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At one point within Gee's seventh chapter, "The Social Mind: How Do You Get Your Corpse Back After You've Died?," he speaks about two ways of learning, the reciprocal teaching method and jigsaw method. In this method, no one in the group is an expert in everything. If a group is five people, each takes on learning intensive knowledge of one part. Then, they reconvene and share/teach the others in the group what they learned. Together each person contributes to form the complete puzzle. My sister, when she was in high school, would enact this method of learning with her friends. While it made me cringe (as they were dealing with each taking a chapter of a novel), the idea intrigued me. Each girl in the group knew their chapter inside and out. They spend maybe two hours working on the information for the chapter and maybe study guide questions for each chapter and then they would talk about it. Brilliant!
Our class has started to do something similar with our Second Life project. We each have something different we can contribute to the whole of the project and by utilizing things such as the Design Document, we are able to share our knowledge with our fellow students. Both of those examples utilize the social mind.
The Social Mind
Chapter 7 deals primarily with the idea that learning is a social event. Gee posits that we, as humans, think in "terms of patterns" (190). However, this patterns are not unattached to experiences in our world. We based this thinking on our experiences and use our experiences in order to make predictions about our world. These experiences are not isolated either. They involve interactions with groups and individuals, with social constructs, and rigid systems.
Gee further, after explaining the use of patterns, claims that patterns we develop are not inherently right or wrong. Even these patterns are situated within groups. My mom quilts and sews. I might call everything yarn if it is long and wrapped into a skein, but within my mom's sewing circles, yarn is very specific. My pattern of thinking would be wrong. Depending on the group you align yourself with, your patterned thinking might be wrong.
Another topic within the idea of the social mind is that despite learning and reasoning as social, they are also distributed. Much like Kesha's example of knowing where to gather information when writing a paper--previous notes, published articles, other people, distributed knowledge is stored within other "people, texts, tools, and technologies" (197).
The common trend through this chapter seems to take the path of learning as a collaborative action. We seem things like this more and more, I believe, with group projects and within classroom science labs. Even within scholarly academic work, I believe we see this. For instance, we, as scholars, attend conference and gain information about other topics or add to their own reservoir of information for later scholarly papers.
Wrap Up
The last chapter of Gee's book, the "Conclusion," seems to be a recap and response to everything that has been said about the book. Once again, Gee makes it clear that he is not necessarily advocating using video games within the classroom, but rather, he is advocating the use of video game principles such as allowing the players to adopt identities, allowing the player to think like scientists, to lower the consequences for the future. Perhaps though the most interesting aspect Gee points out is that good video games allow the players to feel like the game is theirs. They are not just passive consumers of a game. Instead they have some stake in the game and process. Learning should be this way, or should, at the very least, strive to work this way.
Gee proposes that video games are a form of art, and like all forms of art when they first come into being, it is misunderstood. We do not understand exactly what video games are, what their exact place is within society other than fun and games. Gee's book, and particularly within the final chapter, focus upon the ways in which video game principles and possibly video games in particular, could be useful within the educational community, could be useful in the learning process.
And, in many ways, these principles have started being utilized within different training programs. For instance, USC Upstate has a nursing training program at the Simhub which utilizes social learning principles as well as allowing students to develop strong identities. Flight simulations do the same things.
Questions:
1) Now that we have finished reading Gee's book, how do you think we can begin to incorporate these various principles while teaching next year? Which do you feel would be most useful to incorporate within your classroom?
2) Gee provides an example within Chapter 7 about a player who needs his character's body rescued within a game. He demands that his father stops using the phone so he can wait for a call from a member from the game. Would you consider this as an extreme in gaming? Or would you consider this valid?
3) How can teachers and instructors lead learning in a way that allows students to claim it as theirs?
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