Superfollow PatternGame

Here is a link to my unit 4 project wiki...

Here's an interesting post on Writer's House at Rutgers. Embedding has been disabled (I wonder why) so you actually have to go to YouTube.

Here's something to consider in light of our discussions about censorship and control.

Here's the blog I created for last week's presentation.

Here is my wiki for the digital writing resource project!

Jeffrey Grabill’s “Utopic Visions, The Technopoor, and Public Access: Writing Technologies in a Community Literacy Program”


In this article, Grabill addresses the issue of technology access—and, more specifically, the issues of access in Adult Basic Education courses. Grabill draws attention to the fact that in the discussion of literacy and technology access, most (if not all) of the conversations have been focused on activities based in the context of traditional schools. By focusing all of the attention on the writing and the access of technology in schools, we are missing an opportunity to investigate these same issues in the work place. To summarize the point of this article, Grabill states “My argument is that writing with computers in nonschool contexts is a significant area of inquiry that needs the experience and expertise of computers and composition professionals. But, work in this area demands that we confront complex issues of public access and participate in the design of writing technologies” (299).

Grabill acknowledges that the issue of access has already been addressed. There are three main categories of access: infrastructural, literacy, and acceptance. Infrastructural access revolves around how technology is distributed. This involves questions like “Who is making these decisions about technology? And “How will these access—both physical and virtual—be designed?” (300) Literacy as an access issue revolves around who has the knowledge to use these technologies. Finally, the third issue of access is about acceptance. The groups that are typically silenced in traditional classrooms (women and minorities basically) have the opportunity of an equal playing ground in technological environment. Grabill includes data that shows how these groups in particular have limited access to technology, and he states, “In a sense it seems irrelevant to talk about how electronic discourse in a medium like e-mail can hide markers of race, class, or gender or that network use may allow a group or individual to cross lines of social stratification more easily. Given this data, it is increasingly unlikely that individuals of lower income, education, and people of color are online. Groups and individuals without access, who fit the Rand profile, form a fluid, multiple, and complex class position of the technopoor” (303).

Having touched on all of the issues of access that have already been explored, Grabill then addresses something that has not: the adult population outside of the context of traditional school. Grabill uses an example of the Western District Adult Basic Education program. He writes, “The purpose of the case was to understand how literacies were defined at that site, who participated in those decision-making processes, and in whose interests those decisions were made” (305). One particular class of the program was a writing class (though the teacher claimed it was not a writing class) that dealt specifically with teaching students how to communicate through technology. Some students were frustrated with the technology to the point that they dropped out: “In some respects, the technology impeded the students’ ability to learn to write with technology” (308). Grabill concludes that some of these problems that students come across when learning technology can and should be dealt with through the design of the curriculum.

COMMENTS:

I was uncertain about reading another article about the issue of access because I thought we had pretty well covered the topic, but when I read this piece I was taken aback by the fact that Grabill addresses many issues I had never considered: adults’ access to technology and access in work place situations. I, like many other people apparently, have always thought about this issue in a traditional educational setting.

I saw this on Conan last week--it seems somewhat relevant to this class. Enjoy.

“Game Theories”
By Clive Thompson

This article all begins with the fascinating story of economist, Edward Castronova. Welfare researched was his main focus, and it proved unfruitful in reaping him attention, prestige and the success that he desired.
Castronova finally hit an interesting niche when he began to pay attention to the economic situations of EverQuest, a video game. Noticing the currency within the game, and the currency that the game generated in the real world, Castronova began to conduct more research, and wrote about the revenue the digital world produced in the “real world.”

“The Gross National Product of Everquest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Band rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia… It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn’t even exist.” Thompson goes on to make the point that “Many economists define their careers by studying a country. [Castronova] had discovered one.”

Thompson goes on to examine how real world currency is generated by means of digital entertainment. In EverQuest, for example, players all start out on the same bottom level. They work themselves up the virtual socio-economic ladder by killing things like dragons, and obtaining gold and other valuable pieces, and also gain property. Once they gain considerable assets and position in the game world, they can sell their character to the real world. Such auctions can take place in online auctions like e-Bay, but people have also set up businesses where they buy characters and then turn around and sell them at a marked-up price.

There are ethics that play into this. Oftentimes a “guild” forms online – a group of players who have worked together to accumulate riches, which they split among each other. They help each other slay dragons, and thus help each other get wealthier. Thus the winnings tend to be everyone’s in a sense, and when one player sells his character, [s]he is selling what they jointly earned…

Utopian as well as free-market concepts, varying economic situations are, in certain instances, played out on EverQuest. Most everyone starts on the same level, with nothing, and works themselves up, some forming guilds that seem communal – and then there are the more privileged players who buy themselves position… also, “when game companies offer socialist alternatives, players reject them” because they get bored without some sort of defined competition. So it seems like the free-market, in some form, is predominantly mirrored in the game.

Robert Shapiro, who was in the Clinton administration as the undersecretary of commerce, feels that “Castronova’s research proves that the only way to create a truly free market is to support programs that give everyone a fair chance at success, such as good education and healthcare.”

So the once unnoticed economist is now noticed, and now he is hired as a fully-tenured professor at Indiana University. Though he likes gaming, and his research has been successful, when taking into account other online communities that are being contrived in order to replicate and even replace real-life training and scenarios (like what’s occurring in There.com), Castronova states that “he is dismayed by how the real world has bled into the virtual one. ‘I liked it better when they were, you know, just games.’”