LEARNING ANALYSIS for Feminist Learning: Games & Virtual Worlds!

This is a synthetic reflection on the course and your place in it. EVERYONES DUE Thursday 12 December 2013: learning analysis/8-10 pgs in hard copy, turned in at the last class time! Draft it 3 times! DUE THURSDAY THE LAST DAY IN CLASS: LOGBOOK 4, LEARNING ANALYSIS IN HARD COPY & ALSO SENT ELECTRONICALLY Send to katiekin@gmail.com, use filename: yrlastname 468 LEARNING ANALYSIS or LOGBOOK4. Subject header SHOULD BE THE SAME. NOTE: Credit given only after presentation in class. Make plans to be in class, no matter what. NO CREDIT FOR COURSE WITHOUT LOGBOOK 4, carefully and accurately filled in. SUMMARY OF GRADED MATERIALS: everything must be turned in on the last day of classes Logbooks: 4, last one must be turned in to get any credit for the course Prototypes: 3 class posters, 2 website versions Final Learning Analysis & attendance: with logbooks & prototypes all together: 1/3 grade Con 1: research poster & pics or paper & handout; 2 days attendance: 1/3 grade Con 2: research poster & pics or paper & handout; 2 days attendance: 1/3 grade The learning analysis gives you an opportunity to talk about what the course has meant to you. It includes: (1) your description of the argument or story of the course. Examine the syllabus (course descriptions and requirements, the reading and writing assignments), WWW sites and class website, notes from class, any freewrites, lists and preps for class, imagining this information as elements in an argument about how games and play teach us more about learning and its possibilities, about arts of protest, about changing broken realities. What is the argument of the course? What are the parts of this argument, and how do they connect together? Why Games, Virtual Worlds and Feminist Learning in a womens studies cultural studies course? How have we put together our understandings of how both confusion and frustration are actually fun? We gather together for this something feminists and others call Worlding: keeping our planet going, caring for flourishing and justice. How is Worlding at stake here? Where does play fit into all this? You will be trying to imagine how the course was constructed, and why it was put together in this particular way. Pay special attention to titles in our Schedule. Imagine them as titles in a Table of Contents to parts of a book and try to understand the argument of the "book" of the course. (2) put yourself into this story. What have we created together, researching and writing and prototyping and playing, in cons, class, and more? All this includes practices feminists call intersectional: where social identities, structures of injustice, ways of changing worlds (including ourselves), are understood as complexly interconnected. How are you a part of the argument of the course as you understand it? What was happening with you at different points in the unfolding and building of this argument? What kind of knowledge did you make yourself in your analysis of readings, in your projects, in your responses to others' work and helping classmates to catch up, in your investigations on the Web and using our class website? How do the insights you developed connect? Use the lists you did for class and your class notes to remember your thoughts, questions, ideas. How did these change? What changed them? What were your contributions to the class? What effects did you have on the course, on your buddies? How did your responses to other people's work include you in the argument of the class? (3) discuss 4 readings (whole books as well as chapters) and 1 or 2 web sites (in addition to the class website) connecting you to the class. Choose readings that meant a lot to you, and web sites of substance that helped you think and connect. Demonstrate that you've kept up with the reading by showing how widely you've read in the course materials. How do these readings connect to the argument of the class? How did they affect you? What was meaningful and important about them? What did you learn from them? How did they change your relationship to the course, to ideas, issues, politics, feelings? You can talk about how your life was connected to these ideas and feelings. You can suggest relationships with other readings, other courses, other experiences. Be sure to draft at least three times! This is an exercise in synthesizing--putting things together in new relationships, making a whole shape. It requires imagination. Have fun with it. Good luck!