One internet meme which has attained such popularity as to crossover into TV entertainment, commercial advertising, movies, and even military analyses of international relations is the saga of Leeroy Jenkins, a World of Warcraft player who catapulted to fame on the basis of a allegedly drunken video game session.
Picture this: You’re in a dark, gloomy dungeon with a clan of feared warriors. Through the next set of doors lies a veritable hornet’s nest of monsters. You’re in the middle of a complex strategy meeting when one of your guys, who had apparently stepped away from his computer, comes back, puts on his headset, screams a battle cry and charges headlong into the dungeon.
Everyone is slaughtered.
It was a hysterically funny video which achieved internet meme status. Sometimes, memes become such because they’re funny, sometimes because they’re cute, sometimes because they’re tearjerking. It’s the connective power of the net, however, that links us all together, that allows things such as this to spread rapidly.
There’s power to memes. If not, they wouldn’t spread the way they do. They’re something that links us together. As such, they hold power for the classroom as well.
Postman brings up memes as a way of demonstrating literacy, and they are a delivery vehicle for making connections between wildly disparate elements, such as the “Bert is Evil” meme mentioned in the chapter we read. Using memes, one can teach and evaluate on the synthesis and analysis levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy and reach a higher level of learning, as I demonstrated in my video clip assignment.
Our students will repeatedly throughout life have to make connections between wildly varied topics and subjects. Outside of school, not everything is neatly slid into subjects. Memes provide a way to teach connection literacy. It’s something I never would have previously considered, but a fun way to teach this.
