I guess I thought that the Resident Evil 5 trailer that we watched on Thursday was disturbing enough to watch again and then contemplate how, in the name of all thorough consideration, this video game got made. Maybe even more disturbing than the fact that it was made, tested, sent through control groups, etc., is that YouTube commenters seem to not recognize this issue in the least.

I've been re-reading Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You again this year, mostly because I'm using it for 106, but I've been more impressed this time around with the main thrust of his argument. I think he has a lot to say about the topics that we've been going through recently in 605. For example, he makes a clear distinction between the cognitive benefits of video games and the potential for problematic content. Since we've been discussing transferrence, and the topic is certainly short of resolved, but Johnson's take on this issue is surprising clear-minded and practical.

I guess there's been a bunch of stuff from this series of reading on gaming that I found interesting, and that I haven't really thought about before. Just like infusing my courses with new media what-not, I'm now kinda into the idea of using games, or at least persuasive games, in my comp course next semester. I think the tough issue that I keep butting up against is: what strategies will I be using to help students investigate games as a site of complex social and rhetorical issues?

Hey all-

Below is the text to a post I was sent toward from a blog I often read. It's a response from a game designer to a call for a ban on the game "Bully." The comments are great, too, but here's the text of the original post and a link:

http://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2008/03/a-teachers-prim.ht...

A Teacher's Primer

I guess one of the main questions I have about gaming is perhaps one of the same questions that many people have had about composition and rhetoric over the years: is there any transference of knowledge and/or skill strategies to other situations outside of the ones that happen when a learner is in the context of the game/course.

Davidson and Peeples:

Can WPAs manage knowledge-intensive workplaces without a labor force knowledgeable about instructing knowledge-intensive (KI) work?

How important is it that we categorize the work of rhetoric and composition as KI? Does that label force us to consider new issues or are we just creating a “bad” category?

Felix’s and Hector’s stories were really interesting, but are there easy ways around the problems presented in them?

Willard-Traub:

I became really attached to Sullivan et al's article about organizational critique from a few years ago, so I immediately found something to like in Stuart Blythe's piece about agency within organizations. As he sets up the paradox of agency, though, I think he simply doesn't offer too many strategies for taking agency within organizations.

I've been really taken by the idea of creating "underground places" where our students can practice/enact discourses that subvert our course, our course discourses, the university discourses, etc. Part of me wants to agree with him wholeheartedly and argue that we need such spaces, but another part of me, perhaps the part that used to teach high school, feels somewhat uncomfortable about it.

Primarily because we read an article on Texas Tech's unique program for freshman writing this week in my 505b class, I have administrative and infrastructural concerns on my mind. In that vein, I read the Richard Miller piece, and his video with some of the specific issues regarding what we will be teaching and what will count as "work" in the coming years. For some background Texas Tech uses an online essay dropbox and breaks TA work into two main chores: teaching and grading. For example, some TAs grade and teach, while other perform only one of these tasks.

For those of you who missed my revelation during class today, I think I went from being willing to see the train, but being hesitant to get on board, to running to catch it and make sure that I not only have a good seat, but that I don't miss dinner service with those tiny apple juice boxes.