So recently I've been digesting
James Paul Gee's "
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" and I wanted to document some of the principles in it to serve as a reference point for me in my educational projects. Very good info for designers, teachers, system architects, and of course gamers.
Oh last thing, the definition of
SEMIOTIC DOMAIN is this "any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (images, equations, symbols, sounds, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings."
Here are the first 12 principles:
1.
Active, Critical Learning Principle: all aspects of the learning environment(including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.
2.
Design Principle: learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.
3.
Semiotic Principle: learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, atifacts, etc.) as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
4.
Semiotic Domains Principle: learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
5.
Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains Principle: learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.
6. "
Psychosocial Moratorium" Principle: learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.
7.
Committed Learning Principle: learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as extensions of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they find compelling.
8.
Identity Principle: learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity.
9.
Self Knowledge Principle: the virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but about themselves and their current and potential capacities.
10.
Amplification of Input Principle: for a little input, learners get a lot of output.
11.
Achievement Principle: for learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievements.
12.
Practice Principle: learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
So this wraps up the first dozen. I will hopefully be able to use these in my future pursuits and projects in relation to online education, educational gaming, and the like. That is all.
as always continue to Live, Love, and Learn . . .
B
