“I placed my feet carefully, one foot in front of the other, on the slippery path. Then I ran out of rocks. I couldn’t see one more step. How do you take another step when you can’t see the path in front of you? I thought I would begin my post with a quote from the book Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool.
This is an amazing book about a journey of self discovery. This quote keeps playing over in my mind as I come to class each day wondering where I’m going with my learning. Today I ran out of rocks and felt that I couldn’t see or reach out to take another step. It was today that I realized what I need from this course. Literacy.
“One must consider the differences in literacy between text and technology. Where textual literacy only has to be acquired once because letters, codes and meanings stay the same, generally speaking, technology such as the computer and its software typically uses a hybrid set of codes involving pictorial icons and invented words. These images and created words are constantly evolving and becoming increasingly less transparent in meaning as time goes by.” 1
I am on the path of learning this new language so that I can be ready to teach in this new era of education which is asking us to teach a broadened definition of literacy which includes social, information, media, digital. I’m not sure if I’m making sense to anyone else, but I understand my own need to change my path of learning and step out into a path that I can’t quite see yet but will help me to feel like I can communicate with my neighbors, collegues, student family and the world in this 21st Century.
1 University of Chicago: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/literacy.htm
“The consequences of rapidly changing definitions of literacy are abundant. McLuhan claims “mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.”10 We are in a world where a person who cannot master technology is considered disabled and thus prevented from participating in the world fully. “ 1
Thanks for connecting your learning to the book you are reading, the quote gave good visual for what this week has been like in our new class!
I wonder what Marshall McLuhan (if he were alive today) would offer on our class blog? There has certainly been a lot of food for thought on the topic of communication, information, and technology this past week!
In his book, Understanding Media, McLuhan says that ‘a medium is any extension of ourselves’. Similarly to the medium being used to deliver ‘the message’, I see technology as a means to delivering the ‘information’. The essential element to all the various forms of literacy is the human connection.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.
Beautiful quotes! I had a friend once who talked about the experience of walking through a field of waist-high wheat. She couldn’t see where she was putting her feet, but when she looked behind, she could see where she had been. Your analysis of the new literacy demands we are facing as a society is spot on. Since the Guttenberg press we have had a stable literacy condition, in terms of learning to read and write. Now, with the advent of information and communication technologies and multiple modes of communication and multiple means of interactivity, we are being called to new levels of sophistication in our appreciation of the flows of information and what it means to have unprecedented access to information. How do we make sense of it?
Thank you for those beautiful quotes. I, too, feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information we are getting everyday from our course. Through reading your blog post, I really get the sense of “learning and unlearning” we have talked about consistently in class. I think you make an excellent point about textual literacy being more consistent. Every time we have are learning new digital resources in class, I feel like to “reset” my learning curve. As we are teaching our students to learn a new set of ways of thinking, we as teachers, have to also rethink a lot of our teaching philosophies. I admire your bravery to continue to trek on into unknown territory. I think it is already a bold step since I know many teachers who are complacent and continue to teach the program they have taught for many years.
Janet, I love the quote you started this post with, it is a great metaphor for this learning journey we are on. In return, I’d like to offer you some advice I often find helpful when things feel overwhelming: in the words of Dory from “Finding Nemo”, “Just keep swimming! Just keep swimming! Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming!” You may not know where you’re going, but the important thing is to be persistant.
You seem to have a clear vision of what needs to be done to move our education system forward. I very much agree with the 5 points you stated in your previous post. We hear a lot about funding and class size, but I think the teacher-librarian piece is a vital one we don’t talk about enough. We need dedicated teacher-librarians to inspire teachers and guide student learning.
I wonder if textual literacy remains constant, or if it just changes so much slower than technology that we don’t notice it as much. If you think about it, magazines look different now than they did 50 years ago. Graphic novels are a fairly new genre, but they are becoming very popular. Even vocabulary changes, words fall out of favour as new ones are created. I agree that the pace of technological change seems mind-boggling at times, but I have faith that we can adapt!