Digital Literacy

Digital Literacy
As video and computer gaming has started occupy a considerable place and time in our college classrooms, Literacy and Composition instructors can make use of them in order to develop students’ reading skills and critical thinking. In her article Gaming, Student Literacies, and the Composition Classroom: Some possibilities for Transformation, Alexander contends that “ incorporating a strong consideration of gaming into composition course may not only enliven writing instruction for many of our students, but also transform our approach to literacy” (37). She also argues that by analyzing and dissecting students’ attitudes towards gaming, teachers can design teaching materials that concentrate on topics such as gender, sexuality, sexism, and stereotyping and their relation to literacy.
I totally support the use of technologies in the teaching and learning process especially if they attract students. And this is what we lack in our traditional literacy. Psychologists believe that lack of motivation is one of the factors that hinder learning. This is because without motivation processes such as concentration and curiosity, which I consider key factors in operating memory, will be absent. Thus, any means that pushes our literacy forward is welcomed. However, we need to be mindful of some issues these games may bring to the educational classrooms: racism and stereotyping, for example. As we know almost most of these games create an imaginable war between a hero and rogues who should be from different races. The hero is always the winner, and the rogues the defeated. Now let us imagine this scenario. A heterogeneous X classroom consists of students of different races some of whom are Arabs. They are watching a game called Delta Force: Land Warriors, which project Arabs as enemies for the US. It also represents them as savage, barbarian, hateful, and rogues. Now the question is how these students will feel and react. There is no doubt that they will feel degraded and discriminated. They will resist all that and even may turn into “ difficult students”.
The conclusion that we can draw from this discussion is that games available now may work perfectly in homogeneous classrooms which consists of the same race. And here is the limitation of these games as audiovisual aids. We all realize that games are originally designed for entertainment. Thus, teachers should carefully choose the ones they want to use and see if a student will be hurt. Practically this is difficult because it is not only a matter of race, but also of gender, sexuality, and class. What is the solution, then? We should design games for pedagogical purposes.