LEARNING PRINCIPLES

FROM JAMES PAUL GEE'S

WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US
ABOUT LEARNING AND LITERACY

1 ACTIVE, CRITICAL LEARNING PRINCIPLE

All aspects of the the learning environment

(including ways in which the semiotic
domain is designed and presented) are set
up to encourage active and critical, not
passive, learning.

2 DESIGN PRINCIPLE

Learning about and coming to appreciate

design and design principles is core to the
leaning experience

3 SEMIOTIC PRINCIPLE

Learning about and coming to appreciate

interrelations within and across multiple
sign systems (images, words, actions,
symbols, artifacts, etc.) as a complex system
is core to the learning experience.

4 SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE

Leaning involves mastering, at some level,

semiotic domains, and being able to
participate, at some level, in the affinity
group or groups connected to them.

5 METALEVEL THINKING ABOUT SEMIOTIC

DOMAINS PRINCIPLE

Learning involves active and critical

thinking about the relationships of the
semiotic domain being learned to other
semiotic domains.

6 "PSYCHOSOCIAL MORATORIUM" PRINCIPLE

Learners can take risks in a space where

real-world consequences are lowered.
7 COMMITTED LEARNING PRINCIPLE

Learners participate in an extended

engagement (lots of effort and practice) as
an extension of their real-world identities in
relation to a virtual identity to which they
feel some commitment and a virtual world
that they find compelling.

8 IDENTITY PRINCIPLE

Learning involves taking on and playing

with identities in such a a way that the
learner has real choices (in developing the
virtual identity) and ample opportunity to
meditate on the relationship between new
identities and old ones. There is a tripartite
play of identities as learners relate, and
reflect on, their multiple real-world
identities, a virtual identity, and a projective
identity.

9 SELF-KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE

The virtual world is constructed in such a

way that learners learn not only about the
domain but also about themselves and their
current and potential capacities.

10 AMPLIFICATION OF INPUT PRINCIPLE

For a little input, learners get a lot of

output.

11 ACHIEVEMENT PRINCIPLE

For learners of all levels of skill there are

intrinsic rewards from the beginning,
customized to each learner's level, effort,
and growing mastery and signaling the
learner's ongoing achievements.

12 PRACTICE PRINCIPLE

Learners get lots and lots of practice in a

context where the practice is not boring (i.e.
in a virtual world that is compelling to
learners on their own terms and where the
learners experience ongoing success). They
spend lots of time on task.
13 ONGOING LEARNING PRINCIPLE

The distinction between the learner and the

master is vague, since learners, thanks to
the operation of the "regime of
competency" principle listed next, must, at
higher and higher levels, undo their
routinized mastery to adapt to new or
changed conditions. There are cycles of new
learning, automatization, undoing
automatization, and new re-organized
automatization

14 "REGIME OF COMPETENCE" PRINCIPLE

The learner gets ample opportunity to

operate within, but at the outer edge of, his
or her resources, so that at those points
things are felt as challenging but not
"Undoable".

15 PROBING PRINCIPLE

Learning is a cycle of probing the world

(doing something); reflecting in and on this
action and, on this basis, forming a
hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this
hypothesis; and then accepting or
rethinking the hypothesis.

16 MULTIPLE ROUTES PRINCIPLE

There are multiple ways to make progress

or move ahead. This allows learners to make
choices, rely on their own strengths and
styles of learning and problem-solving,
while also exploring alternative styles.

17 SITUATED MEANING PRINCIPLE

The meanings of signs (words, actions,

objects, artifacts, symbols, texts, etc.) are
situated in embodied experience. Meanings
are not general or decontextualized.
Whatever generality meanings come to
have is discovered bottom up via embodied
experience

18 TEXT PRINCIPLE

Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e.

only in terms of the definitions of the words
in the text and their text-internal
relationships to each other) but are
understood in terms of embodied
experience. Learners move back and forth
between texts and embodied experiences.
More purely verbal understanding (reading
texts apart from embodied action) comes
only when learners have enough embodied
experience in the domain and ample
experiences with similar texts
19 INTERTEXTUAL PRINCIPLE

The learner understands texts as a family

("genre") of related texts and understands
any one text in relation to others in the
family, but only after having achieved
embodied understandings of some texts.
Understanding a group of texts as a family
("genre") of texts is a large part of what
helps the learner to make sense of texts.

20 MULTIMODAL PRINCIPLE

Meaning and knowledge ate built up

through various modalities (images, texts,
symbols, interactions, abstract design,
sound, etc.), not just words.

21 "MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE" PRINCIPLE

Thinking, problem-solving and knowledge

are "stored" in material objects and the
environment. This frees learners to engage
their minds with other things while
combining the results of their own thinking
with the knowledge stored in material
objects and the environment to achieve yet
more powerful effects.

22 INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE

Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in

repeated practice and experience, often in
association with an affinity group, counts a
good deal and is honored. Not just verbal
and conscious knowledge is rewarded.

23 SUBSET PRINCIPLE

Learning even at its start takes place in a

(simplified) subset of the real domain.

24 INCREMENTAL PRINCIPLE

Learning situations are ordered in the early

stages so that earlier cases lead to
generalizations that are fruitful for later
cases. When learners face more complex
cases later, the learning space (the number
and type of guess the learner can make) is
constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns
or generalizations the learned has founded
earlier.
25 CONCENTRATED SAMPLE PRINCIPLE

The learner sees, especially early on, many

more instances of the fundamental signs
and actions than should be the case in a
less controlled sample. fundamental signs
and actions are concentrated in the early
stages so that learners get to practice them
often and learn them well

26 BOTTOM-UP BASIC SKILLS PRINCIPLE

Basic skills are not learned in isolation or

out of context; rather, what counts as a
basic skill is discovered bottom up by
engaging in more and more of the
game/domain or games/domains like it.
Basic skills are genre elements of a given
type of game/domain

27 EXPLICIT INFORMATION ON-DEMAND AND

JUST-IN-TIME PRINCIPLE

The learner is given explicit information

both on-demand and just-in-time, when the
learner needs it or just at the point where
the information can best be understood
and used in practice.

28 DISCOVERY PRINCIPLE

Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out

minimum, allowing ample opportunities for
the learner to experiment and make
discoveries.

29 TRANSFER PRINCIPLE

Learners are given ample opportunity to

practice, and support for, transferring what
they have learned earlier to later problems,
including problems that require adapting
and transforming that earlier learning.

30 CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT THE WORLD

PRINCIPLE

Learning is set up in such a way that

learners come to think consciously and
reflectively about some of their cultural
models regarding the world, without
denigration of their identities, abilities or
social affiliations, and juxtapose them to
new models that may conflict with or
otherwise relate to them in various ways
31 CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT LEARNING

PRINCIPLE

Learning is set up in such a way that

learners come to think consciously and
reflectively about their cultural models
about learning and themselves as learners,
without denigration of their identities,
abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose
them to new models of learning and
themselves as learners

32 CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT SEMIOTIC

DOMAINS PRINCIPLE

Learning is set up in such a way that learners

come to think consciously and reflectively
about their cultural models about a
particular semiotic domain they are
learning, without denigration of their
identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and
juxtapose them to new models about this
domain.

33 DISTRIBUTED PRINCIPLE

Meaning/knowledge is distributed across

the learner, objects, tools, symbols,
technologies, and the environment.

34 DISPERSED PRINCIPLE

Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the

sense that the learner shares it with others
outside the domain/game, some of whom
the learner may rarely or never see face-to-
face

35 AFFINITY GROUP PRINCIPLE

Learners constitute an "affinity group," that

is, a group that is bonded primarily through
shared en devours, goals, and practices and
not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or
culture.

36 INSIDER PRINCIPLE

The learner is an "insider," "teacher," and

"producer" (not just a consumer) able to
customize the learning experience and the
domain/game from the beginning and
throughout the experience.

RETRIEVED DIRECTLY FROM:

GEE, J. P. (2007). WHAT VIDEO GAMES HAVE TO TEACH US
ABOUT LEARNING AND LITERACY. NEW YORK, NY: PALGRAVE
MACMILLAN.