People of all ages spend massive amounts of time watching television. In his book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky argues that we could change the world if we could get people to devote many of those hours to important causes. And, indeed, more and more people today are turning off the television and using digital media to produce and not just consume, to participate and not just spectate, and to innovate and not just replicate. Video games are one important medium that has siphoned cognitive energy from television. However, for nongamers, video games are often not what they think they are based on what mainstream media often makes them out to be.

Games are not like books, movies, or television. Books, movies, and television are all about their content. In these media, content is king. Games have content, but they are not about their content. They are about doing, making decisions, solving problems, and interacting. Content is there in a game to facilitate and serve acting, deciding, problem solving, and interaction. In good games, content (including story or plot) needs to be a loyal vassal to game mechanics, that is, all that players must do and decide in order to succeed. War and Peace is about war and peace; Grand Theft Auto is not about crime – it is about players coming up with good strategies for success in a virtual world with multiple constraints, some stemming from the story and many from the design of the virtual world and the game play in it.

In this chapter we will argue that to understand how gaming supports learning, as well as to design games for educational purposes, educators and scholars must think beyond elements of the game software to the social practices, or metagame, that take place within and around games. Based on studies of fan sites associated with the popular computer game The Sims, we identify features of what we call nurturing affinity spaces that are particularly supportive of learning and contrast these features with how schools are typically organized. How such spaces are developed and sustained remains a central question for future research on games and learning, and we conclude by identifying key areas for further investigation.

Games and Learning

Those of us who have made the claim that games are good for learning have meant, of course, that well-designed games are good for learning, not poorly designed ones. While an empirical enterprise is under way to test whether and how games are good for learning, too often these studies do not first ensure that they are assessing games that are well designed.

INTRODUCTION

The field of psychometrics has been predominant in work on testing and assessment. For the most part, psychometrics has been strongly influenced by traditional psychological assumptions about the mind and learning. Work that takes a sociocultural perspective has played a much smaller role and has heretofore made little contact with psychometrics. This chapter discusses contributions such a sociocultural perspective has to make to issues of assessment and testing, with a focus on an expanded notion of opportunity to learn (OTL). Ensuring that all learners have had equal OTL is both an ethical prerequisite for fair assessment and a solid basis on which to think about educational reforms that will ensure that all children can succeed at school. It is also a point at which mutually informing discussion can occur between people working in psychometrics and those working on sociocultural approaches to learning.

This section begins with a consideration of the traditional perspective in psychology, one that views knowledge and learning through the lens of mental representations in individuals' heads (Clancey 1997). Even in this traditional view, many of the types of issues that sociocultural perspectives emphasize also arise, although in a more backgrounded way. I will then turn to a more direct consideration of sociocultural perspectives, starting with the relationship between learners and their learning environments. In subsequent sections, I will spell out this relationship in terms of the connections between learning and learners' experiences in the world; how knowledge is distributed across people and their tools; the central importance of people's participation in shared talk and social practices; and the nature of the special varieties of language used in talk and participation when people learn in content areas in school – areas like math, science, social studies, and literature.

The most pressing issue facing U.S. education may be providing all students with a fair opportunity to learn (OTL). Although most would embrace the goal of enhancing OTL, there are fundamental disagreements about how best to accomplish this and different understandings of the meaning of “opportunity to learn.” Historically, conceptions of OTL have been closely tied to the practice of testing. OTL has been conceptualized as opportunity to learn what is tested, and test-based accountability has been widely implemented as a means of enhancing OTL. In the United States, policy makers have embraced test-based accountability as a means of somehow forcing schools to bring “all children” to a “proficient” level of achievement. By law, tests must be “aligned” to rigorous “academic achievement standards.” Thus, standardized tests are relied upon to provide both the definition of successful learning and the means to assure that OTL is extended to all learners. Against this vision, many have criticized the conception of learning underlying large-scale testing programs and have argued that test-based accountability has, in fact, undermined many students' opportunities to learn.

It is rare to find any productive dialogue between the critics and the proponents of test-based accountability systems. By and large, testing advocates embrace a straightforward account of educational improvement. It is taken as a given that schools are doing a poor job – the goal of schooling is to impart skills to students, and it is common knowledge that many students graduate without having acquired the skills they need.

KNOWLEDGE: AS NOUN AND VERB

The theory of learning in many schools today is based on what I would call the “content fetish” (Gee 2004). The content fetish is the view that any academic area (whether physics, sociology, or history) is composed of a set of facts or a body of information and that the way learning should work is through teaching and testing such facts and information.

However, for some current learning theorists, “know” is a verb before it is a noun, “knowledge” (Barsalou 1999a, 1999b; Bereiter and Scardamalia 1993; Clark 1997; Glenberg 1997; Glenberg and Robertson 1999; Lave and Wenger 1991; Rogoff 1990). Any actual domain of knowledge, academic or not, is first and foremost a set of activities (special ways of acting and interacting so as to produce and use knowledge) and experiences (special ways of seeing, valuing, and being in the world). Physicists do physics. They talk physics. And when they are being physicists, they see and value the world in a different way than do non-physicists. The same applies for good anthropologists, linguists, urban planners, army officers, doctors, artists, literary critics, historians, and so on (diSessa 2000; Lave 1996; Ochs, Gonzales, and Jacoby 1996; Shaffer 2004).

Yet if much decontextualized, overt information and skill-and-drill on facts does not work as a theory of learning, neither does “anything goes,” “just turn learners loose in rich environments,” “no need for teachers” (Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark 2006).

INTRODUCTION: FROM GROUPS TO SPACES

In this paper, I consider an alternative to the notion of a “community of practice” (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). This alternative focuses on the idea of a space in which people interact, rather than on membership in a community. I want to consider this alternative because I believe that the notion of what I will later call an “affinity space” is a particularly important contemporary social configuration with implications for the future of schools and schooling.

The notion of a “community of practice” has been a fruitful one. However, it has given rise to several problems, some of which are:

• The idea of “community” can carry connotations of “belongingness” and close-knit personal ties among people which do not necessarily always fit classrooms, workplaces or other sites where the notion of a community of practice has been used.

• The idea of “community” seems to bring with it the notion of people being “members”. However, “membership” means such different things across different sorts of communities of practice, and there are so many different ways and degrees of being a member in some communities of practice that it is not clear that membership is a truly helpful notion.

• While Wenger (see Wenger, McDermott and Snyder 2002) has tried to be careful in delineating just what is and what is not a community of practice, distinguishing it from other sorts of affiliations, the notion has been used by others to cover such a wide array of social forms that we may be missing the trees for the forest.

THE OLD CAPITALISM

Before I talk about new literacies for new times, let me start with old literacies for old times. First, by old times I mean the old capitalism (industrial capitalism, Fordism). The old capitalism (Drucker, 1999; Kanigel, 1997) is a social formation that has been transformed by our current high-tech, global new capitalism (see Castells, 1996; Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996; Greider, 1997; Reich, 1992; Smith, 1995). The old capitalism did not disappear, it still exists as a foregrounded formation in the “developing world” and as a backgrounded formation in the “developed world” (Drucker, 1999; Greider, 1997).

The old capitalism was born in warfare between workers and bosses over how work would be done and how fast it should be carried out (Kanigel, 1997). In the end, the workers lost the battle. Thanks to “Taylorism,” work came to be carried out at a pace and in terms of procedures determined by a “science” of efficiency, not by workers themselves. The craft knowledge of the workers was removed from the workers' heads and bodies and placed into the science of work, the rules of the workplace, and the dictates of managers and bosses. A top-down system was created in terms of which knowledge and control existed at the top (the bosses) and not at the bottom (the workers). Middle managers conveyed and mediated knowledge, information, and control between the top and the bottom.

Vygotsky, or at least the ideas he has bequeathed to sociocultural theories of language, literacy, and cognition, is at the center of much of this volume. The intersection of Vygotsky's ideas and current educational debates are central as well – for example, the distinctions and relations between what we acquire through immersion in communities and what we learn through more typically school-like sorts of instruction. There is, too, in many of the chapters (as in much recent work in the area), a sense that we are looking for ways to move on from where Vygotsky has left us without losing the ground he has helped secure. It is to these themes that I want to turn in some afterthoughts on this volume.

Although Vygotsky's ideas are at the foundation of contemporary sociocultural theories of language and literacy, I believe we are just beginning to realize the extent to which these ideas raise profound dilemmas deeply relevant to current controversies over educational reform. Thus, before I turn directly to Vygotsky, I want to sketch one such controversy now playing itself out in much of the English-speaking world. This is the debate between progressive and postprogressive pedagogies: a distinction that sometimes turns on arguments about the role and efficacy of explicit instruction in contrast to implicit learning through immersion in rich education environments.

Those on both the right and the left of the political spectrum have called for a renewed emphasis on explicit instruction.