Category — Uncategorized

I posted comments about this topic on my own blog in relation to the Messaris reading. I have included a short video from youtube in connection to visual processing and gestalt, something I refer my students to. I have also started a resource list of art that addresses human relationships with technologies. I intend to add to it as ideas come and go throughout the course, but I want to open it up to everyone as your input will inform my understanding. Please reply with any thoughts on visual literacy/visual language at any time during the course – Thanks!
~ Heidi

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.

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.

At the outset of the “Digital Literacy” chapter, we note that some theorists, such as Donald Leu, favour “great transformation” theories, holding that digital technologies “rapidly and continuously redefine the nature of literacy.” An alternate perspective is to view digital technologies as extending the affordances of earlier technologies for writing. The readings for this week invite you to consider this second perspective. The chapter by Jay David Bolter, for example, positions the computer in a long line of technologies for writing from antiquity to the present. Bolter refers to the writings of Ong, as well as to Plato’s Phaedrus, the latter of which is linked from the course website. Bolter also mentions the problem with “technological determinism.” You’ll find a link to Daniel Chandler on that topic. Finally, the Pope and Golub (2000) article is offered merely as a representation of the kind of rhetoric around digital technologies that is popular in education. I invite you to critique these articles, pursue ideas, refer to related resources, and to offer anecdotes supporting or contesting various arguments, etc, in the comment thread of this post–or to make your own posting on a topic of your choice related to the readings.