I remember a conversation I had with a veteran colleague when I was a new elementary public-school teacher in 1998. Harry Potter and the Sorcery’s Stone was about to revitalize children’s literature and we were discussing using E-Readers at school and home. My colleague’s romantic need to hold the tome while engaging the text is support for E. Annie Proulx, and her distain for reading from a “twitchy little screen” (Bolter, 2001, p. 5). While my skepticism of this e-reader technology ever experiencing wide-spread use would prove far from prophetic, for twenty years later and both Harry Potter and E-Readers have a global reach. Forbes estimates that 20 million Kindle readers were sold by Amazon in 2013 (Forbes, 2014). Fortune claims that 400 million copies of the Potter books have been sold since 1997 (Fortune, 2017). Just imagine how the combination of any of J.K Rowling’s novels, and an electronic reader, could be a formidable tool for the reduction of literacy in our world!
Literacy rates, and student achievement in literacy, are used as indicators of successful teaching and pedagogy. Teachers are ever alert for tools and strategies to help their students find success resolving whatever problem is driving their education. Education technology provides tools that help people learn. For myself, I can say that I signed out the text for this course online and used up to three different electronic reader to study the text. The e-reader has a ‘text to speech’ feature that toggles a digital voice to articulate the text. These tools are very helpful in supporting my making meaning of texts and there are other tools available to augment human capacity. The C-Pen (Readerpen, n.d.) reader is an optical code recognition tool that articulates the text the stylus covers. This learning aid has been demonstratively useful for students learning a second language and students with dyslexia, for example. These are excellent tools to support literacy education but what kind of tools will be needed to support future students who struggle to interpret communicative data in a text-image media saturated world? In Writing Space; Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print, Jay Bolter describes the early days of the internet and hyper-text. Combining graphic interface with text might seem obvious to modern ‘net’ users but I remember when it was innovative; as well as the bulletin boards and newsgroups of a simpler internet. What was once electronic text is now electronic media, and the pace of electronic innovation advances. I believe that current (and future) students have (and will) evolve different semiotic systems of interpreting visual information as a result of electronic hyper-text and graphics.
Reading Orality and Literacy reminds me of the importance the invention of writing has had on the advancement of humanity. Writing allows us to pre-record imaginative and thoughtful utterances in the minds of readers. Over time writing has helped us achieve some of our “fuller potentials” (Ong, 2002, p. 14). Over time more and more people have become literate in the art of this autonomous discourse. Bolton identifies modern society as “post-literate” as a result of what he terms, “an enormous experiment in mass literacy in the 19th and 20th centuries” (Bolter, 2001, p. 54). Canadian teachers can be proud to live in a society where literacy rates are extremely high and 9 of 10 people aged 25 to 64 had completed at least high school (Statistics Canada, 2017). Canadian teachers continue to use education technology to help students learn to read and write even while the nature of reading and writing is changing.
References
Bolter, J. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah: Routledge.
Forbes. (2014, 4 2). Estimating Kindle E-Book Sales for Amazon. Retrieved from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/04/02/estimating-kindle-e-book-sales-for-amazon/#2a15ab8123c6
Fortune. (2017, 6 26). Harry Potter at 20: Billions in Box Office Revenue, Millions of Books Sold. Retrieved from Fortune: http://fortune.com/2017/06/26/harry-potter-20th-anniversary/
Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.
Readerpen. (n.d.). Readerpen.com. Retrieved from Readerpen Read Smarter: http://www.readerpen.com/
Statistics Canada. (2017, 12 15). Education indicators in Canada: An International perspective, 2014. Retrieved from The Daily: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/141215/dq141215b-eng.htm
mackenzie moyer
July 28, 2018 — 6:56 am
Hi Ken,
It really is amazing how technology can bring texts more easily into the lives of people who otherwise may find it too challenging to read (e.g., people with dyslexia), to “augment human capacity” as you and Bush (1945) both put it. You actually reminded me of something pointed out by some of our classmates and our readings: reading glasses helped spread literacy. Even with such high rates of literacy, is there a way we can push literacy higher? There are those who argue that we need to spread the definition into multimedia with “multi-literacy,” and that these new literacies should be focused (as with your title) on creating multimedia texts to understand them, and especially with those groups ignored or marginalized by wider processes. (New London Group, 1996)
With your post you’ve tapped into deeper technological trends too: how can we use technology to fix text into the lives of human beings, human beings who lead very different lives. And, as you reminisce, I remember back when the internet was hyper-text rather than hyper-media, and social-media. Beyond an isolated activity (e.g., sitting down to read, to consume something someone somewhere and someone else wrote), we can now asynchronously communicate two-ways.
This goes beyond posts and comments (as is being done here), or Facebook, Twitter and the like. We’re at the cusp of an age when augmented reality (AR) and chatbots, both products of human efforts, make text which itself communicates two-ways with the reader. So, while a chatbot may have been programmed by a human being, the way it interacts with a user depends on interaction; the text emerges from conversation, as with orality. Not only this, but the author of chatbots in particular must be cognizant of the questions that will be posed by “readers” / “users.” In other words, authors in this medium must be able to pre-empt conversations.
In terms of AR, media responds to the user’s environment. Users interact with this augmented environment. The result is a text which responds to both user and environment; text is not only fixed (very literally) into the lives of people, but in a way that is increasingly a conversation and less a dictation.
Medieval professors and Socrates would be appalled! Actually, maybe Socrates would be more surprised that we’re able to make texts that talk back to us, in a fashion.
To be sure, we’re still ironing out the details of these technologies (e.g., with less-than-perfect AR and chatbot tech) but more specifically how these technologies fare in real life. Linking back to e-book readers: while I was initially very excited to work my first e-Book reader into my life (it would reduce the pains of traveling with multiple physical books), I rolled over it in my sleep and broke it. This temporarily ended my e-Book reading…and by temporarily, I mean for a decade. A new decade, a new need: my library is spilling forth upon our apartment as I type, and I need something more portable than this laptop, yet more readable than my cell, to read these PDFs.
Perhaps it’s time for me to join the 21st century!
Thanks for the post Ken,
Mackenzie
References:
Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. Retrieved, August 15, 2009, from http://newlearningonline.com/_uploads/multiliteracies_her_vol_66_1996.pdf (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
agined how lighter my physical load would be
Ken
August 16, 2018 — 11:35 am
Hi Mackenzie, thank you for your reply.
I hope we are in the early days of reimagining the definition of literacy, or at least switching the primary definition (the ability to read and write) with the secondary definition (competency with a skill or ability). Even students who struggle to read have developed strategies to help them navigate printed text. Writers too, have strategies to support their process. All that notwithstanding, new technologies will be able mediate some of the challenges of text literacy.
I am impressed with the affordances of AR and, while never truly comfortable with Voice Activated Personal Assistants, young people are much more adept at employing these technologies.
I am only recently using an e-reader and that bias is likely more to do with my age than anything else (have you seen how familiar young people are, comfortable even, with state spyware in all our homes) so young people continue to show how non-threatened they are by innovations in technology. I hope you get an e-reader, and one with the read aloud option, so good for learning in the 21st century.
Respect,
Ken