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)

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

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.

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).

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).

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

Question

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).

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).

What are other possible ways of defining DMAL?

Question

New Literacy Studies

Argued that literacy is affected by many social and cultural factors

People have multiple literacies Never became a full-fledged area

Situated Cognition Studies Thinking is based on previous

experiences, not abstract concepts Situated cognition studies is a

coherent area

New Literacies Studies

Studies the different types of literacies

New Media Literacies Studies Studies how digital media are

transforming society and culture

“ 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).

“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).

Exemplars

Work that comes to be regarded as a “best example” of what work in a field should be

What are our “exemplars?”

“Play Exemplars”

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

Worked Examples

http://galileoandeinstein.physics.virginia.edu/lectures/time_dil.pdf

http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab_we/ http://worked_examples.crlt.indiana.

edu/

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

Question

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?

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

Question