Module 1 – Queens College

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  Posted by Sara Vogel, PhD. (she/her) on May 9, 2023 at 1:53 pm

  Reply to this post with a response to the prompts below by the module due date.

  • Introduce yourself with your name, college, role(s)
  • Share the rationale cards you kept in your hand all the way to the end of the game. Why did you keep these to the end? Why did you discard particular cards?
  • What connections can you make between the values you reviewed and the examples from people’s digital lives?
  • How did you interact with the game? What worked / didn’t work about our game prototype? Did you follow the rules as written? Did you “tinker” with the algorithm (rules) of the game? If so, how?

• Jacqueline Darvin (she/her)

  Member

  May 18, 2023 at 7:39 am

  Hello, I am Jackie Darvin, and I am a Professor and Program Director for Secondary Literacy Education at Queens College. I kept card numbers 7, 15, 26, 35, and 41 until the end. It was very difficult to select only five, since the reasons on the cards are all valid. I think I discarded the ones that were more “general”, in terms of benefits to society as a whole, etc., and instead honed in on the ones that are more specific to my graduate students, research, and the courses that I teach. The values I reviewed and the examples from people’s lives are connected in that the examples are snapshots of the values in action. I strated out following the rules of the game, but honestly, I tinkered in that I eventually made three piles (yes, no, and maybe) and then ultimately pared them down to five from there. I like the idea of the game, though. It’s more creative than just providing the list and asking folks to choose five… 🙂
  Michael Perrone (he/him/his)

  Member

  May 29, 2023 at 8:30 am

  Hi:  My name is Michael Perrone and I am a Clinical Professor at Queens College.  Like Jackie, I found it very difficult to select only five cards.  Initially, I reviewed the cards without much of a plan or structure, However, I then focused on the following overarching notion:  ‘What do our undergraduate and graduate pre-service teachers most vitally need to best serve their own young learners. I placed the cards into three categories:  ”Very important’, ‘Moderately important’, and ‘Not as important’.  From there was able to pare down to my final list of 5:  5, 8, 9, 10, and 22.  I think that the cards that I selected tended to highlight the idea that digital literacy can be used as a tool for promoting equity and voice in our classrooms.
  Kate Menken (She/Her)

  Member

  May 29, 2023 at 8:15 pm

  Hi! I’m Kate Menken, Professor of Linguistics and TESOL at Queens College. The cards I held onto were 4, 8, 9, 27, and 36. There were many I thought were very important, so it was hard to choose. I felt very inspired by all of the ways that students and educator are engaging with computing, digital tools and literacies that we learned about in the Padlet. Their work made me think about the potential for students and teacher to use computing for a range of advocacy purposes, and encouraged me to gravitate towards equity focused computing values. It also shows examples of the many ways students are engaging with technologies, which remained me how important it is for educators to learn about the tech lives of their students, with regard to my interaction with the game, in the end I made three piles: first picks, “if space” choices, and the s discard pile. And I rearranged a few times. It was fun!
  Kate Menken (She/Her)

  Member

  May 29, 2023 at 8:17 pm

  Yikes that had a lot of typos! Sorry….
  Christopher J. Wagner (He/Him)

  Member

  May 31, 2023 at 4:35 pm

  Hi all! My name is Chris Wagner and I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Elementary and Early Childhood Education. The cards I kept were #14, 16, 11, 46, and 3. As I worked through the card deck, I found that I gravitated toward cards that connected to themes of: (a) tinkering, iteration, and design processes as mindsets for teachers; (b) opening space for agency, joy, and possibility in learning; and (c) equity and justice in schooling. But I also gravitated away from cards that were focused more exclusively on the tech industry/sector. This is because I don’t see me work in teacher education as preparing students to enter the tech workforce, even though I agreed with some of the cards more broadly (particularly those focused on equity and diversity, like card #9). Some of the cards I ultimately rejected for very minor reasons. For example, I rejected cards that stated “it will help teachers to…” (e.g., card #43) rather than “it can…” because the former implies that simply integrating to using computing will lead to positive outcomes, without considering the quality of the tool or how it is implemented. In many cases I believe technology/computing can achieve the aims on many of these cards, but that it depends heavily on the implementation and quality of the tools and the instruction. When it came to the game rules, I generally followed them, but I found it harder to keep track of some of the nuances between the cards. This led me to spread them out (admittedly with more than five sometimes…) as I tried to compare cards and identify the differences. It would be interesting to play this game collaboratively with others. For example, if one player discarded a card and another person picked up that card from a discard pile, it would be interesting to talk about why one person valued a card that another person chose to discard. The conversation that might occur in a group context could be interesting.
  Grace Pai (she/her)

  Member

  June 5, 2023 at 1:01 pm

  Hi all. My name is Grace Pai, and I’m an Assistant Professor in the Elementary and Early Childhood Education department at QC (with Chris and Michael). What a simple, fun, and thought-provoking game this was! Like others, I struggled with deciding on only five cards, but I ended up choosing the following four cards: 2, 5, 6, and 9.  And since we were reminded that rules are meant to be broken,  I ultimately decided on a mash up of cards 14 and 16 for the last card: “because the process of tinkering and making can lead to wonder, discovery,
  enjoyment, and a debugging mindset that learns from and iterates on failure for students and teachers.” The idea of a debugging mindset and iterating on failure from card 14 is important to me as a math educator since persistence and productive struggle is a cornerstone of mathematical success. But I think that is important for not only teachers (as stated in card 14), but also for students which was the framing for card 14. The other cards I chose were largely centered around developing equity in technology in various ways – be it through developing students and teachers’ critical computational literacy (card 6) of the invisible biases that are built into technology (card 9), or around closing the digital divide (card 5) so that any student can choose a career pathway in technology should they want, thereby diversifying the tech industry (card 2). All in all using the CITE framework, I’d say that I am not a Luddite, but I am personally most interested in teaching with and through computing, alongside raising students’ and teachers’ critical consciousness against computing.