Constructing meaning

I do agree with Gee on the idea that video games can create the environment in which children and students can critically think about what surrounds them. I think what gives these games this advantage is the ‘fun’ element. When both children and students get involved in these games, they do not feel the formality of classrooms. On the contrary these games will be “serio-ludic” activities which can motivate them to learn.

In addition, these games present input not as direct assignments that tease students’ minds, but as semiotic images and sounds that stir their thinking.

I have already experienced the use of visual rhetoric in classrooms. My experience was with a video I created in order to prove how meaning would be culturally constructed. I presented this video to fulfill the research paper requirement for 515 class. The purpose of presenting this video is to show how Gee’s principles from 1 to 7 can work.

First see the video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AttelKBKHAE

I constructed this video depending on Stuart Hall’s idea of representation, which means the way objects are arranged in order to convey meaning. My video has been made to lead the viewers to understand some of natural signifiers that have particular significance in the Arab world such as mountains and rivers. “These signifiers were organized in such a way that they expressed the three stages of being a student: the stage of applying to the graduate school, the stage of being admitted and the stage of starting studying; the signifiers that represent these stages are: the children and the buildings, the greens and the trickle, the sea and the wharf, the river and the green mountain. All these signifiers represent blankness, purity and the quest, pleasure and knowledge, a new, long academic life, pleasure mixed with difficulties, respectively.

If you see the video and try to explain it, you will find yourself indulged in learning about the first seven principles that Gee made. Please see the video and signifiers and try to get the meaning. Give it a try.