Posts from — November 2009

At the beginning of this course we contemplated the following question: What does it mean to be “literate” in a digital age? We have since had opportunity to examine this question from a number of different angles, coming, in the end, to the notion of “information literacy,” which signals a portion of what may be different about literacy in digital times: that readers have increasing opportunities to “find their own way across a plethora of information resources and to be able to do so outside of the traditionally supportive bounds of libraries, publishers, and educational institutions” (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009). Beyond this, to allude again to the initial reading for the course, social media constitutes “a fairly substantial answer to the question of how digital literacy differs from and extends the work of print literacy. It speaks to how people’s literacy combines the taking in and giving back of words” (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009).

Shapiro and Hughes (1996) provide us with a sketch of an “information literacy” curriculum that seems to serve well as a possible “digital literacy” curriculum, entailing tool, resource, social-structural, research, publishing, emerging technology, and critical literacies. As we conclude this course, I invite your final reflections respecting the nature and implications of “digital literacy,” and respecting how educators might facilitate this form of literacy in both local and global contexts.

Thanks, all, for your provocative and thoughtful contributions to class discussion here and in the seminar room. I’ve enjoyed the term very much.

In August 2005, Canada’s primary granting council for the social sciences and humanities, SSHRC, announced its intent to transform itself from a “granting council” to a “knowledge council” with a view to engaging Canadians “in building knowledge through research and in using that knowledge to create a just, free, prosperous and culturally vibrant world” (SSHRC, 2005, p. 9). Fundamental to the council’s shift in perspective is the understanding that developments in information and communications technologies have lead to a new knowledge economy in which it is important that research results are disseminated beyond the academy to the public at large: “we need to do a much better job of getting humanities and social sciences knowledge out into the world where it can make a difference, where it can inspire ideas and debate, where it can galvanize individuals, communities, businesses and governments into action” (SSHRC, 2005, p. 23). This statement echoes the position of Willinsky, who notes that electronic “publishing systems that provide greater public access are likely to help us to better understand and extend Dewey’s democratic theory of education, while enhancing the prospects of creating a more deliberative democratic state; and that they are in a good position to expand education’s role within democracy, as well as increase the impact that education research has on practice, and provide an alternative source of information to the media’s coverage of such issues as education” (Willinsky, 2002, p. 6).

While the democratizing effect of new publication technologies is clearly beneficial, many have expressed concerns about “information overload.” Ted Koppel’s discussion of the challenges facing archivists offered in the context of the 1990 television documentary, Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress, constitutes an older (and gendered) iteration of this issue.

In light of the above and the week’s readings, what do you perceive to be the primary challenges facing present-day learners and educators? More fundamentally, what does it mean to be an “educated” participant in the new knowledge economy? There are two posts for this week you may wish to consider: this one and one on intentional fallacy below.

In discussing changing roles of authors and readers on the “read-write web,” I’ve raised the notion of intentional fallacy. Before I post something on next week’s readings, I think it may be useful to point to some readings on this topic. The phrase is commonly attributed to Wimsatt and Beardsly, who wrote an essay on the subject about the same year Vannevar Bush was musing about the “memex.” Their article is available via UBC VPN on JSTOR here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676

Another key article related to this topic, of course, is “Death of the Author” (Barthes, 1968). Here’s an excerpt (one can easily find the whole thing through a Google Scholar search):

“. . . a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. . . . Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (Barthes, 1968).

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” 1968. Trans. Richard Howard. The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill, 1986. 49-55.

In asking students to determine authorial intention, it might be argued that instructors attempt to assume the authorial mantle of power. Meantime, the “birth of the reader,” as Barthes terms it, has given rise to a new school of criticism: “reception” or “reader response” theory (e.g., Hans Robert Jauss), and the question that has been raised by some English educators in light of this trend is “does the empowerment of the reader result in the subversion of serious literary criticism and lay the ground for an ‘anything goes’ style of response?” If so, where does that leave the teacher of literature, who is no longer positioned as the keeper of knowledge about literary texts and instead seems poised to be the mediator of response?

In fact, the debate isn’t very far removed from questions arising in education circles in relation to how social media and folksonomic trends in knowledge creation and distribution are displacing traditional didactic models of teaching.

Alexander outlines a range of applications associated with Web 2.0 collectively known as “social media” and discusses the paradigm shift that would appear to have accompanied their emergence. Lankshear and Knobel examine this same issue from an educational perspective. Their “Mindsets” table points to, among other things, shifts in thinking around authorship and ownership of information. Although we have remarked in class about the need to be wary of great-divide theories, the table nevertheless may serve as a useful catalyst for this week’s discussion. Other of our readings remark upon the sorts of social interaction and exchange promoted by emergent “networked publics” in consideration of particular populations (e.g., youth).

I welcome your thoughts on issues emerging from these readings. In consideration of the fact that our topic is social media, you may also wish to further the wiki narrative, or to harness other forms of social media (e.g., Twitter or YouTube) to make contributions to the discussion. (Considering the wiki narrative, which we’ll discuss first thing next week, do take a look at Jeff’s post below, along with the comments in that thread, if you haven’t already done so.)

Hi everyone,

Thank you again for a provocative and engaging class. I enjoyed the presentations and the various ways in which we ended up touching upon issues that we’ve been mulling over across much of the course as well as some of the new issues that arose specifically out of the topic of e-literature, both from the reading and the presentation.

I would have liked, however, to have had a bit more of a chance to delve into what is our first collaborative work as a class (well, besides the sequential narrative comments we’ve been posting to this weblog)! We were able to talk a little bit about our experiences of engaging with the seed paragraphs that Teresa set for us from the Stoss story. I made a couple of points about the particular affordances of the wiki space for collaborative writing (something that perhaps Heidi and I will revisit when we talk about social media), but I’d be interested in picking up on a point that Teresa made concerning the experience of students schooled in traditional print literacy (sound like anyone you know), and the ways in which their critique/resistance with e-literature changed somewhat when they shifted from being readers of hypertexts to authors of a hypertextual story.

For those of you who engaged with the wiki story, what did you make of the experience? How did you find your way across the gap from consumer to producer in the context of this particular text? I was talking to Eva at the end of class and I mentioned that I fell into my own approach by the serendipity of searching for one of the words in the text, the word “pronoiac.” Well, in doing a quick Google search of the word, I stumbled upon an allusion to a story that led me into wikipedia, which then led me to the title of the story from which Teresa extracted the passage, and from that point, I decided to adopt a strategy of fleshing out some contextual clues about the original text without (I hoped at the start) giving away the text itself. I did, finally add in the link to Stross’s text, but not until Sunday evening, so as to prevent that link from having significant influence on how we might develop our collaborative story. To link to some of the points raised tonight, I played around with character embellishments rather than bothering much with plot. Others, worked to advance the plot.

How did you engage with the text (if you did)? Once you did engage, what was it like to have to then accommodate the work added by others? For those of you who did not add to the text (and it is certainly not too late to do so…), what stopped you? I know a couple of people had some technical difficulties, and that is really something to think about with such spaces. And what might we make of such spaces and approaches to collaborative authorship in a wiki with the students that we teach? Was any of this experience different than how you typically write when you are using other spaces/context/technologies?

Curiously yours,

Jeff

This week’s readings have to do with electronic literature, which is defined by the Electronic Literature Organization as “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” (ELO, 2006, n.p.). Examples of e-literature are available here.

Hayles (2007) provides an overview of the development of e-literature through the past twenty years and attempts to identify some of the genre’s inherent features. Douglas (1992, 1994) speaks to the peculiarities of reading e-literature, considering in particular what Hayles refers to as “first-generation” examples of the genre such as hypertext fiction. She also alludes to some of the print harbingers of e-literature, such as the short fiction of Borges. Douglas’s essays are updated and published in a collection of articles on hypermedia and literature: The End of Books—Or Books Without End? (Douglas, 2000). My own article (Dobson, 2006) considers contemporary fiction (e.g., Munro) that shares narrative features in common with e-literature, and ponders how we might approach teaching such narrative through engaging students in social media writing processes.

I invite your thoughts on topics raised in this week’s readings. Alternately, you may wish to try your hand (along with your classmates) at writing a collaborative hypertext fiction in the wiki rather than making a formal response on the blog. I’ve started a wiki page for this purpose here. Feel free to modify or extend this narrative fragment in any way you see fit.