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From: James Paul Gee (2004) "Learning by design: Games as learning machines" Interactive Educational Multimedia no.8 pp.15-23
Drawn from Gee, James Paul (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, Palgrave Macmillan: New York
1) Active, Critical Learning Principle
All aspects of the the learning environment (including ways in which
the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage
active and critical, not passive, learning.
2) Design Principle
Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is
core to the leaning experience.
3) Semiotic Principle
Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and
across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols,
artifacts, etc.) as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
4) Semiotic Domains Principle
Leaning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being
able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups
connected to them.
5) Meta-level thinking about Semiotic Domain
Principle
Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships
of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.
6) "Psychosocial Moratorium" Principle
Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are
lowered.
7) Committed Learning Principle
Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and
practice) as an extension of their real-world identities in relation to
a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual
world that they find compelling.
8) Identity Principle
Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way
that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity)
and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new
identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as
learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities,
a virtual identity, and a projective identity.
9) Self-Knowledge Principle
The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not
only about the domain but also about themselves and their current and
potential capacities.
10) Amplification of Input Principle
For a little input, learners get a lot of output.
11) Achievement Principle
For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from
the beginning, customized to each learner's level, effort, and growing
mastery and signaling the learner's ongoing achievements.
12) Practice Principle
Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice
is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners
on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success).
They spend lots of time on task.
13. Ongoing Learning Principle
The distinction between the learner and the master is vague, since learners,
thanks to the operation of the "regime of competency" principle listed next,
must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinized mastery to adapt to
new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization,
undoing automatization, and new re-organized automatization.
14) "Regime of Competence" Principle
The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge
of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as
challenging but not "undoable".
15) Probing Principle
Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and
on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world
to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.
16) Multiple Routes Principle
There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners
to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and
problem-solving, while also exploring alternative styles.
17) Situated Meaning Principle
The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, texts,
etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or
decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered
bottom up via embodied experience.
18) Text Principle
Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e. only in terms of the
definitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to
each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experience. Learners move
back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal
understanding (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when
learners have enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences
with similar texts.
19) Intertextual Principle
The learner understands texts as a family ("genre") of related texts
and understands any one text in relation to others in the family, but only
after having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a
group of texts as a family ("genre") of texts is a large part of
what helps the learner to make sense of texts.
20) Multimodal Principle
Meaning and knowledge ate built up through various modalities (images, texts,
symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.
21) "Material Intelligence" Principle
Thinking, problem-solving and knowledge are "stored" in material
objects and the environment. This frees learners to engage their minds with
other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the
knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more
powerful effects.
22) Intuitive Knowledge Principle
Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience,
often in association with an affinity group, counts a good deal and is
honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.
23) Subset Principle
Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real
domain.
24) Incremental Principle
Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead
to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more
complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guess the
learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or
generalizations the learned has found earlier.
25) Concentrated Sample Principle
The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of the fundamental
signs and actions than should be the case in a less controlled sample.
Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that
learners get to practice them often and learn them well.
26) Bottom-up Basic Skills Principle
Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what
counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more
of the game/domain or games/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements
of a given type of game/domain.
27) Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Time
Principle
The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time,
when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best
be understood and used in practice.
28) Discovery Principle
Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample
opportunities for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.
29) Transfer Principle
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for,
transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including
problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.
30) Cultural Models about the World Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and
reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without
denigration of their identities, abilities or social affiliations, and
juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to
them in various ways.
31) Cultural Models about Learning Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and
reflectively about their cultural models about learning and themselves as
learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social
affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as
learners.
32) Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains
Principle
Learning is set up in such a way thsat learners come to think consicously and
reflectively
about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are
learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social
affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.
33) Distributed Principle
Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols,
technologies, and the environment.
34) Dispersed Principle
Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with
others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never
see face-to-face.
35) Affinity Group Principle
Learners constitute an "affinity group", that is, a group that is
bonded primarily through shared endeavours, goals, and practices and not
shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture.
36) Insider Principle
The learner is an "insider," "teacher," and
"producer" (not just a consumer) able to customize the learning
experience and the domain/game from the beginning and throughout the
experience.
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