From Canon to Vernacular
From digmovements
[edit] About Digital Literacy and Higher Education
A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is “the set of abilities and skills where aural,visual,and digital literacy overlap. These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds,to recognize and use that power,to manipulate and transform digital media,to distribute them pervasively,and to easily adapt them to new forms”. We would modify this definition in two ways. First,textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture,they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies,not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second,new media literacies should be considered a social skill.
from Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture, 2008.
[edit] Legacy Education
Legacy education is a long established practice of teaching with curricula from the past. It's something that nationalists, religious schools, different types of conservaties will do. In 2005, Marc Prensky applied the term to the practices of contemporary, otherwise progressive educators who continue to teach with little or no attention to the impact of digital media on their students.
Like rock and roll was fifty years ago, the world wide web is here to stay. We refuse to adapt and transform our teaching at our own peril - and at the disservice of our students. It's not even that we're clinging to the swing music of the 40s. It's more like we're still in waltz and march territory; ragtime if we can be generous to ourselves.
[edit] The Lloyd Wilson Effect
A couple of years ago, Lloyd was a student in Still Looking, one of the first programs I've taught that engage what was then called media studies with the long history of literate knowledge in the West. We were discussing whether people my age should try to learn to use computers seamlessly, or transparently, like people his ago do; or whether people my age were just too old.
After arguing this question in seminar for an hour or so, Lloyd remarked, "It doesn't matter. In another 50 years, all the people who learned to read before computers will be dead. And only we will be left." That may not be the exact quote, but it captures the gist.
And it's the truth. Learning, literacy, the way literate people think - they're changing right before our eyes, whether we close our eyes to it or not.
[edit] Digital Natives
The term digital native was coined in the K12 literature about ten years ago, in reference to children who have acquired their reading skills primarily on the monitor. The K12 system has not been able to ignore the transformation in literacy that is underway around us in education. Most of their students are learning to read and write in environments dominated by digital media.
We, on the other hand, have been skating pretty well, one might even say surfing, on the new wave. But, right now, we in higher education are engaging the last of the students who learned to read before 1995, the year that Windows and Netscape arrived together to deliver the world wide web to popular use.
Issues of digital divide exist; not everyone has access to a computer. Not every child is learning to read this way; not every child is learning to read. These same caveats and qualifications have been true about the book, too, but it never stopped us from generalizing about print literacy and its effects on education.
Walter Ong taught us that the way people think changes when they learn to read, a culture changes when it goes from orality to print literacy. Marshall McLuhan built on his work and laid the ground for our currently dawning understanding of how digital literacy is changing people and the way they think once again.
[edit] New Things Under the Sun
Online Reputation - the not so ephemeral truth about the web as an ephemeral medium.
Avatar Identity - identity politics was just the beginning.
Cyberbullying - and we thought You Porn was awful enough.
Cybergossip - the "poisonous cocktail" of web anonymity and adolescent spite.
Detagging - trying to erase the past.
Wayback Machine - Sherman and Mr. Wizard had no idea.
[edit] The Skills That Remain
The compound, linear narratives yielded by the print form will never go out of style entirely. After all, even the pencil has been in production and use in its present form since 1795. People will still need to organize information in fixed, linear structures. We'll still need to contrive complex analytical rationales for these structures. And, we'll still learn a lot from doing so. In politics today, books still sell like there's no tomorrow.
