Can gaming provide experiential media literacy?
Yes, I know. ANOTHER gaming post.
Toward the end of Woosley's article, she asks of the three interconnected media, "Which will help [students] to understand and then contribute to the world around them, its politics, its science, and its literature?" (10). Although the question certainly implies a hierarchy, I'm assuming from the context that she wants to find utility in many of the discussed e-media. Since she mentions gaming, I'm wondering where exactly her discussion of "Experiential media" literacy comes into play with regard to the above question. I'm not sure I buy the idea of such a literacy; the term itself seems rather vague (of course, I do not discount that I am simply misreading it). Nonetheless, I find gaming useful for more general purposes mentioned elsewhere, such as collaboration skills leading to enhanced civic discourse. If there is one "practical" line in the burgeoning merger of education and ludology, it is certainly one of collaboration--the notion that gamers find specific roles that compliment each other, roles that enhance awareness of co-constructed systems of knowledge as well as the knowledge itself (I'm borrowing heavily from James Gee here). Part of that knowledge, of course, entails multiple other media: digital media in order to interact, older media forms in order to communicate, and so on.