By a semiotic domain I mean 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 meaning. --James Paul Gee (19) Up to this point, we have been talking, reading and writing about what it means do what Nancy Sommers calls personal writing. Sommers uses this term personal writing to talk about how students can bring themselves to the task of academic writing, including the writing of essays and research papers. This paper asks you to bring [your] judgments and interpretations to bear on Mike Roses book, The Mind at Work (Sommers 18). In order to do that academic task, you are going to use a second text as a lens through which to examine Roses examples. In his book What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee tells us from the beginning that he will look beyond the traditional idea of literacy as reading and writing in print to apply the term more broadly to making meaning in what he calls semiotic domains. The epigraph above offers his most technical definition of that term, but he also offers a second definition in more everyday language: an area or set of activities where people think, act, and value in certain ways. My own definition might expand that to an area or set of activities where people think, act, value and use language and symbols in distinctive ways. Write a paper in which you explain your understanding of Gees broader view of literacy. As part of this explanation, develop two thick examples to illustrate your understanding-- one developed from Mike Roses observations of workers in his book The Mind at Work and the other from your own experience with literacies in different semiotic domains. Think of each example as being at least one to two full pages.

By a semiotic domain I mean 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 meaning. --James Paul Gee (19) Up to this point, we have been talking, reading and writing about what it means do what Nancy Sommers calls personal writing. Sommers uses this term personal writing to talk about how students can bring themselves to the task of academic writing, including the writing of essays and research papers. This paper asks you to bring [your] judgments and interpretations to bear on Mike Roses book, The Mind at Work (Sommers 18). In order to do that academic task, you are going to use a second text as a lens through which to examine Roses examples. In his book What Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Gee tells us from the beginning that he will look beyond the traditional idea of literacy as reading and writing in print to apply the term more broadly to making meaning in what he calls semiotic domains. The epigraph above offers his most technical definition of that term, but he also offers a second definition in more everyday language: an area or set of activities where people think, act, and value in certain ways. My own definition might expand that to an area or set of activities where people think, act, value and use language and symbols in distinctive ways. Write a paper in which you explain your understanding of Gees broader view of literacy. As part of this explanation, develop two thick examples to illustrate your understanding-- one developed from Mike Roses observations of workers in his book The Mind at Work and the other from your own experience with literacies in different semiotic domains. Think of each example as being at least one to two full pages.