DIRECTIONS
Identify
a young person (under 16 years of age, preferablly) who plays computer
games and is willing to work with you. Your goal is produce a multimodal
literacy biography of your own design, focused on the literacy of gaming,
that adds to the class' understanding of literacy.
This
assignment will take the form of a paper that is essentially biographical
in nature, but it will also include still images that enter into some
kind of dialogue with the alphabetic text. You can focus on
the gamer, his/her parents, his/her teachers, his/her friends, and the
game itself—among other topics.
Your
essay should set the gamer's activities and life in a cultural ecology.
You
can construct this cultural ecology from various sources: historical
timelines about what happened in the world/nation during the person's
life time, technology timelines about how technology changed during
the person's lifetime; video game timelines that show how computer/video
games changed during the person's life time.
See
the following sources:
Technology
• <http://cter.ed.uiuc.edu/cter2/ci335/timeline.html>
• <http://www.crimsonbird.com/science/timeline.htm>
• <http://www.computer.org/computer/timeline/>
• <http://www.nuclearfiles.org/hitimeline/index.html>
• <http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist/>
• <http://myron.sjsu.edu/caesars/COMM.HTM>
• <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/telephone/timeline/index.html>
• <http://www.lhbe.edu.on.ca/teach2000/onramp/timeline.html>
• <http://home.earthlink.net/~atomic_rom/moments.htm>
Intellectual
• <http://www.historychannel.com/index2.html>
• <http://dmoz.org/Society/History/Timelines/>
• <http://www2.canisius.edu/~emeryg/time.html>
• <http://www.decades.com/>
• <http://www.historymole.com/>
Cultural/Social
Have the
person signs a consent form that outlines the purpose of this project,
and that gives their permission to use their responses for the purposes
of this class. If the person is under 18, tell their parent(s) about
this project and have them sign as well. You can write your own sheet
or use this consent form from
my project with Dr. Hawisher.
Among
some questions that might help you focus your biography are
those I have suggested in the following documents:
•
Some questions for young
gamers
•
Some querstions for the
parents of young gamers
•
Some questions for the
teachers of young gamers
Please
note that these questions are only suggestions. You will need to select
from them/revise them/ change them/add to them for each person with
whom you work.
Make
sure that you borrow a digital camera (from me or from a friend) and
take photographs of the person you are interviewing. Download
the pictures onto your computer and use them to illustrate and add information
value to your paper.