This is fascinating: how via Facebook or Twitter (I read recently someone who wrote that he preferred not to Twitter (or is it "tweet"?) "because he had thoughts." I wish I could remember where that was... I also overheard a student telling her sociology professor who was questioning how she'd complete an assignment, asking what she'd stop doing online. She said she couldn't possibly stop Facebook, "because that's the only way she keeps in contact with people." I'm having a little brain flutter, suggesting that, maybe, people who, in the newspaper and media literacy articles posted a while back, "read" a news story by jumping from link to link, reading in "sound bytes," as it were, are in effect getting a kind of non-linear Gestalt rather than a linear reasoned argument. This kind of thinking would more closely approximate how thoughts, and events, occur in the "real world," in a kind of simultaneity rather than within the constraints of linearity, and
 the standard writing/reading repertoire that depends on it: coherence, cause and effect, transitions, and the like. How, then, do we translate E.M.Forster's dictum "How can I know what I think unitl I see what I say?" into digital or screen literacy? And what kinds of critical literacy skills would then come into play? I don't know. It would be nice to "outsource" these questions. :-) 
Bonnie Odiorne
Writing Center, Post University, Waterbury CT


--- On Wed, 11/26/08, Ira Socol <irasocol at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ira Socol <irasocol at gmail.com>
Subject: [Technology 1807] Re: People of the Screen
To: "The Technology and Literacy Discussion List" <technology at nifl.gov>
Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2008, 3:40 PM


I am often confused by those I call "print privilegers" and their view of how any kind of "reading" is learned. After all, "text" comes in many, many forms. The complete Homeric legends, the Norse Sagas, the Celtic Cycles, were all "written," absorbed, analyzed, understood, adapted, and "read" before alphabetical reading was ever involved in any of these. And people read landscapes and situations, cultures, and complex environments before reading. And they developed civilization, engineering, agriculture, religion, and, yes, literature, before reading as well.

But now we tend to think of "print literature" - "ink-on-paper reading"- as somehow both "natural" and "essential." I think it is neither.

Yes, the Gutenberg era created a form of literature and thus a certain form of literacy. It created "straight-line" literature and straight line thinking. It fit perfectly with Lutheran and Calvinist religion, in its directional and fixed nature. And we have taught it and taught it and taught it. - How many hours of instruction have your students received in analyzing and processing traditional print forms? Now how any hours have you spent teaching them to process and analyze post-Gutenberg digital text forms?

This isn't about consumerism. Ink-on-paper literature has always been a capitalist enterprise, based on expensive technologies, controlled by the few and the powerful. Books have been, in fact, powerful instruments of control - consider newspapers, textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and who decides what gets on the library shelves or the shelves at Barnes and Noble.

And it isn't about knowledge or cultural transmission either (though it surely is about social reproduction). In the print era many authors tried to fight print's inherent limitations. Think Dos Passos, or Ferlinghetti. Think of the New York Modernists merging text with painting, or the rise of comic books and graphic novels. It is really a question of helping students to learn how to look at a chaotic world and make sense of it.

The New York Times, a while back in an article on Twitter - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html - in which he described a process: 

"Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends' updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like "I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus"; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.
"But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends' lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they'd scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.
"This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of E.S.P.," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.'"It's like I can distantly read everyone's mind," Haley went on to say. "I love that. I feel like I'm getting to something raw about my friends. It's like I've got this heads-up display for them." It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley's group decides to go out to a bar or see a band
 and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they've never actually been apart. They don't need to ask, "So, what have you been up to?" because they already know. Instead, they'll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle."

This is a powerful communication form, and a powerful way to build knowledge. It is not shallow in the least, or, I suppose, it is only shallow to those who have not yet learned to look beneath the surface. But that's true of words on a page too, isn't it?

In the end we either engage with and actively teach literacy in this post-Gutenberg age, or we become irrelevant - or maybe we become Latin teachers in the 1950s - an interesting artifact prized by historians.

I have come to believe that this "reading of screens" is far more human than the Gutenberg-era technologies. In many ways we have (as Bonnie suggested) "come full circle." Digital text, multi-modal texts, screen text, all brings us back to an era when we had to build theory out of multiple bits of information swirling about us in many forms. That seems to me much more difficult than attending to a single author or lecturer for a set amount of time, but it also opens new world's of intellectual possibility.

Anyway, we fool ourselves when we speak of "digital natives." There is no such thing. The skills needed for post-Gutenberg literacy must be learned. The developing norms must be challenged. Critical literacy - in any literacy - needs to be brought to students.

I think we have a lot to do.

And with that rant - a Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Ira David Socol
Special Education Technology Researcher
Michigan State University
College of Education
irasocol -at- gmail -dot- com
socolira -at- msu -dot- edu
http://speedchange.blogspot.com/
http://riverfoylepress.com/



On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 7:56 PM, Bonnie Odiorne <bonniesophia at sbcglobal.net> wrote:






David, and colleagues,
Thank you for the timing of this article. I began my English composition class with some articles that appeared here, I believe, about the impact of technology on reading, and most particularly on newspapers. My students didn't seem terribly bothered about this, or about the fact that they may be reading in "sound bytes" (to mix a metaphor.) Coming now to the end of the course, I'm convinced more than ever that this is true for the majority of the students, who seem unable (or unwilling?) to sustain reading enough to trace an argument, or to perform analogous operations in writing. Of course, it sounds as if your article implies that the manipulations of a fluent text reader should be available to the fluent screen reader as well. But, as we approach Black Friday, I wonder if we've become consumers of the text as much as of the screen without doing more than scratching the surface. I gave the class an exercise of describing in detail an object in their
 possession. Most of them waxed eloquent about their cell phones: how "cool" they were, extolling their features to the extent that these descriptions became little more than product specs for the latest gadgetry. Far be it for me to decry the convenience of the cell phone; I'm the owner of a Smartphone, which I use to manipulate the texts of my daily life: schedules, memoes, and, if I could get Documents to Go to work, of actual texts and spreadsheets as well. Are we suggesting that visual literacy should proceed to critical literacy, analyzing these images, or learning to manipulate the technology to create yet more images? I can't wait to read the article to find out. I intend to use this text to end the class. Thanks for helping me come full circle.
P.S. Some of these students are superb writers, or would be if they could shed their consumerism of both language and "stuff." Not the "stuff" of adult literacy, but many of our students are "underperforming" (how I hate that word) which means we as teachers need to meet them where they are.
Gratefully yours,
Bonnie Odiorne
Post University Writing Center

--- On Tue, 11/25/08, David Rosen <DJRosen at theworld.com> wrote:

From: David Rosen <DJRosen at theworld.com>
Subject: [Technology 1802] People of the Screen
To: "The Technology and Literacy Discussion List" <technology at nifl.gov>
Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 8:13 AM


Colleagues,

Can you read fluently? Of course, you say. But maybe not. Although I  
meant, can you read text, I also meant, can you read screens? Very  
few of us can. Some of our younger students are more screen literate  
than we are. Is screen literacy important? If getting to meaning, and  
to the truth, is important, screen literacy is as important -- some  
would argue more important -- than reading. However, "If text  
literacy meant being able to parse and manipulate texts, then the new  
screen fluency means being able to parse and manipulate moving images  
with the same ease. But so far, these 'reader' tools of visuality  
have not made their way to the masses."

I hope I have tantalized you to read this short and fascinating  
article on screen literacy by New York Times writer Kevin Kelley:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23wwln-future-t.html?_r=1

I would also like to invite you, when you read -- or see -- something  
that we in technology and literacy might be interested in, to post  
the URL to this discussion list. If we are a community of practice on  
this discussion list,  then let's help each other to learn new  
things, think in new ways.

Your thoughts on the article?

David J. Rosen
DJRosen at theworld.com




----------------------------------------------------
National Institute for Literacy
Technology and Literacy mailing list
Technology at nifl.gov
To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to
http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/technology
Email delivered to bonniesophia at sbcglobal.net

----------------------------------------------------
National Institute for Literacy
Technology and Literacy mailing list
Technology at nifl.gov
To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/technology
Email delivered to irasocol at gmail.com

----------------------------------------------------
National Institute for Literacy
Technology and Literacy mailing list
Technology at nifl.gov
To unsubscribe or change your subscription settings, please go to
http://www.nifl.gov/mailman/listinfo/technology
Email delivered to bonniesophia at sbcglobal.net
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/technology/attachments/20081201/de84be04/attachment.html