What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Many people in "literate" societies, when asked to define literacy, almost always do so in terms of reading
and writing abilities This narrow interpretation of literacy, an
offspring of reductionist psychology, has reigned supreme in many academic and educational contexts for decades, greatly shaping literacy theories and classroom practices Within the past ten years, however, a large body of multidisciplinary
research has begun to undermine the authority of this
perspective by situating literacy in larger social practices

Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses.

Authored by Dr. Safiya U. Noble, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication, this text is one of the preeminent works that explicitly addresse...

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism

In 2008, Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, watched as the entire financial sector around her imploded.1 The financial crisis gave O’Neil, a self-proclaimed math nerd with a Ph.D., a front row seat to the weaponization of mathematics. During the financial crisis, complex mathematical models designed and marketed to be superior to human ability and beyond the confines of human subjectivity turned out to be farces—layers of false assumptions coated in difficult-to-understand layers of mathematics. In order to dupe both the public and themselves, financial analysts at banks used models and algorithms as a justification for their subjective and flawed inputs. Ten years after the financial crisis, O’Neil sees these nefarious models infiltrating every aspect of modern life. These “Weapons of Math Destruction”—as O’Neil calls them—are (1) “opaque,” (2) “beyond dispute or appeal,” and (3) disproportionally impact the underprivileged.2 These Weapons of Math Destruction, or WMDs, replace the role of traditional subjective decision makers and cause those affected by their decisionmaking to adjust their ways of life to the models. In Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, O’Neil highlights different WMDs that have infiltrated various areas of American life.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/PT.3.1721

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science

In this paper, the authors draw on theories of critical pedagogy to interrogate recent trends in online education scholarship, calling for more humanizing pedagogies. By using vignettes from their own teaching experiences, the paper illustrates tensions between autonomous and ideological visions of humanizing approaches, particularly how they apply to issues of inclusion in online teaching and learning.,The authors draw on critical theory to interrogate the framings of humanizing online teaching. Sharing three illustrative vignettes from their own reflexive teaching practice, the authors demonstrate how a critically framed approach to humanizing digital pedagogies can promote the design and enactment of more inclusive learning environments across online contexts.,Based on the pedagogical cases presented, the authors demonstrate (1) how methods promoted in autonomous models of humanizing pedagogy can present challenges for inclusive design, (2) how participatory media production activities can still intersect with issues of racialization, and (3) how humanizing pedagogical commitments by individual instructors can be constrained by material, structural, and institutional realities.,While critical framings of pedagogy necessarily resist prescriptive recommendations, the authors conclude the article by underscoring the importance of critically interrogating the ideological dimensions of humanizing pedagogies, the need to grapple with social inequities even as educational contexts are increasingly digitized; the importance of considering structural issues of power and privilege that produce and constrain pedagogical possibilities.,The authors offer a critical framing of humanizing pedagogies in online education that runs counter to the often-autonomous framings of these approaches, highlighting issues of power, privilege, and ideology that can be overlooked in online educational contexts, especially at the level of institutional, instructional design and support.

A critical approach to humanizing pedagogies in online teaching and learning

The design, publication, and features of contemporary narrative picturebooks have been impacted by the digital revolution and the emerging popularity of digital reading devices. Considering both the affordances and the limitations of digital picturebook apps can help readers, teachers, parents, and other educators make better decisions about the value and use of such apps for different purposes.

Picture Books in the Digital Age.

LIKE OTHER MULTIMODAL texts, the design, publication, and delivery of contemporary picturebooks have been impacted by the digital revolution and the affordances of digital reading devices. Print-based picturebooks are being published alongside digital narratives, and new digital picturebooks are being created that no longer begin as print-based books. These digitally produced texts may resemble in some basic ways their print-based predecessors, but these digital texts provide access to Web-based resources, navigational features, and types of interactivity that print-based texts do not support (Schwebs, 2014).The nature of the transaction between children and contemporary picturebooks has been theorized, debated, and researched from a diverse array of theoretical and pedagogical perspectives (Arizpe & Styles, 2003; Lewis, 2001; Nikolajeva & Scott, 2006; Nodelman, 1988; Sipe, 1998). Scholarship focusing on the interactions among written language, visual images, and graphic design features in children's literature and how these elements work in concert to present a complex narrative has extended these theoretical and pedagogical perspectives in significant ways (Bang, 2000; Salisbury & Styles, 2012). This extensive history of research has largely focused on print-based picturebooks and only recently begun to consider the ramifications of digital technologies on the picturebook itself and the affordances of these digitally rendered narratives (Al-Yaqout & Nikolajeva, 2015; Schons, 2011; Stichnothe, 2014).Although picturebooks continue to be published in printbased formats, many are now offered in digital formats for reading and viewing on computers, tablets (e.g., iPad), and smartphones (Yokota & Teale, 2014). How picturebooks are digitized varies from simply scanning print-based picturebooks to make them available on digital reading devices to the creation of sophisticated software applications, or apps, that offer interactive features that alter the original format of the picturebook, provide new options and content for the reader, and move these digital narratives closer to the gaming or entertainment industry (Juul, 2001).Digital technologies and software platforms provide new affordances and capabilities that change the transactions between readers and multimodal texts in significant ways (Serafini, 2014, 2015). These changes challenge literacy theorists and researchers to reconsider how picturebook narratives are experienced; the relationship among the textual, navigational, design, and visual elements of digitized picturebooks; and the expanding possibilities afforded the picturebook format across digital platforms. As narratives for children in digital formats evolve and appear in greater numbers of classrooms, picturebook scholars and educators will need new lenses or frameworks for analyzing these texts and developing pedagogical approaches that support classroom instruction and readers' transactions with the texts.In this article, we focus on six transmedial features (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013) associated with reading and viewing four instantiations of a fictional narrative across analog and digital media. We constructed an analytical framework that focuses on visual, aural, textual, paratextual, navigational, and transitional features that cut across analog and digital variants of particular multimodal texts. In closing, we suggest potential avenues for research focusing on the ways transmedial features affect the experiences of reading fictional narratives in digital formats.Using The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (hereafter referred to as ML) by William Joyce (2012) as an example, we set forth a framework for analyzing the similarities and differences among print-based and digital instantiations of this narrative by considering the picturebook, film (Enochs, Farnworth-Smith, Kantrow, Joyce, & Oldenburg, 2011), app (Moonbot Studios LA, 2011), and augmented reality (AR) app (Moonbot Studios LA, 2012) instantiations of this narrative. …

Picturebooks 2.0: Transmedial Features across Narrative Platforms.

Research on the nature and impact of book apps or e-reading in general is still limited and informed by diverse assumptions about the nature of these new “texts,” the varied forms of engagement and meaning-making associated with them, and their implications for understanding literacy and learning in the digital age. The purpose of this article is to explore the affordances and constraints inherent in an examination of children’s picturebook apps through multiple analytical frameworks—in this case drawn from social semiotics, film analysis, and game studies. After outlining these frameworks in the context of our evolving new media landscape, we move on to more detailed analyses of the children’s picturebook app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from each of these perspectives. We conclude with lessons that might be learned from juxtaposing these analytical frameworks and suggest implications for literacy education, research, and practice.

Expanding Analytical Perspectives on Children's Picturebook Apps.

In this review essay, Earl Aguilera compares two recent contributions to the growing body of literature on technology in education, Christo Sims’ Disruptive Fixation and Antero Garcia’s Good Recept...

Earl Aguilera

Papers

A critical approach to humanizing pedagogies in online teaching and learning

Picture Books in the Digital Age.

Picturebooks 2.0: Transmedial Features across Narrative Platforms.

Expanding Analytical Perspectives on Children's Picturebook Apps.

On disruption and integration: two views of digital media technologies in K-12 schools