In my quality of life class, I was a part of this discourse community with around 10 other students to come up with solutions to our issue that we are researching about. While reading James Paul Gee’s writing, I relate to his learning practice of, “Semiotic Principle.” This principle relates to this discourse community by how while researching my issue, I came across different opinions about whether increasing foreign language across schools was beneficial or not. And while reading numerous texts and articles, I had to interact with both parties (is foreign language beneficial to high school students?) and understand where they are coming from since not everyone has the same opinion or perspective. This better helped me engage in this discourse community because I had to survey over 250 people, so by talking to the different classmates around me I was able to understand better on what this community is leaning towards and their opinions which helped me create a better survey to question a bigger community/population to receive a wide amount of answers. Through that I was able to see what the population leaned toward which helped me come up with a different solution combating this issue.

Additionally, the 10 students in my class were all focusing and targeting on different issue that they wanted to solve, so by communicating with each other we were able to learn from each other and gave each other advice on how their solution can be “better” or offering them a better doable solution. This all ties back to the semiotic principle because we also had to create a website about our issue which has to include images and certain word choices. For example, because different people view a certain word and image different, I had to choose good word choice that would make people sign my petition to increase foreign language classes as well as adding persuasive images that get the viewer thinking. Lastly, there are so many languages out there and some words may sound similar to another language. One word may be something good to one country, but that same word may be a bad word to another country, so different people interact with certain words based on the language they speak. This ties back to my topic since knowing more language, we can learn and communicate with proper pronunciation that wouldn’t negatively affect another country which also ties back to how we interact with certain words.

In today’s world, communication happens almost instantaneously thanks to technology. As a result of this, understanding and interpretation is also quicker of societal culture that’s progressing on a daily basis. The world has speed up too fast coming into the 21st century, and with it, the creation and progression of new slang, pop culture, gender progression, social class changes, and economy fluctuations. In James Paul Gee’s book “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning & Literacy”, a learning principle that stood out to me when mentioned was Semiotic principles. This term translates to learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems such as an idea or object which communicates meaning — and what meaning it communicates.

This can include modern advertisements that most people are familiar with, but others are not if they come from different parts.

This advertisement for example, communicates the idea of the famous fast-food chain brand: McDonalds. While never clearly stating the full name of the food chains name, or even it’s full logo, only people who understand it’s pop culture significance will know it’s McDonalds just from looking at half of the logo’s famous Golden Arches.

This next one is an advertisement that makes sense to people who knew or now know the capability of a famous brand and the products it sells.

This advertisements communicates how the first generation Apple computers, were way too advanced for more than half of the people in America, because of the technological advancement Apple was bringing to people’s home. But people knew that already, and some decided to buy Apple computers to see if they could handle using an intimidating piece of hardware.

Aside from advertisements that use Semiotic principles, these principles are also used in everyday ideas and actions we do or come across everyday. As mentioned before, the inevitability is that these principles can change form over time as a result of the world progressing further as a society. The “Content” and “Context” of ideas, opinions, or actions human beings generate, will change and become blurry as time passes on. This will bring it’s own set of problems in learning environments, where younger generations will have to gain a more complex insight at an early age to properly understand intricate societal norms.