Author: TMD

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The Last Post

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.

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New Knowledge Economy

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.

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Intentional Fallacy

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.

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Social Media

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.)

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E-literature

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.

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Gaming

It has often been observed that film is the narrative genre of our generation. Ryan (2005) also points out that many game spaces have a narrative component, and ponders whether particular game forms–Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, for example–will eventually win over the sorts of audiences that are traditionally attracted to literary fiction and film. Ryan’s query has relevance for educators: Might game spaces with a narrative component provide a catalyst for critical thinking not unlike fiction or film? Might gaming, often deemed a deterrent to reading, in fact provide a segue to fiction, particularly for reluctant readers? How might games requiring participants to write themselves into the narrative extend literary engagement?

In the next two weeks we’ll take a look at the “poles” of digital narrative described by Ryan, beginning with gaming and moving to e-literature. You may post your thoughts on the ideas posed above, the presentations we attended on Monday, the readings we’ll be taking up in class next week, or any other topic related to gaming.

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Computer-Mediated Communication

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynn Truss writes the following about computer-mediated communication:

What to call the language generated by this new form of communication? Netspeak? Weblish? Whatever you call it, linguists are generally excited by it. Naomi Baron has called Netspeak an “emerging language centaur — part speech, part writing” and David Crystal says computer-mediated language is a genuine “third medium.” But I don’t know. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s typing”? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and doesn’t even qualify as typing either: it’s just sending. What did you do today? Sent a lot of stuff. (Truss, 2003, pp. 191-192)

Truss’s book is an interesting anomaly: a twenty-first century #1 bestseller on . . . punctuation? Reads the slipcover, “Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now ‘txt msgs,’ we have made proper punctuation an endangered species.” The examples in the book, however, suggest that the Internet may have little to do with poor usage proliferating on billboards, shop signs, and the like (although it may have a good deal to do with priming the public for a book on punctuation).

This week’s readings take up the question of how computer-based forms of writing may be modifying language, and whether or not literacy educators need to be concerned.

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Reading Spaces and Orientations

In the Digital Literacy chapter (Dobson and Willinsky, 2009), we provide a brief history of the introduction of hypermedia and its implications for literacy and learning (the section is subtitled “Hypermedia”). It may be useful to review this short section in addition to taking up the assigned readings for this week because the section raises a number of key issues that have been debated through the past twenty years, such as the following: 1) What are the implications of networked multimedia environments for learning? 2) How do readers, or “users,” experience such spaces? 3) How might different text structures modify reader experience (cf Bernstein, 1998)? 4) What are the merits or demerits of the “associationist” argument? The assigned readings offer perspectives on these issues and others. “As We May Think” is an historical article that is often cited as the first articulation of the hypertext concept; Gerjets & Kirschner (2009) and Salmerón et al (2005) take up the complex question of how reading processes are modified in hypermedia environments.

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Multiliteracies

The New London Group (1996) introduced the term “multiliteracies” with a view to accounting not only for the cultural and linguistic diversity of increasingly globalized societies and the plurality of texts that are exchanged in this context, but for the “burgeoning variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies” (p. 60). Distinguishing multiliteracies from what they term “mere literacy” (a focus on letters), the group calls for attendance to broad forms of representation, as well as to the value of these forms of representation in different cultural contexts. Our readings for this week are the New London Group’s original 1996 article in the Harvard Educational Review, as well as selections focusing on multimodality and media literacy by, respectively, Kress and Messaris. You may post your thoughts on these articles as a comment on this post or add a new post of your own.

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Text Processing

In discussions of the shift from pre-digital to digital modes of writing, it is not uncommon to hear academics, educators, and writers speak of a move from fixity to fluidity. Heim’s early comments on the technology are still relevant:

“The text processor is transforming the way philosophy, poetry, literature, social science, history, and the classics are done as much as computerized calculation has transformed the physical sciences based on mathematics. The word processor is the calculator of the humanist . . . . It would seem that not only the speed of intellectual work is being affected, but the quality of the work itself . . . Language can be edited, stored, manipulated, and rearranged in ways that make typewriters obsolete. Extensive sources of knowledge can be accessed electronically and incorporated into the planning and drafting of ideas. This new text management system amplifies the craft of writing in novel ways.” (Heim, 1987, pp. 1-2)

Bolter also refers to the fluidity of electronic text, noting that writing on computer encourages authors to think in terms of “verbal units or topics” (2001, p. 29). Ultimately, Heim (1987) inquires, “Does the conversion of twentieth-century culture to a new writing technology portend anything like the revolutionary changes brought about by the invention of the printing press and the widespread development of literacy” (p. 2)? Critical opinion on this issue at the time was, and in certain respects has remained, divided. Some feel the word, or idea, processor augments human thought processes by easing manipulation of language; others conjecture that it represents a threat to literacy and to the mastery of the “predigital word.” In this last regard, asks Heim, might the advent of digital writing erode literature and “the culture based on respectful care for the word” (p. 3)? There has been extensive debate on such issues through the last twenty years, including discussions among instructors of writing respecting whether graphical interfaces might distract student writers through an over-emphasis on the iconic (e.g., Halio, 1990; Slatin, 1990; Youra, 1990; Kaplan & Moulthrop, 1990).

This week we’ll take up the question of how digital technologies for writing might extend and modify our experiences and understandings of writing and textuality.

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