native and non-native) around the world on specific topics (e.g., What stereotypes about Spanish and Spanish people annoy you?, addressed to people in Andalucía). Exposing students to non-native accents of English seems particularly valuable in an EFL, particularly if the teacher is a NS.

            Another potentially valuable aspect of this website is its emphasis on work around the written language and the integration of reading&writing with listening practice and other aspects of communicative and interpretive competence development. Three of this website’s features stand out in this respect: the “Serialized Macmillan readers” with downloadable read-alouds, transcripts and accompanying activities; weekly episodes of the soap opera “The road less traveled” (with podcast, transcripts and exercises), also featuring NS and NNS speech; and “mini-plays” aimed at giving students insights into “relevant modern day UK society and associated language”, again reaching beyond national standard dialects and resorting to various modes beyond verbal language.

In terms of CALL the site does not seem to particularly promote the use of computer and internet-mediated language learning but its lesson plans and general materials include fairly well-prepared “Webquests” on specific topics, which give students enough structure and guidance on web research (with links which actually work!) and yet also encourage a certain degree of individual and further exploration of other topics. As to the approach to language learning, I found that the way in which questions and webquest tasks are prepared seemed to allow for a fairly good integration of language skills through a literacy-based approach to FL learning emphasizing reflection, interpreting and analysis of different approaches to the topics researched. Finally, a last feature of the site which seems interesting from a multimodal, i-mode (language) learning and new literacies perspective is the “video projects” model lesson plans posted under the site’s “integrated skills” subsection, under the major “skills” section. Here an ‘ELT author’ guides teachers and students to develop their own multimodal texts (going from movie reviews to be posted on the web to short promotional videos or oral history documentaries local themes or community members) through comprehensive teaching notes and student worksheets as well as tips for recording and downloading videos.  Students are requested to work with personal digital cameras or mobile phones. Sharing the products on sites like you YouTube and Google video is one of the final goals of these activities. Emphasis is put on not relying excessively on writing and combining it with sound and (moving) images.

Halliday's view of "literacy"

Hi!

A couple of weeks ago as we were commenting Lankshear and Knobel’s as well as Reinhardt and Thorne’s work on digital (L2) literacies development, I mentioned how the definition of literacies as the ability to make meaning valid to a certain community of practice through a variety of codes including but not restricted to verbal and written language was not ‘bought’ by my ‘hero’ Michael Halliday. I meant to share a couple of his quotes on the subject with you and I will in a sec. But basically his idea is that written language, i.e, the way in (or wordings with) which we make meanings in writing, has evolved—like language in general—to serve specific purposes in the ‘social semiotic’ (the dialectically shaped semiotic whole/system made up of language and society). It is not just spoken language written down, it arose to serve specific social functions and then also shaped and was shaped by a specific way of knowing: scientific knowledge as opposed to everyday knowledge. It thus represent or talks about the world in a different way than spoken language does (more statically, as things; as opposed to in movement, as processes). This different representational perspective is inscribed in the wordings used in writing, which are largely different from the wording of spoken discourse. We come to command the written way of meaning through a long and often unconscious process of socialization into the ideal of literacy predominant in our communities. Such command of the written way of making meaning, was unfortunately for too long privileged against the spoken way of meaning making. Despite the welcome current validation of spoken language (regardless of the medium used to convey the meanings it expresses), in no small part due to the rise of internet technologies, command of written language is still an important gatekeeper to arenas of intellectual prestige like academia. Now, despite its clearly distinctive features, not all written discourses are purely written in their form, people rather talk of a spoken/written continuum; however tendencies towards the poles are distinct and real. Research also shows that command of the written language is most often not acquired naturally, unless highly exposed to it. So if we are in anyway committed to education as a vehicle for social equity and the exploration of the potential of the diverse codes we have at hand to mean and how these combine, it will have to be taught and be an object of inquiry. That is why Halliday, as I understand it, argues for the importance of retaining a word to talk about our ability to use written language to mean.

Now the 'master' himself...:

“In many instances the term literacy has come to be dissociated from reading and writing, and written language, altogether, and generalized so as to cover all forms of discourse, spoken as well as written. In this way it comes to refer to effective participation of any kind in social processes. Having argued for much of my working life that we still do not properly value spoken language, or even properly describe it, I naturally sympathize with those who use the term in this way, to the extent that they are by implication raising the status of speaking, of the spoken language, and of the discourse of so-called "oral cultures". The problem is that if we call all these things literacy, then we shall have to find another term for what we called literacy before, because it is still necessary to distinguish reading and writing practices from listening and speaking practices. Neither is superior to the other, but they are different;  and, more importantly, the interaction between them is one of the friction points at which new meanings are created.4 So here I shall use literacy throughout to refer specifically to writing as distinct from speech: to reading and writing practices, and to the forms of language, and ways of meaning, that are typically  associated with them.” Halliday, 2007, pp. 97-98

Note 4: The situation is similar to that which arises with the term language. If we want to extend it to mathematics, music and other semiotic systems, in order to emphasize their similarities of form or function or value in the culture, then we have to find another term for language. The expression natural language arose in response to just this kind of pressure. I am not aware of any comparable term for literacy in its canonical sense.

The entire article goes on explaining the specific features of written language from a linguistic perspective and detailing the distinct contexts were it has developed and the functions it has come to serve. In the name of the paradigm of ‘dispersion, relatedness and sharing’ here’s a digital copy I ‘happen’ to have on his writings on educational linguistics, in case you’re interested...:) 

 (Wait! I still need to work on my new literacIES skills to post it... If I can't pull it please ask me and I'll email it to you)

Halliday, M. A. K. (2007). Literacy and Linguistics: A Functional Perspective (1996) In J. Webster (Ed.), Language and education (pp. 97-132). London; New York, NY: Continuum.