Working from the starting objectives of the course I have linked some of the best examples of how we as a learning community have met these objectives and how the objectives have influenced my understanding and changed or confirmed my opinions.

Through the posts, the authors examined such varied topics as the invention of specific aspects of writing, determinist and digital divide concepts, current technological innovations and the impact of the visual.  As a group of authors, I feel that the commentaries and the projects reflect the movement as a group through a thoughtful consideration of how writing has and is modifying human societies.

On a personal level I feel that we are currently involved with that modification, and those that reviewed and discussed current debates appear to fell the same.

I have used key words from the below course objectives entered them in the community weblog search engine here is what it cam back with.

1. Students will consider how the invention of writing, the fundamental technology of all literate societies, has modified human ways of knowing.

commentary-1-an-observation-of-how-orality-and-literacy-have-changed-interactions-between-people/

Title is very self-explanatory.

verba-volant-scripta-manent/

The desire to make orally transmitted information permanent.

whats-wrong-with-ong/

This was harder to place but the nature of the Digital Divide and deterministic challenges I would place it in this category.

before-the-rapture-of-capture/

I found the discussion surrounding the search for information particularly interesting after having made the argument that we need to include critical thinking as part of literacy in my major project.

ibrary-2-0-searching-for-meaning/

technology-and-nature-fusion/

refuting-the-theory-of-the-great-divide/

writing-changed-the-act-of-teaching/

cautions-and-considerations-for-technological-change-a-commentary-on-neil-postman%e2%80%99s-the-judgment-of-thamus

technological-determinism-reductionism-and-the-great-divide-a-commentary-on-w-j-ong/

the-white-flag-of-surrender/

research-assignment-3tv-to-radio/

on-the-air-educational-radio-its-history-and-effect-on-literacy-and-educational-technology-by-michael-haworth-stephanie-hopkins/

how-did-we-get-to-number-1/

unintended-consequences/

yatate-the-writing-technology-of-the-samurai/

invention-of-the-telephone/

perceptions-pre-and-post-gutenberg/

telegraph-the-old-information-super-highway/

icon-to-symbol-its-implications-on-visual-literacy-and-education/

formal-response-2-the-evolution-of-culture-from-oral-to-visual-dominance/

language-as-cultural-identity/

rise-of-cinema/

an-overview-of-a-remediation-from-scroll-to-codex/

hypertext/

revolution-of-communication/

In revolution of communication Sara brings up a great point, one that I wish to expand upon. The rise of web 2.0 allows us to move back towards a characteristic of oral societies and that is knowing the person on a close level that is communicating.  With web 2.0 we are able to develop relationships and build communities with many people around the globe and thus interact and partcipate with the knower on an ongoing basis.  A possibility that was not available due to physical special and time constraint that held back other forms of writing.

web-2-0-2/

Deb Giesbrecht explored the concept of invention through the invention of the idea of Web 2.0 and discussed the recent applications that have been invented to facilitate the interactivity and interconnectivity and participation characterized by the concept of web. 2.0.

Here is the abstract of my final paper and a link to both a podcast and a print version.

Abstract:

The New London Group (1996) starts their discussion of multi-literacy by presenting the needs of future citizens in the work place of tomorrow. They argue that to engage and negotiate critically with a working environment, students need to have multi-literacy skills or the ability to communicate meaning through a variety of mediums. Students also need to participate in literacy activities as members of communities; they need to be able to discern meaning from multiple media sources and produce meaning using these “new media.” The change in participation and literacy is in part because hypertext, the Internet, and associated applications have changed the way knowledge is created and presented.

The author is no longer the authority. As we all become authors of a collective knowledge the authority of knowledge is no longer clear, print is no longer associated with truth as it may once have been. Knowledge is created changed and rework, represented mixed and fed in to what is becoming known as a participatory media culture. The following is both a historical and modern understanding of how western society has understood the transmission of knowledge and how the transformation of the transmission has changed what it means to be educated or knowledgeable.

Critical thinking

NoahBurdett_ETEC540_majorproject

I started my journey examining fonts used in graphic design.  My search then led me to ask how had text in public changed with the introduction of the printing press? This question led me to the broadside and public ephemera and the poster.  Eventually I found the lithographic process and the ability to combine print and images in an economical and rapid fashion for public display and the eventual development of the poster.  It has been a journey.

Enjoy

http://wiki.ubc.ca/Course:ETEC540/2009WT1/Assignments/ResearchProject/LithogrpahyAndPublicLiteracy

The Secret and Magic Power: Orality and Literacy

Power-Knowledge Literacy-Orality

Noah Burdett

U.B.C. Master of Educational Technology Candidate

Knowledge is a difficult concept to define.  One point that has been made clear by Michel Foucault and others is knowledge is fundamentally connected to power.  Many have heard the cliché that  “knowledge is power.”  If power relations are viewed in terms of access to knowledge than how is access changed in oral and literate cultures?  The questions itself is of a great divide nature and will help to demonstrate the fallibility of setting oral and literate cultures as binaries.

By comparing characteristics of literate and oral societies one is able to demonstrate that the control of information in any form of society is an important factor in the creation of inequality, regardless of how that information is transferred.

Culture and Language

Culture will be examined in a broad context and will provide a platform for comparison, but it should be understood that “culture” is not meant to illustrate that difference do not exist, not all oral or literate cultures share the exact same attributes.  However, members of a specific community do share culture. To suggest that culture is shared also suggests that it is learned from others and that it is transmitted. If culture is shared than it is also not a private entity thus one cannot have a private culture and must be a participant.

The method of transmission is the medium of language.  Language is thus the key to membership within a culture and to learn a language is to become a cultural member; to become a cultural member is to learn a language (Parkingson and Drislane 1996).  As language is key factor in the creation of culture, does ones participation in relation to other depend on how that language is transmitted either orally or through a written system?

Oral Cultures

In a primary oral culture knowledge is embed within the knower.  To find knowledge one has to seek out a member of the culture that knows.  Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy attributes the need to be intimately connected to the knower because of the property of sound, “sound exists only when it is going out of existence,” (Ong 2008, p. 70). The time space relationship of sound prior to recording technologies creates a circumstance where members of a primary oral culture relate “intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of sound as perceived by human beings” (Ong 2008, p.73).

When knowledge is embedded in the knower and the knower possess the power to chose and distribute the knowledge as he/she sees fit, a power structure is created. Thus in an oral society knowledge is power as it is embedded.  A member of an oral culture is positioned within their culture is determined by your situation within the collective and how others view your knowledge base.  The act of embedding knowledge within individuals creates a power structure of the knower and the seeker.  The structure is evident in Plato’s Phaedrus[i] where Socrates acts as the knower and Phaedrus as the seeker, the irony being that this is a written work. It can be said that knowledge as power works within oral societies to create inequality.

Literate Cultures

Written forms of language change the embodiment of knowledge, but not the power structure.  Writing provides a way to detach the knowledge from its author and audience, giving knowledge a form permanence, rigor, and objectivity. As Ong describes, with the written word “each reader enters into his or her own private reading world,” (Ong 1982, p. 73).  The act of separation would seem to create a power dynamic between those that can access the information in a written form and those that cannot.  Examining the history of education using Learned Latin and other chirographically controlled languages demonstrates how power and knowledge are still controlled within written systems even though the knowledge can be separated from the knower.

Learned Latin became the written language of scholastics for some 1400 years. Ong describes learned Latin as “a language written spoken only by males, learned outside the home in a tribal setting, (Ong 1982, p. 111).  Learned Latin became a chirographical language spoken and written by its users and separate from their mother tongue.  Learned Latin served as a way to isolate a community of male literate that wanted to share a common intellectual heritage. Creating a group that was in control of it of a form of language transmission further enhanced the isolating aspect of the written word and creates a scenario where knowledge and power create inequality.

Knowledge as power will be controlled and transferred within a culture regardless of how individuals are connected with that knowledge either through orality or literacy or both.  The similarity of the power-knowledge relationship exemplifies that within oral and literate society “differences of behaviour and modes of expression clearly exist, but psychological differences are often exaggerated,” (Chandler 1994).  The human ability to isolated and alienated is not text or orally based.  Demonstrating the connection between power-knowledge relationship in both oral and literate cultures also demonstrates that the binary opposition of the two misses the human component of both.

If the move from orality to literacy continued existing forms of power than using technology of writing as causal mover of change may also be overstated.   For example, Ong attributes the isolating aspect of Learned Latin with making possible “the exquisitely abstract world of medieval scholasticism and of the new mathematical modern science which followed on the scholastic experience, (Ong 1982, 112).  Attributing these scientific and mathematic developments to the language in which they are expressed does not determine that it was because of the language that they were made possible.  Ong’s claim reduces a complex time and process to single phenomenon and does not incorporate a perspective that views the larger cultural and social context.  The above has shown that literacy and orality are components of the human experience but should never be seen as single driving forces for our behaviours.

Resources

Excerpt from Plato’s Phaedrus (Retriever, 29 September 2009 from: https://www.vista.ubc.ca/webct/ContentPageServerServlet/Imported_Resources/etec540demo_det_course_20070517151759/module02/m2-phaedrus.html?pageID=1862431905141)

Chandler, D. (1994). Biases of the Ear and Eye: “Great Divide” Theories, Phonocentrism, Graphocentrism & Logocentrism [Online]. Retrieved, 29 September, 2009 from: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/litoral/litoral.html

Ong, Walter. (1982.) Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. London: Methuen.

Parkinson, G. & Drislane, R. (1996). Exploring Society: Pathways in sociology. Toronto: Harcourt Canada.

“OED was built up from the contributions of thousands of amateur philologists all over England and, later, the world.” (vista ETEC 540 sept09).  Well in the style of the OED I google images with the search criteria “technology.”  If google is understood as access to a collective intelligence of the web (to find out more) than the images it produces could be understood as a collective understanding of technology as an image.  After searching I took the top ten images and mashed them into one. Voila technology as understood by google….

Ten top images of technology using google images.