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Schools have learned from video games by gamifying non-game like tasks as a tool to capture and sustain the attention and motivation of students, known as gamification. However, video game design a...

This chapter presents an alternative way to think about multimodality. The approach we take stresses sensation and multisensory experience rather than modes. Our theory is meant also to constitute a model for the analysis of designed experience. Humans learn from experience (ensembles of sensation across time), and artists, architects, media designers, writers, and teachers can be seen as designers of guided experience for learning. We seek here to ground our theory in current research on sensation, perception, affect, embodied cognition, and the associational nature of the human mind. The chapter closes on an example of designed experience from a video game.

This article investigates a distinctive linguistic device – slogans – in the discursive ecology of the history, culture and politics of China. We are interested in how a given language device, one that might seem trivial, can carry out different distinctive and important functions in particular cases. Slogans in China are an important way to carry out a function that all states must engage with: to encourage and teach people to see themselves as ‘co-citizens’ in the state. At the same, this function also and always links to important ideological goals and intersects with the state as a source of coercive power. This article is a first step in a larger project to study the discursive tools used, in different ways in different societies, to accomplish the civic and ideological goals of states. So, China here is a case study, an important one to start with, given the significance of modern China in the global world today.

En la actualidad existe una nutrida controversia en relación a los medios de comunicación sociales y digitales que ha llevado, incluso, a censurar la utilización de las redes sociales y los móviles por parte de líderes en la industria tecnológica. En este sentido, la Organización Mundial para la Salud ha propuesto añadir el «desorden del juego» a su listado de enfermedades, definiéndolo como un modelo de comportamiento de juego tan severo que se impone como «preferencia sobre otros intereses». Al mismo tiempo, distintos académicos han enfatizado los aspectos positivos derivados de las redes sociales y los videojuegos. En este artículo se argumenta que es necesaria una mejor comprensión del ser humano para poder implementar lo que aquí se define como diseño para el aprendizaje profundo. El «diseño para el aprendizaje profundo» está encaminado al reconocimiento de las personas y el desarrollo de sentidos saludables, individual y colectivamente, así como la mejora, en general, del estado del mundo para todos los seres vivos, según principios de verdad, felicidad, imaginación, individualidad, diversidad y futuro. En particular, se sugieren quince características basadas en desarrollos científicos que responden a la pregunta: ¿Qué es un ser humano? Consecuentemente, propuestas vinculadas al aprendizaje y la transformación y mejora social deben ser coherentes con dichas características que permiten definir cómo las personas, en tanto que organismos biológicos y sociales, aprenden o pueden aprender óptimamente, así como cambiar para mejorar., There is today a great deal of controversy over digital and social media. Even leaders in the tech industry are beginning to decry the time young people spend on smartphones and social networks. Recently, the World Health Organization proposed adding “gaming disorder” to its official list of diseases, defining it as a pattern of gaming behavior so severe that it takes “precedence over other life interests”. At the same time, many others have celebrated the positive properties of video games, social media, and social networks. This paper argues that a deeper understanding of human beings is needed to design for deep learning. For the purposes of this study “design for deep learning” means helping people matter and find meaning in ways that make them and others healthy in mind and body, while improving the state of the world for all living things, with due respect for truth, sensation, happiness, imagination, individuality, diversity, and the future. In particular, fifteen features related to human nature are suggested based on recent scientific developments to answer the question: What is a human being? Consequently, proposals that are linked to learning and transformation, as well as social improvement, should fit with the ways in which humans, as specific sorts of biological and social creatures, learn best (or can learn at all) and can change for the better

Using recent work on neuroscience, this chapter discusses the nature and limitations of the conscious parts of the human brain. It stresses the role of interpretation, stories, fabulation, and self-deception in how the conscious brain works given that so much of what goes on in the brain and body is not open to consciousness.

This chapter offers a brief 12-point summary of the major claims of Part II of this book. Here I stress enchantment, the human need for magic and transcendence of the mundane world, as well as the fear of death and destruction that the mundane gives rise to in humans.

This chapter discusses an alternative approach to our question “What is a Human?” that comes from the work of Michael Tomasello on normative rationality and normative morality. Tomasello argues that the goal of culture, and its outcome for most humans, is conformity.

This chapter argues that humans are not intelligent in and of themselves. They are actually plug-and-play devices who are at their best when they are connected to smart technologies and tools and networked with others in forms of collective intelligence. Even then, however, human intelligence requires something I call insight intelligence if it is not to be used for destructive ends or bring about a myriad of unintended consequences.

Humans have long argued that they are higher, better, and more intelligent than other animals. This chapter argues that this is actually not true. There are unique aspects to all animals, but no clear hierarchy if we define things like intelligence in ways that do not just “rig the game” in the favor of humans. The chapter begins a discussion of the up and down sides of consciousness.

This chapter discusses work in evolutionary biology that argues humans are domesticated animals and that they domesticated themselves. It goes on to argue that humans domesticated themselves, across their evolutionary history, as a kind of monster and that this is what may make them unique as a kind of creature.

This chapter brings all the material in the book together in a 27-step answer to our question “What is a Human?”.

This chapter discusses the role of stress and anxiety in human life and the human need to belong to groups. It connects these two things to the role of the state in creating co-citizenship as a form of social belonging. It argues, as well, that the state is a fetish.

This chapter discusses gifts from the dead, things like Stonehenge, cave paintings, and the voices of long-lost poets. It is an attempt to come to terms with the humanities as something more than “high culture” trapped in schools or pleas that humans are next to angels.

This chapter gives several examples of fetishes in human thinking and their effects on society. The chapter discusses grades, money, and membership as fetishes.