user guide for educators
James Gee (2007) argues that new experiences, even those that seem trivial, such as playing video games, serve a purpose in learning. As a learner enters a new environment they interact with and experience a new world of understanding, or what Gee calls a “semiotic domain,” which he describes as “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities (e.g., oral or written language, images, equations, symbols, sounds, gestures, graphs, artifacts, etc.) to communicate distinctive types of meanings” (p. 18). He asserts that the experience of learning new semiotic domains can teach individuals the necessary skills to scaffold future learning. We believe that “Collection Collective” itself acts as a semiotic domain that provides many rich opportunities for participants to build connections and discover adjacent semiotic domains. Gee explains the benefits of gaining experience with new semiotic domains,
We learn to experience (see, feel, and operate on) the world in new ways.
Since semiotic domains usually are shared by groups of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices, we gain the potential to join this social group, to become affiliated with such kinds of people (even though we may never see all of them, or any of them, face to face).
We gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in the domain and, perhaps, more important, in related domains. (Gee, 2007, p. 23)
The creation of an inclusive, inspiring and dynamic learning environment that builds on social interaction to create a meaningful semiotic domain is a key goal of “Collection Collective”. This participatory digital environment operates as an affinity space for the exploration of creative self-identity, while also encouraging agentic involvement through “personally transformative” (Ito et. al, 2015, p. 14) connected learning. This space engages peer learning outside the realm of academia and applies social culture and networked connection through creative practice.
Additionally, in participating in “Collection Collective”, learner-collaborators will:
Learn about the personal collection through distinctive themes such as The Evocative, The Ordinary, The Gleaned, and The Relic.
Immerse in an authentic and personalized museum learning experience while engaging in multiple roles such as learner, participant, creator and contributor.
Celebrate and experience the diversity of cultural backgrounds and personal histories through the sharing of textual, visual, audio, and video objects and memorabilia.
Gain inspiration through multimodal content to create and share personal exhibit artifacts and connected narratives.
Discover the depth of meaning that objects can hold through the exploration of intimate connections with memory, experience, relationships, emotion, and perception.
Capture different perceptions of life through the viewing of objects and the act of collecting.
Experiment and engage with genuine, social interaction with the creative arts and arts community through self-expression and discovery.
Contribute to a rich multimedia documentation of object stories in a public web-based environment.
Practice creative digital content creation in a real-world scenario, where content is publicized, and interacted with by individuals outside of the participant’s regular social sphere.