My digital document

So I've been working on ym digital document a lot, but I'm definitely not done yet. There are some things I've really been struggling with like making it long enough, having enoughpictures, making my music fit and flow, and really communicating what it is I'm learning. I'm very nervous about trying to do the narrative and make it fit with my story and make my whole document cohesive. I don't have any videos, either and I feel like they wouldn't fit in my story that well. I need to do some more work on my project and I'm just feeling like I don't know where to go next, like do the music more, or get more pictures, or try to do the narration, which I thought I should do last.

Active learning and discovery

I like what Gee talks about in Chapter 5 about how the hands on learning of video games is really an important form of discovery, but how past experiences also can guide our behavior. In school I have always appreciated tasks that were interactive and involved so much more than just trying to read a book and write a report. Being in an environment where trying something new and being allowed to fail at it without giving up is so important. In one of my computer classes, although it would have been faster to tell us step by step how to do a project, one of my teachers gave us a new program and told us to create this slideshow and print it out with all of these specifics. She gave us no instructions about how to do it, so we all were forced to discover things for ourselves-open files, click buttons, pull down screens, search everywhere and try everything. While it seemed like a very structured project, there were many things that were left to our discretion and we were encouraged to be curious, but were left to our own devices. It taught me how to interpret the program and while I did the assignment I found out so many things that I would still remember now, but I know if the steps had just been put in front of me, I wouldn't remember at all. You really do learn much more by doing something for yourself than by just being told what to do.

Situated Learning

The chapter on situated learning immediately made me think of some of my psychology classes from the past and the formation of schemas. These are ways of organization that everyone has occur in their brain, completely without consciously doing so. At the beginning of the chapter, Gee talks about hwo we recall these little categories that we've created in our head to relate to a current situation. We start doing this when we're incredibly young, so children can recall these situations they've been in and the observations theyve made and recorded for future reference. These are very important for all kinds of learning, especially like in video games, as he describes. Assimilating is way for humans to use these old schemas on these new situations that are confronted in classrooms or in video games, while accomodation is a way to adjust these existing schemas to account for these new situations. I think these are very important points to remember when teaching.