My Speak & Read

 ***NOTE: I've realized that my entry for Feb. 22 never got published on here. I'll be writing another entry early this week as a result but I don't expect you to read/comment for both instead of just one***

A recurring theme I like to add this blog is that developing literacy through reading books is only one particular method of literacy. I myself was a late bloomer for both reading and speaking, and I did not understand how to write connect words with letters until I was four years old: a notably old age to understand how to read and to speak. The device for which my parents attribute my ability to read was a learning product from the 1980s called “Speak & Read.” It was a device that, among other features, had a mechanical voice that would say words and children would type out the words (which would say aloud the letters as they were written) that were being said by the machine.

You can find a limited simulation version of this device by following this link: http://www.speaknspell.co.uk/speaknspell.html

After using this device every day as a toddler, I began speaking and reading so much that I more than made up for the years that I didn’t speak nor read. My parents have said that everything just “clicked” once I was able master that device.

Students cannot be expected to all achieve at their highest abilities by only asking them to develop literacy in one style. Teaching exclusively with lectures helps many students, but not all will absorb the material equally. The same will be true with book discussion. Even in the digital world, teaching only with Powerpoint slides would capture the attention of a good portion of students, but not all. Variety in your teaching style will always be the best method of capturing the attention of the majority of students. Separate ways of approaching literacy will help to push them all to understanding more about a text.

In the spirit of discussing the use of digital information as a separate entity from books to develop literacy, I would like to focus an article called “The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling” by Bernard R. Robin that can be found here: http://digitalliteracyintheclassroom.pbworks.com/f/Educ-Uses-DS.pdf . In this article, Robin discusses how digital storytelling has “rules” not too unlike how book storytelling has “rules.”

As an introduction to his article, have you ever had to endure a painfully-presented Powerpoint presentation? There are “rules” to what makes a Powerpoint work and what makes them not work. In college I saw many Powerpoints that had the entire script of what the student or teacher wanted to say and then they would read off of the slides, leaving the audience to have to read along on the small text of the Powerpoint. Other Powerpoints I endured had scarcely any content and so the student did not recall the main points in which s/he intended to make in the Powerpoint; these particular Powerpoints were filled with ramblings that did not show insights that the student intended to show. Then there the Powerpoints that were aesthetically good but took so much time that the student did not have the audience in mind and added so many points that it became impossible to sort them in the brain.

When Robin discusses the educational uses of digital storytelling, I believe that he would agree to those “rules” of Powerpoint that I mention. In his Table 1, he lists seven elements of digital storytelling which include several applications to Powerpoints (I use Powerpoint as an example in this article because I believe that we all have watched or presented them before). One of his elements is the “Gift of your Voice.” One of the reasons that Powerpoints that only include text that the presenter reads off the slides are weak is because the speaker’s voice is not involved in the presentation. A speaker can provide a voice that transcends the presentation. The speaker’s voice can strengthen when discussing the main points. The speaker’s voice can help to relate the content of an educational Powerpoint to a personal anecdote to provide a stronger effect of the narrative. The speaker can even weave a joke into the presentation to help brighten the mood of the audience and to ease boredom or tension. “Pacing” is also one of the elements of digital storytelling that Robin writes in his article. The reason we give a time limit to presentations (or are provided them as presenters) is that—just like a book—a presentation must pace itself to be both informative and accessible. The presentation must provide the necessary content that it deserves, but the presentation cannot “overstay its welcome” either, so to speak. A presentation that is too long will have its audience mostly shut its brains downs waiting for the presentation to end rather and absorb the information that could have been useful.

I understand Robin’s article in the sense that teaching literacy through books and reading has rules and that teaching literacy through digital technology also has rules. My Speak & Read was not a book, but it had an electronic interface that made me understand how to read and write for the future. When we use technology in our classes, we should understand what sorts of teaching technologies work and question why they do work.

Gaming As the New Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book

Video games. Over the years, we've heard them labeled as mindless activities. We've heard them labeled as a mind-rotting leisure. We've heard them labeled as toys for children. Lately, researchers have found that video games can have less of a negative effective on players than naysayers might think; video games can indeed be claimed to be a good way to develop literacy for young students as well.

In Immaculee Harushimana's August 2008 article in the Journal of Literacy and Technology, Literacy through Gaming: The Influence of Videogames on the Writings of High School Freshman Males (found here on the internet: http://www.literacyandtechnology.org/volume10/harushimana.pdf ), Harushimana discusses how several games go to great lengths to include a story that works as well as any book does, writing that "video games which involve intense reading activity [are] serious games, such as history-based and classical literature-based games" (41). He continues to discuss how games such as these do not just involve looking at a character and moving around, but also writes that the text and story in the game are also necessary bits of information to understand how to play these games. On page 50 of his article, Harushimana discusses how many video game characters are based off of classical heroes, which helps to explain to me why on page 44 male students were able to write stories based off of these characters and settings.

Many games-- not all games-- can manage to draft up a game with well-developed characters and a believable story. I think that one of the games that drove the idea of mixing video game elements and into a game that would have made a good novel would be Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight, an adventure game from 1993 that that was lauded for its focus on creating believable and real characters in a fantastical Gothic world in which players freely traverse in. If a video game can maintain believable characters and a story that has a natural and well-paced arc, how is the game any better or worse than a novel or film? Since video game characters have the option of moving or interacting with their environments as the player pleases, do you not feel as if games are a sort of "choose your own adventure" version of a novel or film?

In discussing how I feel that games work well as "choose your own adventure" media, I want to discuss this gaming article I ran across the other day which can be found online at http://elder-geek.com/2012/02/non-violent-skyrim-playthrough-results/ . Essentially, this article is about a gamer who chose to play a game that highly focuses largely on fighting monsters to advance the storyline. This player instead chose to take the exact same game and attempt to win it as a "pacifist," taking the time and effort to try not attack anything at all and still managed to beat the game which has a large emphasis on combating monsters and people in the game. I argue that this player's game narrative and experience can be viewed as a novel in itself. Is the story about this character who refused to get involved in combat when the game "tells" the character he must live a life of combat not as interesting and unique as the story of a character who plays the game with the intent to engage in combat?


I think that gamers are also creative and able to weave stories in a medium in which a story need not necessarily be told. A unique and creative story can be built from a strategy game such as Civilization V, a game about choosing a world leader and creating a civilization that will stand the test of time against adversity of other civilizations on a randomly-generated map. In this forum thread, http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=397739 , a player writes a story that is written as a diary to show how Ramesses II began his own adventure. The diary is written on the forum as he plays the game and he shows screenshots of his progress so that readers can follow along with his choices in the game while reading his narrative.

I believe that we as teachers and writers would do a disservice to students to not consider video games as a form of weaving stories and learning literacy, grammar, characterization, and storytelling. In a world in which the Internet has helped to provide a plethora of sources for any sort of person to develop literacy through any means of media—be it books, films, video games, or anything else—we teachers need to at least consider jumping into the stories and narratives that students present to their teachers before dismissing certain mediums such as video games.