lack of support
The thing we can see happen most often in school environments. If your interest is a little bit out of the box (like gaming or cartoons), chances are there won't be much support for it. Some of it is justifiable. Video games, being easily adaptable to education, is becoming less and less justifiable.
This is one reason games have such potential as tools for learning: they are really nothing more than complex problems waiting to be solved by players in a way that is both fun and challenging.
Informal learning at its finest. Chances are you're playing a game because at one point you were interested in it, and you slowly learn about the mechanics of it. Once you know the rules you can then elaborate on them or break them; just like writing or skills you learn.
This brings to mind some of those really good modded Minecraft Youtubers, like direwolf20. Complex problems that can be solved with a bit of ingenuity.
engagement is an absolutely critical condition for learning?
I've started noticing in my life that engagement is what gets me motivated to do schoolwork. So, definitely.
I predict that shooting will be less important and talkingmore important in many games, even shooter games. Even now, many shoot-ing games stress stealth, story, and social interaction more than they used to.
Nowadays, if your story and interactions within the game are more complex, you're guaranteed to sell it. I really like conversation and story-heavy games, and I definitely feel more engaged playing something like Warframe vs Call of Duty (or Fortnite). Everyone learns how to shoot when they first play a video game. It takes some effort to learn to not kill everything on sight, in most non-shooter games.
Meanwhile,inschool,ourreactionhasbeentobanthesetechnologiesorseverelyrestricttheiraccess.
This reminds me of a couple of incidents that happened in my high school: someone blew an incident out of proportion and the administration cracked down on groupchat apps for a while, and then the same thing happened with tests in a certain class that banned the students from using any of those apps completely. Both of these incidents illustrate just how the world changed, because it would be unthinkable in the past.
participatinginandcontributingtosuchsitesallowthemtoknowmorecollectivelythananyonecouldindividually
More distributed cognition! This is probably one of the simplest explanations of it I've seen.
Internetaccessconnectsstudentsnotonlytoinfor-mationresourcesbutalsotoonlineprofessionalcommunitiesthatcandramaticallyexpandstudents’socialnetworks
This seems to be one of the core media literacy skills, especially distributed cognition.
His recounting of the surprise and admiration of his teachers teach an important lesson about the missed opportunities for nurturing a child’s develop-ment when the school-based work is the primary lens through which teachers come to know their students.
I think this goes back to the methods of learning a lot of people commented above. Only doing things the way the school/teachers wants them is not going to work for some people. Ultimately, it's an individual thing, and the way individuals learn helps them to decide what they want to do and makes them better people.
those who can actually create digital media or interactive environments are in the minority
This is actually super interesting, because nowadays I feel that those creating can be in the majority now. You can learn how to create in a few Google searches or YouTube rabbit holes, like learning how to Photoshop images. You can learn how to get Photoshop off of a torrent or crack it, learn the basic interface and a few tools with some YouTube tutorials or articles, and then put it up on a free site like deviantArt or tumblr. As long as you have an idea, the Internet has developed to the point where you can make that idea, and that's super cool.
Online communities that re fl ect “cultures of participa-tion” (Jenkins, 2006, 2009 ) a l l o w c r e a t o r s t o s h a r e t h e i r w o r k , r e c e i v e f e e d b a c k , and expand their social networks. Informal collaborative relationships develop as learners share knowledge and codevelop interests.
This illustrates the affinity group concept really well, and I really like how this is clearly visible in modern-day Internet interactions as well, like fandoms. The idea behind them is that no matter who you are, you're participating and interacting within the fandom because you appreciate that One Thing, and this seems like the perfect description of that kind of thing.
development of techno-logical fl uency
It's interesting that while this concept is called techonological fluency, it's pretty much described synonymous to technological literacy - expressing oneself can also be generating/negotiating meaning by using tech.