Here is my final assignment, Virtual World for Cultural Exchange.
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Like Vygotsky would say, had he lived until the the mid 1990’s, I am entirely in the zone with this week’s readings on multiliteracies. It is hard not to view other theorists (especially the earnest NLSers) as a bit behind the curve. Yet as much as New London Group, Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear and Leu seem to be applying an operational theoretical framework, there are plenty of unanswered questions. The biggest one for me, which might have to leave until next term, is what have the digital literacies people been doing to differentiate from multiliteracies? I expected to find an answer to who they are in Geneviève Brisson’s proposal, but instead found a timely recapitulation of multiliteracies’ development up to a certain point. Brisson hits all the right “multi” buttons with her proposed research, yet there is also a slight disconnect between her framework and the case study itself, as most of the theorists mentioned in the former section do not entire reappear in the latter. In their introduction to Deleuzian literacy study, Masny and Cole (2012) present similar findings in their second chapter, pointing to the transcendental empiricism where virtual experiences in literacy are not tied to any one particular representation, as “[r]epresentation limits experience to the world as we know it – not to as a world that could be.” (p. 27) Perhaps Brisson picks up on the transcendental-ness by exploring what her case study students are becoming, rather than fitting into the model provided by a plethora of multiliterate scholars.
James Paul Gee in digital woodcut
Determining who the multiliterates are becomes a Herculean task, not impossible (especially as they frequently cite their own individual work throughout A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies) but nevertheless daunting to figure out who said what. The strongest voice for me, merely as I more familiar with his writing than most of the others, is James Paul Gee. It is understandable that his earlier work with in critical discourse analysis and NLS needs to be understood fully to appreciate where he comes from, yet I have always pictured him as more concerned with where literacy is going. I suspect there will be a lot more of him when I take Prof. Asselin’s Digital Literacy course next term. It is Gee’s voice, seconded by Gunther Kress, that worked out the design parts of New London Group’s Pedagogy and I am sure once I get a copy of Coiro et al.‘s Handbook (would make a nice Christmas gift, in case family or friends are searching this blog for hints!) they will have more to say about which voice says what. In any case, Gee and Kress have lots to say about how things are designed, as well as the redesign of what technology is available, or as Kress often mentions “to hand”. Taking video games as the obvious lead in to design, recent developments with mobile games (Angry Birds being one of the prime examples), gamers no longer need to read instruction booklets but learn as they play, sometimes with in-game tutorials or often with the option to replay the level once completed. Nearly every video game emphasizes the just-in-time learning, where the skilled needed to defeat the level boss get introduced throughout the same level, allowing the player to hone their skills before facing off with the end of level challenge, the test if you will. The redesign, however, is the most interesting feature of multiliteracies pedagogy as skilled “readers” are able to switch modes to make more personal meaning. Remixing is something that has been around for ages, but has experienced a boost in activity thanks to the availability of digital video, on-line file sharing (YouTube and other websites) and a receptive audience (Facebook’s Like button seems to be the new standard of assessment). It always impresses me how much the New London Group got right back in 1996, at least with connections to what would be possible in the year 2000 and beyond, for the available technology at least.
Andy & Conan predict the Year 2000
What most teachers struggle with is the pedagogical predictions of the New London Group, how much the classroom is changing due to the invasiveness of the Internet, therefore Julie Coiro and Donald Leu teamed up with Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear to produce the Handbook of Research on New Literacies well into the first decade of the 2000’s. Their purpose seems to be to make multiliteracies operational for classroom teachers while also raising awareness of literacy’s newness (and multiplicity). Their prediction of nearly half the world’s population being on-line by the year 2012 fell a bit short with the latest census (dated July 30th, 2012) holding at 34.3% of the world having access to the Internet. The graph below shows the two most highly populated countries, Asia and Africa, are below the world average which can be argued from a statistician or even an economist’s point of view, but I would put forth that educators around the world may be partially responsible. For every BCTF conference or workshop I have been at (I work as a facilitator for such Teaching Teacher On Call (TTOC) workshops as “Reality 101: A day in the life of a TTOC” or “Classroom management”), there is always one or two teachers who insist that children have way too much screen time, and the best place for a student’s smartphone is in the locker, or not purchased from the store in the first place. While I admit there is a tendency for students to get off-task with games and other distractions on the web, it is something the teachers will have to push through, hopefully in a constructive way. It would make for a nice Boxing Day if I could start reading up on Gee’s response to Facer, Joiner, Stanton, Reid, Hull, & Kirk 2004 case study of the mobile game “Savannah”. Perhaps after the nine-hour marathon screening of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Extended Version. The research project I had intended to write for this class would have been on mobile learning through virtual world games, but as this is a case study I am conducting in LLED 558 and more details will emerge from the research rather than frontloading the methodology with expectations based on the framework – as Brisson herself keeps the questions open until she has a better understanding of what is going on with her students under observation. Look forward to connecting to my LLED 558 final assignment when more of it is written.
Downloaded from Internet World Stats
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!