The seventh chapter of Gee’s book, The Social Mind: How Do You Get Your Corpse Back After You’ve Died?, posits that learning is a social endeavor. As an example, he tells the story of a young gamer named Adrian, who had logged countless hours into the game EverQuest, a massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) that predated World of WarCraft (although the Warcraft franchise technically existed first in the form of the game, WarCraft: Orcs and Humans). Adrian recounts to Gee how he and his online gaming clan went to a particular level in EQ called the Plane of Fear. Due to the extremely high difficulty of the challenges and enemies within this level of the game, there was a prerequisite that all of the player’s in-game avatars be at least level 45. Adrian’s character was level 46 before it ended up getting killed. In the process of dying in-game, Adrian’s character also lost 2 levels, dropping him down to level 44 and effectively booting him from the Plane of Fear. According to Adrian, 2 levels in EQ is equivalent to a time investment of 12 hours. Using the principles of social and distributed knowledge, Adrian’s character was revived and he regained his 12 hours of investment immediately. Adrian also uses his knowledge of the inner workings of EQ to modify the game, blog about the game, and create a database of shared information in order to help other players advance more quickly within the game. The argument here, I think, is that social learning trumps individual learning.
Any tool (technology) and knowledge of one person becomes the tool/knowledge of another person within the same affinity group. We are already familiar with this concept when we think about a professor teaching his students. His knowledge then becomes their knowledge. After a point, the students can go on and become scholars in the same field as their professor. Likewise, if someone invests the time into developing a program that aids in research, that program then becomes a part of the collective knowledge of anyone else who learns how to utilize it. This is distributed knowledge. A perfect example of distributed knowledge is the internet, a tool billions of people use each day to access information that they may not already have within themselves. When the information is accessed by people who are outside of the intended audience or affinity group for the knowledge, it then becomes dispersed knowledge.
Extensive knowledge and intensive knowledge are integral to the cohesion of an affinity group. “Extensive” implies that an individual within the group is involved in many stages of the overall group goal. I liken this to being a jack of all trades within your particular group. “Intensive” implies that a person is a specialist in one or more areas, devoting a much more concentrated and focused effort into those realms of knowledge than in the extensive model. When Gee talks of the “jigsaw” method of teaching, it is essentially a method of intensive knowledge being distributed amongst a group. In this method, students are put into particular groups and given a subcategory of a class lesson to focus on. The groups learn their subcategories as deeply as they can and then the class reconvenes and each group teaches its subcategory of the lesson to the class.
In the final chapter of the book, Gee stresses that he is not advocating the use of video games in education, but the learning principles of good video games. Furthermore, not everything that a person learns while playing a video game is necessarily “good,” but that is a moot point when we consider that “bad” knowledge and influences can come from any source of information. An effective teaching method should strive to be more like a good video game: it should encourage active and critical thinking, allow for performance before competence, and be challenging and rewarding at the same time.
Questions:
1) Gee states that the most important thing about thinking is not that it’s mental and happening inside of our heads, but that it’s social. Assume a person has been isolated from other humans for his entire life. Is his form of thinking inferior to those of us in society?
2) According to Gee, what we know to be right and wrong is based entirely on the influence of the people around us and the groups we belong to. To use a historical example, the citizens of Germany during the World Wars thought that their persecution of Jews was “right.” Assume that Germany had won WWII and gone on to dominate the entire world. Would the simple fact that the Nazi movement had a majority following still make their prejudices and ethnic-cleansings “right?”
3) I would argue that enough extensive knowledge can make up for a lack of intensive knowledge, but that the converse of this is not true. Do you agree or disagree?
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