Passionate Affinity Groups
James Paul Gee, Elisabeth Hayes · Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2010
T oday, success requires passion plus persistence, what we have called grit (Duckworth et al., 2007). We argued in the last chapter that passion often starts small. There is something a person wants badly to do. As we have seen this may be as small as wanting to make a purple potty for a granddaughter or make homes for “little people” on one’s monitor screen. The person then finds tools that will let them do what they want to do. Today, these tools are often found within a community of people on the Internet. The person initially goes to the community to get the tools as well as help for using them but then becomes hooked on the community itself and its larger passion; in the case of the women we discussed in the last chapter, this passion is building and designing for The Sims . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.