In the ’90s I spent more hours than I care to count playing Sonic the Hedgehog, collecting as many rings as it was in my power to collect. By what industrial practice Dr. Robotnik’s machinations produced floating jewelry as a byproduct remains unclear, and even less clear was what Sonic did with all those rings: place one on each of his spines in a show of erinaceinal bling? But the goal was arbitrary—the window scrolled ever rightward, and the player could either lose or follow Sega’s rules.
Recently I have been curious whether there exists a way for educators to tap this seemingly innate tendency (at least manifested by teenaged men) to collect all of a thing in pursuit of an arbitrary goal.
The American education has programmed its students to respond to grades. My syllabi try to tap into this programming: if students know they will be rewarded in a certain countable way for contributing to class discussion, will they contribute? If students know they will be rewarded for spending more time thinking through their thesis statements, will their arguments be clearer?
One of the umpteen setbacks of this programming is that it is results-focused and pays little attention to process; consequently, it is difficult to grade students on the basis of completing their reading: savvy students can recite the characters, plot, style, and even the symbols of a text without having read past the first chapter.
But what if reading assignments become something like Sonic’s rings?
I’ve been playing with LibraryThing for the last month or so, and have given Goodreads a passing glance; Facebook apps like Visual Shelf and and Books iRead are less rich but build into the student’s established network. Tools like these might feed the gotta-catch-them-all mentality of a game-playing student, offering a visual reward for having completed a text.
Of course, a student who fulfills the arbitrary goal set by a course requirement is in the same place as a hedgehog with a ring. This is where Web 2.0 comes in: by giving students blank spaces in which to write, LibraryThing and Goodreads invite readers to consider their responses to the text in the time between completing the assignment and going to class.
Such a system makes a ton of assumptions about students (e.g. they finish the reading before class), and an instructor would have to make very, very smart use of such a tool so that it actually contributed to learning and didn’t become simply another dorky assignment. And there is the problem that all the reading-collection tools I’ve seen see the book as the fundamental unit of text, having no interest in poems, short stories, or essays.
Still, by scoring students’ otherwise unrecognized work and by inviting out-of-class literary conversation, these tools have the potential to game the system.
Hmm. I know lots of people on the blogs use librarything, but it is only free for the first few hundred books, which is a problem for anyone who’s a grad student, eh?
Goodreads looks interesting but it, like all the rest, has the drawback of me being lazy and not wanting to input all the books I have read already — the same problem I have with starting EndNote.
The most troubling thing would be that I read for pleasure so rarely now that I would never update anything, which is depressing.
I haven’t thought much about using these for teaching — there is always the problem of _quality_ vs. _quantity_ for student reading though. Maybe the instructor would be “gaming the system,” but I would think it would be pretty easy for students to just click in all their books and do a quick google search for some material — like Sparknotes —- to slap into their journals and get the assignment over with.
This has nothing to do with the pedagogy part of the post, but…
I decided that the $25 lifetime fee was worth it. It made it much easier for me to catalog my books and keep a working list of what I own. Think about it this way: If anything were to happen to your books, you would have a list of them. Very important to have such a list for the insurance company. It’s also a good idea to take photos of your books on the shelves for insurance purposes. I have a lot of money wrapped up in books (as I imagine most of us do).
Oh, and I loooove EndNote! It makes my life so much easier. It does have a bit of a learning curve. Using the Connect feature, I downloaded all of the citations for the items on all of the prelims lists for comp/rhet’s sublists (and the core list) while watching television. It really wasn’t that bad. I did need to manually enter the primary sources for my dissertation, but because of the format of the database, it also allowed me to add my own keywords, notes about authors, notes about the texts, etc., which has been invaluable. I have heard that Zotero is good, too, but I haven’t tried it yet.
Bypassing the technology part of the post, something I was never taught as an undergrad, but was expected to have absorbed as if magically, was how to take notes on a fictional text. By which I mean both how to process one’s reactions to a novel while reading, and literally how most effectively to take notes in a book. It wasn’t until I saw other people doing it toward the very end of college that I realized sometimes it was OK to write in books. So part of me thinks that, technology aside, you’re talking about explicitly teaching effective note-taking strategies in a literature class. Doing it online would provide an easy way for an instructor to monitor how people were doing, but I could also imagine, say, spontaneous note-taking checks. That wouldn’t quite provide the incentive of Sonic’s rings, though. More like the incentive of pleasing authority, which we all know how much teenage boys love.
Unrelatedly, I’m surprised (having never looked at LibraryThing before) how few people share your interest in Japanese cultural history…
I still don’t write in my novels. I underline things, sure, and maybe put a sarcastic “ha!” here and there, but otherwise, that’s it.
I did take copious notes all over my Nortons whenever we did close readings of poetry in my undergrad lectures.
Sisyphus, the cynical part of me agrees that a student who is not invested in reading will always have more tools to dissimulate reading than his/her instructor will have to expose that dissimulation. A Mariofication of reading will not reach that student; possibly nothing will.
This might be a feature of teaching in the Midwest, but I have found that students readily admit—in class, in front of their peers—that they haven’t finished (or started) the reading. There seems to be comparatively little shame attached to reading, which is a good thing, but students seem nonetheless to understand the value of the process and may simply need some motivation to do it.
We humans have evolved to respond to community pressure more readily than to any other nonlethal pressure: a discussion of the nit and grit of a text outside the classroom might be a way of encouraging those students who want to do the reading to sit down for the three or four hours it would take to do a week’s reading assignment.
Kermit, I really hadn’t thought about that dimension at all, but now that you suggest it I have difficulty imagining how students could develop richer readings of a text without at the same time developing skills as annotators and notetakers.
I saw just this weekend that JBJ uses wikis to teach notetaking, a technique which seems well-adapted to teaching these skills.
Mike, this is a great idea with fantastic implications. I’m just preparing a post on blogging and ‘casual’ learning (non-institutional learning, with a nod to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society). What struck me about your Sonic the Hedgehog imagery (for me it was Superfrog, an Amiga game) was that it’s essentially what I’m doing in writing a blog. I read, I post, I think about the implications of the post, I read some more, I respond to comments, I read some more. And writing down the results is a form of learning itself; shaping arguments, anticipating criticism, etc.
So although my thoughts are about learning outside curricular boundaries, you’ve certainly helped me visualise what I’m doing as an indefinitely long ‘gotta-get-them-all’ process.
Thanks!
[...] of what it’s like to learn casually, but there’s still another element to it. Mike Shapiro at Ad Nauseam has been thinking about how he could make learning more like playing video games for his students. [...]