Gee’s Field Building Project

1. Gee’s Field Building Project

2. 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)

3. 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

4. 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.

6. 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).

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).

8. Question Do we agree with Gee that scholars should attempt to make DMAL into a more coherent field?

9. 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).

10. 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).

11. Question What are other possible ways of defining DMAL?

12. New Literacy Studies • Argued that literacy is affected by many social and cultural factors • People have multiple literacies • Never became a full-fledged area

13. Situated Cognition Studies • Thinking is based on previous experiences, not abstract concepts • Situated cognition studies is a coherent area

14. New Literacies Studies • Studies the different types of literacies

15. New Media Literacies Studies • Studies how digital media are transforming society and culture

16. “ 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).

17. “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).

18. Exemplars • Work that comes to be regarded as a “best example” of what work in a field should be • What are our “exemplars?”

19. “Play Exemplars” • Instead of waiting for exemplars to emerge, we should make bids for work to be accepted as exemplars through “worked examples”

20. Worked Examples • http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/time_dil.pdf • http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab_we/ • http://worked_examples.crlt.indiana.edu/

21. Question Is Gee’s concept of “play exemplars” idea a good way to build a discipline?

22. 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?

23. Question Is Gee’s “example worked example” a solid contribution to the field building he proposes? Does it work?