Project Proposal

Introduction:

For my project, I propose looking at how television is detrimental to child cognitive growth. This is just a general idea floating in the abyss, but it is along the lines of where I want to go with my multimodal project.

            The book I am reading for the semester is the What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee, and it has really sparked an interest for this topic. There is a chapter wherein Gee talks about interacting with a child while they are watching television and the positive effects that it can have on his cognitive growth, as apposed to sitting a child down and leaving them alone with the television, which will have the opposite effect on the child. This was something that I found to be particularly interesting, and I want to explore different examples of this.

            This connects to Digital Rhetorics and Multimodal Writing because this the future of our children. Working in a restaurant, I notice on a regular basis, that parents are plopping their children down in front of their smartphone or tablet and the kids completely exit any sort of learning or bonding experience with their parents. Being a child of the 90’s, television was a privilege for my siblings and I—Saturday morning cartoons being something that my mother would “take away” if I was naughty, but it wasn’t a way of life. With that said, I acknowledge that mothers are busy these days and can’t spend as much time entertaining their children as they would like. But, if we must constantly keep our children entertained in this digital age (because it is virtually impossible for children to escape the ways of the asphyxiating digital world), how can we do it in a manner that won’t be detrimental to their cognitive growth?

Literature Review:

            Again, I am not positive about this topic, so my process is privy to change. However, I want to take a look at Baby Einstein, a movie series that is supposedly a learning tool for babies and young children. I also want to take a look at some research on Rosetta Stone. Last semester, Phil Gaines talked about a part of the brain that every child is born with that allows him to learn any language in order to adapt to his surroundings (it eventually goes away after a few years). I plan on dusting off some of my old textbooks and taking a deeper look into that. And, of course, I will do my best to use as much of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy as is applicable.

Methods:

The format I am expecting my essay to take would be in the form of a video. I liked working with PowerPoint in my Audio Visual Project, but it seemed to set me back on what wasn’t as important. I think I may just do a self-interview with my smartphone and editing it in iMovie. I have a few creative ideas floating around for the specifics, but I am not going to share them now, since I am not positive in what exactly I will be doing.

As far as completing the research, I plan on reading a bunch, doing a lot of multimodal web surfing, bringing some dead notebooks back to life, and talking to my mom (who worked with this sort of thing when she was teaching). I am not sure the schedule in which I will be conducting my research, as I am constantly working and doing homework when I am not in school.

Works Cited:

Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.