While working on my Personal Literacy Evaluation for ENGL7750, I got to thinking about my own “unconventional” literacies. The only one that I could come up with that I could talk about at length was video games. Mind you, I’m not a great player, but I do love to play. I’ll try anything… except Madden.

I researched several authors who have made connections among video games, learning, literacy, etc. to come up with two main authors that seem to share most of the articles/topics I have found: Kurt Squire and James Paul Gee. Although this endeavor has completely sidetracked my Literacy Evaluation (I was so close to being done!) I feel that this might be the better topic/authors for me to investigate for my research topic in ENED6414. I read some of Teri Lesesne’s work and I couldn’t come up with any strong theme that I could really talk about for the length of a research paper. She likes YA books. She thinks it’s important for children to be matched up to the right book… then for teachers to not kill the joy of reading. So on, so forth.

But there is a lively debate about the role of video games as a vehicle for learning. To focus it to English Education: literacy. Reading literacy, sure, but the more recently added categories of media literacy and digital literacy as well. I’ve just started to scratch the surface there, but between the two of them, they have had a lot to say about literacy, video games, learning, and contexts for all of the above. I’m going to keep reading, even if there’s no time to do it.

I mean, seriously. Internship, class, homework for class, “homework” for internship. If I’m not doing any of those things, I am eating or I am sleeping OR drinking coffee to keep from sleeping.

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