Here is my final assignment, Virtual World for Cultural Exchange.
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Category Archives: Multimodality
Last week was the last class reflection that I needed to write, but how could I stop now with such an interesting confluence of multimodal theorists?
2006 © Touchstone and Warner Bros.
“Are you watching closely?” is the haunting question that opens up Christopher Nolan’s excellent 2006 movie, The Prestige, in which two rival magicians try to outwit each other using a common tool of the trade: distraction. While there is much in the film’s story that is worthy of discussion, especially in connection to the visual literacy theories written about by Gunther Kress, Theo van Leeuwen, Gillian Rose and Mary Hamilton, it is one of the behind-the-scenes details that I will connect with most in this post. The film is set at the end of the 19th century, mostly in London, England. One of the details the production designer wanted to get right was the number of posters and their typography that filled the city’s streets at that period. Much of this relates to the rise of “ocularcentrism” in European countries. The on-set image below shows the posting board that were frequently seen on busy London streets, full of flyers of an increasingly visual nature. Production designer Nathan Crowley describes the look of London he recreates (on a Los Angeles backlot) as “the Victorian version of Tokyo” with advertisements everywhere (Conjuring the Past, DVD Bonus Feature). Crowley is just one of the many crew members involved, as his departmental positions suggests, with the production of the movie. As director and co-producer, Christopher Nolan deserves full recognition as the auteur of everything that appears on screen, while his wife and frequent collaborator Emma Thomas takes care of everything surrounding the movie (from securing the screenplay rights to getting it onto screens around the world) as another of the co-producers. Christopher’s brother, Jonathan, incidentally co-wrote the screen adaptation of Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel. So many layers of production to consider when discussing who really made the movie.
Christopher Nolan directs Hugh Jackman
in The Prestige (2006) © Touchstone and Warner Bros.
According to Rose, a film’s production crew is just one part of the equation in making meaning from a movie, and as sprawling and time-consuming as it is to produce a feature film, the audience should take credit for creating the film as well. The Nolan brothers and Thomas were in between highly acclaimed Batman movie, and were able to secure the talents of that series regulars like Christian Bale and Michael Caine to take on roles in The Prestige, and it may have been a surprise for audiences of the art house (ie. middle to low budget) team that produced Following (1998), Memento (2000) and Insomnia (2002) before capturing more mainstream audiences with Batman Begins (2005). For dedicated followers of this team’s work, The Prestige was something of a surprise, soon to be overshadowed by the genre-defining The Dark Knight (2008) comic book adaptation. Asides from critical praise and awards nominated, and in a few cases won, the fans of Nolan-Thomas-Nolan films are growing in number and interconnectedness. The audience created the need for each one of their films, and as their style and production values began to increase with each success, the larger the audience for their films become. One of the demands of the audience is to be surprised by technical innovation, yet too much CGI (computer-generated images) spoils the lucky streak they appear to have – much like how way too many lightsaber battles in the most recent Star Wars movies has deadened audience response as compared to the classic Obi Wan vs. Darth Vader multimodal (sound and visual) treasurebox. In The Prestige, the rival magician both learn to make their illusions look good, but not too good. As the last lines of movie suggest, the best part of the illusion, and I would add visual literacy in general, is offering the audience just a bit more than is the image presents, they want to find what they think is the real truth behind the artifice. It is best summed up by the last lines of this wonderful movie:
Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called the pledge, the magician shows you something ordinary. The second act is called the turn, the magician takes the ordinary something and makes it into something extraordinary. But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it BACK. Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.
Reference
Nolan, C. (dir), (2006). The prestige [film and DVD commentary]. Los Angeles: Touchstone and Warner Brothers.
Thanks to Dr Gunderson for
75% of the team names!
The lecture that Dr. Margaret Early gave based on her research into innovative arts-based learning in high school English Learners’ classroom had some connections to the presentation Eury Chang and I gave for LLED 536: Drama and Literacies in Education. One fond memory I was able to recreate for this presentation on Johnny Saldaña’s textbook was a list of team names, based on Dr. Lee Gunderson’s comments (a few years back) on the tendency for teachers to group language learners together in a classroom, so that no one learns from another. He splits up the class into three aptly named groups: the go-getting Screaming Eagles who need little support with language and race ahead of others in the class; the chatty Bluebirds who could make more of an effort to learn but are perched comfortably on top of the bell curve; finally, the Mudhens, who are all sinking together in a mire of misunderstanding and miscommunication. To these three, I added the Angry Birds to categorize the language learners who would rather just be gamers. A lot of my research for LLED 601 and 558 will examine virtual worlds in video games and their influence on students, and one discovery I made through games like Angry Birds is the self-efficacy of players: when they get to tricky puzzle or face a challenge in the game, they can keep trying until they get it right and advance to a more challenging level. The game design even uses gold stars, and it is very similar to an A (or an E) for effort, rather than the Mudhen-teaching strategy where it all of it is too confusing and learners don’t bother learning anything. Even for part of the game that the player already finished, there is the choice to go back and replay the level, earning a higher rank (three gold stars instead of one) than just getting by with the bare minimum. True that this game is part of a corporate machine that has got merchandizing on its mind, there is even a reported daycare centre in China decked out with Angry Bird activities, but it also has some educators talking about new learning strategies, such as this blog post on A Lesson in Assessment FOR Learning. Fine for Team Angry Birds, but what about the Mudhens?
A New Hope FOR assessing students?
Back to the research. One word that stood out in Marshal and Early’s case study was “force” the students admitted to feeling when they worked on literacy mandela: they were forced to speak English, forced to work together, forced myself. While the researchers reflect on these comments and give them an optimistic interpretation of the students’ word choice, there is still something about students admitting that they would not have done this sort of activity unless there was external pressure. On the one hand, it is an effective strategy to make students groups where at least one member had to speak a different language that the others, and English becomes the default language of communication. On the other hand, it still is an artificial situation common enough for the only student in the classroom who speaks Farsi or Russian, but seems to knock away the support Cantonese or Tagalog speakers would normally rely upon: others who understand them. The students need to feel the force from within, rather than feeling singled out because there are too many of “you guys” in the classroom. Cummins et al. present a slightly more student-driven format for learning the language by making it part of their identity creation. It was a little disorientating to read about the No Child Left Behind policy as it relates to Canadian students, but nevertheless, still impressive. Got to hand it to Marshal and Early, howevr, for creating and implementing a wonderfully visual literacy exercise based on student-made mandelas, and three gold stars for referencing Carl Jung at the end of their paper!
Life Magazine show Carl Jung at his Mandela
An interesting topic that combine Indigenous learning with multiliteracies. When I came into the PhD program, I was certain that digital literacy was the place I need to be, exploring the possibilities of Web 3.0 (way beyond what is currently happening with socially mediated Web 2.0) but came to understand that the most innovative approach to digilit research (at least in North America) is a near impossible task of making the Internet perform like paper. It is as if someone is theorizing about Literacy 3.0 by advocating for a return to Literacy 1.0 (pencil and paper, chalk and chalkboard etc.). I don’t want to get too worked up about this back to basics attitude, but will mention how Hare’s article builds upon the idea of “knowing paper” both the affordances and limitations in an Indigenous context. To paraphrase Robert Service, there are strange things done in the academic world by the mostly white and mostly male researchers who ploy their papers. Little connection to land, especially the forests that produce the raw materials. At least there is a connection to the land through paper, who knows where all the plastics and silicon that make our laptops and other mobile devices comes from?! Nevertheless, there is attempt to know better what literacy then and now may mean, and it is refreshing to read how Hare engages her discussion with connection to lived experiences.
Marshall and Toohey continue this exploration of lived experiences with their literacy project using MP3 recorders and hand-drawn storybooks, a case study for representing Punjabi Sikh heritage in primary school. The term used to describe where children are drawing life experiences from is “funds of knowledge” which might cause alarm for critical discourse theorists inspired by Freire to watch out for any for of “banking education”. But the way the term is used here, and gets mentioned in a couple more articles this week, is harmless. In this case study, mostly harmless; the students really seem to enjoy representing violent images. I’ve already posted on the strange attraction students have toward stories that end with death, that can be accessed her with this link, so I don’t want to go over what was already said there. But something I will pick up upon from Marshall and Toohey’s research is smiling characters. Most children draw characters, even in the most strenuous and life-threatening situations, with big smiles on their faces. Not that I want to give too much credit to Piaget’s theory of developmental stages, but there is a point in a child’s artistic life where anything other than a smiling character does not occur to the young artist. Of course, to prove the rule through an exception, one of Gurvinder drawings show her grandfather crying, wearing a frown on his face. Here I will point out that the girl deliberately chose to depict sadness, and it did not take too much effort for her to turn that smile upside down. It is something wonderful to see, when children express theirselves on paper, that they choose more often than not to depict happiness. James Paul Gee (2004) states that the work of childhood is play, and Richard Louv and other play-based researchers agree that a happy frame of mind is best for children’s development (take that, Piaget!).
Not sure if this qualifies as an aspect of multimodality, but my readings over the Thanksgiving weekend (when one would imagine I’d have plenty of time to get into them, seemed to be actively working against me, conspiring with other events to make it nearly impossible to have them all read by Tuesday’s class! Dinner on Sunday evening was the least of my concerns, but my wife cutting her finger while preparing a salmon the next day, her trip to emergency to get stitches and then another trip to recover from the anaesthetic-induced nausea from the first trip all ended up with me at 2 am in the hospital waiting room, trying to read Pippa Stein’s wonkily scanned article on my low-battery iPhone – can any of this be blamed on the new basics?!
New/Old Basics I
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013
Stein’s trip to museum is a good place to start, not only because it was the most legible part of the PDF, but also for connecting back to an earlier class discussion where Anna explained an exhibit that was a slab of marble that every day had milk poured onto it. Her point was that the museum had taken down the title cards, and there was no explanation for what the artist attempted to achieve. While such a curious, innocuous artwork would not have captured my attention (unless a sudden draft caused the milk to ripple, it would have had me transfixed), I agree with the museum’s decision to remove title cards, PDA and any other multimodal method of filling in the gap created by an artist like Frida Kahlo between her biography and the paintings themselves. Nothing against Frida herself, the bio-pic directed by Julie Taymor completely won me over, but if her artwork needs description and commentary by people she would not have met, perhaps the artwork itself is not doing its job. It would be a good criteria for much of the new basics, our own class projects included in this post (sorry to Anna and Liam’s group, I did not get a photo of your fabulous projects), does it stand alone as an effective meaning-making object, or does there need to be another form of literacy to support what the teams created. Please feel free to leave a comment below on your interpretation of the three projects.
New/Old Basics II
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013
Anne Haas Dyson’s brief account of issues that occur with the new basics brings up another unanswerable question: how much of the students’ selves are acceptable to include in their literacy learning? Will it ever get to a point of being too much, and the students have to learn how to self-correct? In extreme cases where racist, sexist or other hurtful language is brought into the classroom, it becomes a stern lesson of what is not allowed. Yet in matters of faith, it becomes a matter of tactfully sidestepping theological issues that shape one person’s attitude. An example of this comes from my TOCing experience, where a class of grade 2/3’s had a guest speaker (called in by the principal to address some of the bullying and less-than friendly ways the students interact with other). The speaker was calm and professional, and wanted to get the class thinking about how nobody is more important than anyone else. This did not sit well with one student, who insisted several times that God is more important than anyone, and couldn’t accept the speaker’s gentle persuasion that it might be true for this student but not for everyone. What is an appropriate response? (Incidentally, the guest speaker told me confidentially that the students at this particular school – that will remain nameless on this blog – had the worst case of stubborn entitlement and it was difficult for any learning, social-emotional or educational, to happen at any grade level). Back to the role of religion in education, it is easy to wag fingers and say how reductionist most religions can be, the whole purpose of any religion is to promote one story while denying value in contradictory accounts. Dyson’s commentary on Tionna and Ezekial’s classroom discussion celebrates the identities these children have formed, and while it seems out of place to mention Jesus or God in an academic article, it is entirely relevant to a discussion on multimodality. It prompted me to ask a question in class that went unanswered: are churches on-side with multimodal education, or does it go against their belief system. Initial reaction might have one believe they would have nothing to do with new basics, but on second thought, Christianity has been multimodal for centuries: cathedrals, devotional song and poetry, and widely celebrated holidays like Easter and Christmas (for starters) are all inspired by words printed in the Bible. In fact, I would not be surprised to find an entire section of educational libraries with articles on religious multimodality.
Multimodal Land
LLED 558 – Oct 15, 2013
Still there is the issue of basics, the traditional approaches to education mentioned in Marjorie Siegel’s earlier article that run contrary to new and new-fangled multimodal frameworks. Why are some people inevitably drawn back to them? With religion there is a purposeful “tying back” to one interpretation of text, but with schools shouldn’t the focus be on moving forward and developing? Her other article, from 2012, makes an evocative allusion to a fun Charles Dickens novel I recently read, Hard Times where the protagonist (or at least the character with the most dynamic change throughout the novel) is Thomas Gradgrind, a stanch uphold of traditions and the old basics. Books are book, numbers are numbers, and any attempt to make imaginative use of any school resource is frowned upon by this headmaster. What I have found interesting with this parody of extreme rationality is how it gets taken up by people who seem to be missing Dickens’ point. One of my side careers is working part-time at an afterschool academy, to train K-12 students on how to pass SAT and SSAT reading and writing tests – while they have no bearing on local schooling, many parents who want their children to get accepted into American universities will see this academy their children for rote learning skills. Of the many reading passages I have taught, and the usually inane multiple choice question that follow, passages that directly quote or refer to Hard Times seem to take the satire of education as well-reasoned persuasion. Why be critical of these passages, when students need to know only the correct answers to move ahead in life? The best I can do is suggest that students find time to read the novel, or at least watch the BBC adaptation, to get a better sense of how taking standardized tests is similar to being one of Gladgrind’s pupils, and that multimodality offers more than just “fact, facts, facts.”
An extended title for Wohlwend’s mostly enjoyable article could be: A is for Avatar, B is for Beta-mode and C is for Collaboration… this seem to be the new skill set children need as they work their way through school. Not so much because every child needs to learn these concepts, but rather they are already familiar with most of them, having something close to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of gaming and video watching by the time they get to kindergarten. There is some fright amongst parents and educational stakeholders that these children are going to lose touch with the natural world, that it should be animals or flowers that they are naming off with their alphabets rather than these digitized concepts. Louv’s Last Child in the Wood gets dismissed in Wohlwend’s article, perhaps a bit unfairly, yet unless children being educated today are going into the agriculture business (as I am sure many of the farming communities were expecting of their children back in the late 19th century, when schools and the alphabet were just coming into vogue), I feel they are better off knowing the ins and outs of the ubiquitous tools that connect them to the Internet. It is a romantic ideal (idyll actually if you want to get poetic about it) that people in the developed world can go back to the way things were in the supposed good old days. With the increased percentage of Canadian living in urban, as opposed to rural, areas of the country within the last fifty years, we’d be fooling ourselves to think that apples, butterflies and cows will be the right frame of mind for students to start learning about their letters. It takes a multimillion-dollar Hollywood film like James Cameron’s Avatar to remind most of the young ones that trees are good, and technology has its downsides. I know, what a world!!
Where both Wohlwend and Rowsell & Pahl get the story right is by raising awareness that each on-line connection teachers can make to lived experiences in the students’ lives, the better prepared they are for being creative with these tools when they are older. During my practicum in a grade four classroom, I wanted the students to have access to the laptop cart as much as possible, as they worked on their responses to Kenneth Oppel’s novel Silverwing. It took me by surprise how easy it was to get the laptop cart wheeled into the classroom, as none of the other teachers seemed to be making use of them. It became evident why when a roomful of students tried to access the wifi at the same time, so I had to think up some off-line activities while others patiently waited to log on. Letting children explore what they could do with the approved webpages was the task I set before them, and if it meant they could have a few dozen minutes playing Club Penguin once they finished their classroom work, all the better. Some of the students did not have access to computers at home, yet seemed to know what to do with those bonus minutes of on-line free time. It was a great opportunity for me to learn a bit more about how Club Penguin works, too. What I find interesting with Rowsell & Pahl is they assume some familiarity with Facebook and other on-line worlds their students would visit, yet it become a worksheet-filling activity. I get the multimodal aspect of remediating webpages onto pieces of paper, and wonder if teachers are not aware of the disconnect students make from these types of project: why don’t we just go on-line and create a Facebook page? Hundreds of reasons why not, I am aware (especially with the elementary students who are not permitted to enter this social media arena, yet somehow already have a digital presence thank to parents and older siblings allowing them access to their pages). Seems a bit silly to discuss authenticity in the virtual world that social media allows students access to, but as young as 10 years old, possibly younger, these children know when they on-line or not.
The multimodal example I brought to class this week was a brilliant remix of the 2012 United States presidential debate, turned into a video game by digital artist Schmoyoho. As much as I could distance myself from the actual events (not being an American, I viewed the whole campaign with mild curiosity) but hard to escape the polarization of views. Schmoyoho’s brilliant parody plays up the standardization of sentiment, overused rhetorical devices to make people feel secure in the choices they had already made – let’s face it, if an American had already decided to vote for Obama, there is little either he or Romney could say to persuade that voter otherwise (a sad truth about Canadian politics, voter apathy, will need to be discussed another time). What works so multimodally amazing in the video below is that it is made into a video game, but uses the 16-bit graphic more familiar with Pac Man and early Mario Bros games. When showing this clip to Ernesto earlier last week, he had much to say on this topic: how if Schmoyoho had used images from 2012 games, they would not have been as readily identifiable for a majority of people to get the joke. Some of the digital natives may wonder why the gaming references are so old, but then it fits with the old-fashioned world American politics continually seems to represent.
Where it gets really interesting is with Kendrick & McKay’s work in bringing these digital tools to Kenya, and how empowering much of the older technology can be when compared to North American standards: why bother with a digital voice recorder when you can do the same thing with your smartphone? (and sadly, why bother with the last generation smartphone when someone can buy you the latest iPhone 5s, because it come in pink or green?!). As Maureen explained, the students in the journalism club had to play around with these newly-acquired tools for weeks before feeling comfortable with them, but once they mastered the technology, they could do amazing things (until they graduated and were sent to the school test scores recommended). I felt the same sense of untapped potential with the students on my practicum, let them play around with the laptops and they can do some amazing things, but also the slight frustration that my 15 weeks with them won’t amount to much if their teachers next year were to keep the laptops out of their classrooms, and handout more pieces of paper which only simulate the experiences they could be having on-line. Maybe these teachers are expect their students to enter into the newspaper business? Reminds me of the joke Jimmy Kimmel told at Obama’s Meet the Press event a few years back: “What is black and white and read all over? Not much, actually.” What a world, indeed.
Slide 7 of last week’s presentation
Before getting onto the reading, I will write a brief reflection on the multiliteracies and multimodality presentation last week. Despite the 10-minute delay as we discovered we could not reconnect an already-running presentation to the SMARTBoard, we accomplished our goal to demonstrate how the SB is an example of multimodality in the classroom. Well, most classrooms anyway. What surprised me in preparing the presentation, and even some of the in-class feedback during the presentation, was how much teachers and students don’t like using this expensive learning tool. Things could be done a lot more smoothly on a giant LCD television screen connected to a Bamboo electronic drawing pad, but without the hands-on-screen manipulation of objects and text, it just becomes another skill most teachers would tire of introducing to the class, especially as it will get replaced by tablets or the latest technological “fad”. Like it or not, SMARTBoard will be in the classrooms for a while, and with a growing number of children who have been using them since kindergarten (many of the primary students I meet in North Vancouver seem to know more about these devices than the teachers for whom I substitute). While it is a shame that high schools cut off these students from the technology they essentially grew up with, returning them to dusty used books and a mountain of photocopied handouts, there is also a push to make learning more asynchronous, at home on the students’ computers. Nevertheless, our LLED 558 presentation set out to rekindle creative use of classroom technology, and it will remain to be seen who will carry on the torch passed from us to them.
Bamboo drawing pad – SMARTBoard’s next level up?
Now, onto this week’s readings, I would imagine if the grown-up versions of Chelsea and Lucas (from Edwards-Groves’ case study) were to present in our classroom, we would be in for a treat. At their young age, only a couple of years ago, they already have a handle on collaborative work in designing a presentation, as well as the imaginative showpersonship needed to impress net generation students. All three articles acknowledge that the look of learning has changed thanks to online resources, and as Gee would want to add in here, familiarity with gaming practices. It was amusing to read the back-and-forth between James Paul Gee and Julian Sefton-Green, one claiming that online games creates a community of practice, while the other questioning this approach of a gaming literacy that only promotes more gaming (Jewitt, 2008, p. 255). From some of the South Korean students I have tutored on the North Shore, university-aged older siblings could make a better career out of playing Starcraft than continuing with their studies. While JS-G scores a point on the side of caution (for teachers not to get too carried away by every digital bell and whistle), the children from Christine Joy Edwards-Groves’ (hereafter CJE-G) case study demonstrates, they like the wow factor being added to the research and planning they are required to do. It is especially a hit with the kindergarteners, and who knows what technology will be in use when they finish up their studies? A more balanced approach is presented in Jennifer Rowsell and Kate Pahl’s investigation of “sedimented identities” that demonstrates for each device in use in the classroom, students bring knowledge from home that may either support or contradict what needs to be done for school. Rowsell and Pahl place great emphasis on Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus” for defining their studies of the sedimentary layer of home world, school world and other influences on the students.
Although Bourdieu and habitus are two related terms that I have heard in the last couple of weeks, it is still a vague notion of what he means. The field theory video posted to the class makes it a bit more relatable. Reflecting upon Lisa and Meg’s presentation question about the Sri Lankan teacher’s habitus, the answer revealed itself from the discussion with Angela. When teaching a grade four classroom in the United States, there was a district-wide initiative to get students interested in getting into college, each teacher’s classroom was named after the college they had attended, and students took on the identity of that post-secondary (Angela’s college team was the Cougars, and so were her students). While there is not such a focus on the teacher’s university life in Canada, my experience as a Teacher on Call are walking into way too many classroom decked out with hockey posters and other paraphernalia, and the closer the hometeam gets to the play-offs, the more team jersey are spotted around the school. No wonder Vancouver had riots when the team lost the Stanley Cup (twice) when a student’s school world has become so hockey-ified.
Lastly, looking ahead to multimodal text for next week, I would like to draw attention to the latest RSA Animate that came out last week: David Coplin’s Re-imagining Work:
Reference
Edwards-Groves, C. J. (2011). The multimodal writing process: changing practices in contemporary classrooms. Language and Education 25(1). 49-64.
Jewitt, C. (2008). Multimodality and literacies in school classrooms. Review of Research in Education 32. 241-267.
See our SMARTBoard presentation first! – Uploading soon.
Lots of readings to cover this week, but Natalie and I got off to a good start in preparing for our presentation. New London Group seemed to be the most daunting, even after reading it again since my Master of Educational Technology course (and it is on the reading list for LLED 601 later this term). It tells an enticingly simple story of where literacy education was at the end of the 20th century, and how it must be designed for the 21st, making the fullest use of multiliteracies. In predicting changes to lifeworlds, even without the paranoia caused by September 11th, the Group seem to have envisioned Twitter and Facebook. People are reading information in a decidedly more public way, and able to comment on what others are up to, that would have shocked other in the late 1990’s. One issue that comes up is harm that happens, and cases like Amanda Todd get more attention than most people are able to deal with in a respectful way. Amongst the obscenities and wry comments in Lewis CK’s latest stint on Conan O’Brien’s talkshow, he raises an interesting point about the lack of empathy children have for other when most of their interaction happens through a smartphone screen.
James Paul Gee, one of the New Londoners, as well as Knobel and Lankshear, see the young students’ ability to process the vast amount of information coming at them from all corners as a sign of multitasking, and it was a good point raised in this week’s discussion that how well these students are able to blog, listen to music and study at the same time is not made clear. On the one hand, if students are productive with so many resources at their fingertips, it will encourage others to make use of any device within reach, never mind the digital divide that supposedly limited how many can access these tools. Yet on the other hand, society seems to have taken just as many steps forward as they have regressed into a mob mentality due to anyone being able to say anything in a vaguely anonymous manner. Another recent example is the fall-out from Guido Barilla’s anti-LGBT comments. It is unfortunate that the chairman of an otherwise successful pasta company needed to air his views on the “family values” issue, and equally sad that he is not as unbiased and enlightened as others appear to be. Somehow hectoring him to conform to a 21st century standard makes social justice all the more oppressive, when tolerance is only granted to those with the same level of tolerance.
Finally, two other article that captured my attention were Kress and Bhattacharya. Another New Londoner, Gunther Kress writes about mutlimodality in the year 2000, and takes a less digital, more “at hand” or manual approach to the different forms literacy takes. The shape and feel of a bottle of water, the images on the label, the taste of local spring are all working together to make one brand more appealing than another – good thing he stayed away from the pasta aisle when generating his thoughts on this topic! For him, there are multiple ways of experiencing the same thing, yet a more critical stance is taken by the more modern Usree Bhattacharya, who problematizes the western alphabet and the Eurocentric culture of education. When it comes to histories disrupted by the colonial takeover of the world, learning to type or text using only the 26 letters provided (less and less accents, tildes and umlauts seem to be required) by the English alphabet makes for easier computer processing, but a less dialectally interesting world. Two developments occurring with digital literacy could be the game-changers for New Londoners and their new literacies-backed opposition alike: video lectures and online gaming communities (what Gee calls an affinity group). The former is evident with popular websites such as TEDtalks and RSA, which produce digital video of lectures and can communicate radical ideas across the world, no doubt in as many languages as subtitle-writers permits; it moves the information age into the visual and aural corners of the New London Group’s multimodality circle. The latter allows for people to work past political and socia-economic boundaries in the form of avatars (or more simply players – the spatial and gestural modalities) to tackle important issues like zombie invasions or minecrafting.
Move over Google, here is Minecraft Earth!
The plot seems to thicken with the New Literacy Studies, especially as the binary relationship between orality and literacy is called in to question. Gee (1996) leads the way with his review of the development of the two-sided debate, including some familiar names like Havelock, Vygotsky, Ong and Heath. The old world view of educated civilization and illiterate savages was demonstrated not to be so appealing after Havelock proved Homer’s epics were most likely composed ages before anyone could read or write (at least anyone Greek had these valuable skills). Ong’s further praise of oral culture’s strengths, along the same argumentative lines as Plato, prove that more the word’s proper place was in the mouths of people, not on surfaces or even screens. Ong’s Orality and Literacy presents an intriguing case for secondary orality, which follows along the same lines as TEDtalks, RSA.org and even YouTube itself. Here is a link to animator Andrew Park discussion with RSA on link between the visual images and memory: The RSA Animate Revolution.
Andrew Park’s scribing for RSA Animate
Perry (2012) covers the same ground, but with more questions about the difference between New Literacy studies and New Literacies. Kind of difficult to follow along without a map or flowchart, and she even includes diagrams in her paper. Many of her questions are answered, some with more questions to follow, all zeroing in on the big question, what is literacy? Much of the class seems to be pondering this very question, which is not so bad for literate minds like ourselves, but I really have to wonder if students in other graduate degree programs spend as much mental energy asking questions like “what is physics?”, “how do we define law?” or “what does ‘ocean’ mean?”. A paradigm must have something in view, however nebulous the abstract idea might be, and Perry puts her two-cents in with a subtle complaint that “something is lost when the field defines literacy so broadly” (p. 65). For other answers that Perry provides, they are directed towards multiple meaning and differing opinions, and I find her paper at a balancing point between Gee and Street.
Finally there is Street (2003) again, jazzing up the questions Perry would ask less than a decade later, but focusing on the newness of New Literacy Studies. If he himself and Gee take so much credit ushering in the new studies in the early 1990s, how new could they be by the start of the 21st century? I felt the same sense of unease as when I studied post-modern art for my undergraduate, wondering if there will be a point in art history where people look back at our period and say “ah, that po-mo movement, so dated. Thank goodness society moved on to…” While literacy seems to keep morphing its researchable shape, picking up new terms and dropping out-of-date concepts, one of my classmates last week raised an interesting point about the continual search of the new. Taking digital literacy as the newest of the new literacies, there will eventually be a point where society, led by dissatisfied academics, go into post-digital literacy. No doubt Google has its top thinkers working on a way to get their corporate logo put in front of whatever words are used to describe gliteracy.
Reference
Gee, J. P. (1996). Social linguistics and social literacy: Ideology in discourse. London: Taylor Francis. 46-65.
Perry, K. H. (2012). What is literacy? – A critical overview of sociocultural perspectives. Journal of Language & Literacy Education 8(1). 50-71.
Street, B. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to theory and practices. Current Issues in Comparative Education 5(2). 77-91.