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.

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

E-Moderators are \"the new generation of teachers and trainers who work with learners online\" (p. viii) using Computer-Mediated Conferencing (CMC) as a learning tool, regardless of the subject they are teaching. They are the focus of E-Moderating, a recent book which provides both a theoretical framework for developing online learning using CMC (part one), and a wealth of practical advice (part two). The book is supported by a Web site. The author, Gilly Salmon, a distance education specialist with the Open University Business School in the UK, provides a five-step model of effective online education, along with copious examples of how the model relates to real-life online learning contexts. Salmon proposes that, by basing learning on a constructivist model, it is e-moderators that can make the difference in online education as they convene, direct, summarize, and archive synchronous and asynchronous discussions.

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E-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online

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Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation

Student transitions into the university are often conceived of via an apprentice-type model, or as entrance into a 'community of practice'. This paper disputes the applicability of these models to the indeterminate and opaque nature of student experiences of academic writing, and proposes
 that emotional destabilization and struggles around identity are a normal part of both transitions and writing. With reference to student text/visual journals and in-depth interviews, it argues for extending the notion of 'threshold concepts', proposing academic literacies as 'threshold practices'
 which can lead to a reinforced sense of identity as a student. It concludes with implications for practice.

Threshold Practices: Becoming a Student through Academic Literacies.

Background: The literature on immersive virtual worlds and e-learning to date largely indicates that technology has led the pedagogy. Although rationales for implementing e-learning have included flexibility of provision and supporting diversity, none of these recommendations have helped to provide strong pedagogical location. Furthermore, there is little, if any, exploration of the kinds of e-learning spaces that are commonly adopted in higher education or the rationale for their use.

Purpose: This article explores the current arguments for the use of immersive virtual worlds in higher education and examines the impact the use of such environments is having upon teachers and teaching. 

Design and methods: A comprehensive literature search and review was undertaken by a team of researchers in order to explore issues of pedagogy, staff role and digital literacies, and explore perspectives that might inform the higher education community about views on the use of immersive virtual worlds.

Conclusions: It is suggested that an exploration of digital literacies and the use of pedagogically informed models may offer higher education some purchase on the complex issues and implications of using such immersive virtual worlds for learning.

Key words: pedagogy; immersive virtual worlds; staff role; digital literacies

https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/items/d03fed1a-43b1-acca-67e3-ab76f2cee039/1/Situating+pedagogies.pdf

Situating pedagogies, positions and practices in immersive virtual worlds

‘Reality’ shows dominate our television screens. We see the personal ‘transformation’ of hapless novices into competent singers or dancers, rude and irritating ‘brats’ reinvented as loving teenager...

https://web.edu.hku.hk/f/acadstaff/367/The_Reflection_Game.pdf

The Reflection Game: Enacting the Penitent Self

Student engagement in higher education has tended to be discussed in mainstream discourses by invoking typologies, seeking to place students into categories and focusing on the importance of ‘participation’. I will give a critique of these ideologically loaded and normative constructs and their inherent contradictions, proposing an alternative framing drawing on sociomateriality. This framing, I will argue, allows us to explore the complexities of day-to-day practices, acknowledging the centrality of texts and meaning-making in ‘being a student’. Referring to a longitudinal multimodal journaling study, I will argue that contemporary student engagement and sites of learning are constantly emergent, contingent and restless – not only transgressing the mainstream constructs mentioned above but also raising fundamental questions about apparently ‘common-sense’ binaries such as digital/material, public/private and device/author. I will suggest implications in terms of research and understanding of the day-to-d...

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‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation

This paper offers a working conversation between the authors about the uneasy relationship between literacy studies and learning technologies. We come from the field of literacy studies but from contrasting perspectives: from academic literacies and work on literacies and technologies in higher education; from an interest in media theory and the implications of digital mediation for the contemporary university; from everyday literacies in informal settings and a concern for the gaps between policy and practice. We illustrate our perspectives through reference to post-compulsory education, especially higher education, but intend our arguments to be of broader value to all sectors of education and learning. We argue that it is probably inevitable that terms such as literacy/digital/network will be taken up by different arenas of scholarship and practice to mean different things, but what is important is finding spaces to make visible the embedded and implicit understandings, assumptions and ideological positions that are carried by these terms. In the paper, we attempt to lay bare some of the tendencies in the different approaches and argue the case for building on these differences in our work rather than seeing them as paradigm contests. We suggest that it would be more generative to the field to acknowledge the richness and diversity of these different traditions, rather than attempting the impossible task of forcing them into a superficial reconciliation. Keywords:  literacies; digital; textual practices; learning landscapes; ethnographic (Published: 31 January 2014) Citation : Research in Learning Technology 2014,  21 : 21438 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v21.21438

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Lesley Gourlay

Papers

Threshold Practices: Becoming a Student through Academic Literacies.

Situating pedagogies, positions and practices in immersive virtual worlds

The Reflection Game: Enacting the Penitent Self

‘Student engagement’ and the tyranny of participation

Textual practices in the new media digital landscape: messing with digital literacies.