Literacy in the networked society

September 14th, 2009

As we migrate from the industrial world to the nectworked society – many argue we need a new literacy to help us on our way.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pldms/2553479524/

Euan posted this on his blog last week via Clive Thompson via Earl Mardle

I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Hundret Wasser: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rascouet/3598328087/

Henry Jenkins the De Florez professor of the Comparative Studies Media Program at MIT produced a report on media
literacy for the MacArthur Foundation in 2006, Howard Rheingold described Jenkins thinking as an entire approach to culture. A culture that Jenkins describes as a Participatory Culture.

Howard Rheingold wrote

The vast repository of information available online has changed forever our certainty about authority.
As such, the locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts has shifted from the publisher to the reader.
So, the ability to be critical, and to ask the right questions is a key skill in terms of media literacy

Jenkins himself writes, ‘we have also identified a set of core social skills and cultural competencies that young people should acquire if they are to be full, active, creative, and ethical participants in this emerging participatory culture.’ Our new networked and read-write participatory society offers a multiverse of ways to interact, however, we need new literacies premised upon the principal of Engagement.

* Play – the capacity to experiment with your surroundings as a form of problem-solving

* Performance – the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery

* Simulation – the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real world processes

* Appropriation – the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

* Multitasking – the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.

* Distributed cognition – the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities

* Collective intelligence – the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal

* Judgment – the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources

* Transmedia navigation – the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities

* Networking -the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information

* Negotiation – the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

Stephen Heppell considers the 21st century to herald the ‘learning age’. In the 20th century, he argues, we built big things (railways, universities) but the focus for the 21st century is ‘helping people to help each other’, Learning should be a part of all our lives an open, living breathing system where the intelligence and knowledge is shared and distributed – our institutions should become networks that
overlap and connect.

The danger is that our traditional schools and colleges will lag behind, designed by people from a world that used to be, for a world that will be no more, rather like our armies, which were always well trained for the last war. If we fail, this time, to leap beyond our own experience, we will fail our youth. It is indeed a time for bold imaginings, for reinventing what we understand by education. It is also time to realize that there can be schools in unlikely places, places which we never thought of schools before. Only in that way will young people acquire the self-confidence that is the prerequisite of self-respect and responsibility.

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