Tag: multiliteracies

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Final Project

It’s finally here!  I’ve managed to finish my very first podcast.  Let’s just say I’d call it a work in progress.  In keeping with my self-appointed goal for this course, I tried another new-to-me tool to create this podcast:  Audacity.  It proved to be fairly intuitive and a lot of fun to use.  The sound within the different components of my recording was a little inconsistent, but I attribute that to the fact that I’ve never actually created a podcast before so I’m still learning how to set up the microphone and use the gain and volume settings on it as well.

Podcasting:  The Process

As expected, this podcast required quite a lot of prior planning.  I first needed to sketch out my idea and determine whether it was doable within the scope of a 10-minute podcast.  When those ideas were well on the way, I created a script for most of the podcast, but left my conversation with my daughter free-flowing and unscripted.  I found another app (TwoTone) to create an introduction and some music to start the podcast, but the rest was was completed on Audacity.

Generating Ideas – 7.2:  Digital Literacy

As I reread the course notes and some of the assigned readings, the paragraph below from from section 7.2: Digital Literacy from within our course readings initially sparked my idea for the final project.  (I believe I might have erroneously said “7.1” within the podcast; it should be 7.2):

Unlike critics such as Tapscott and Prensky, Dobson and Willinsky do not define digital literacy as a revolution in literacy practices resulting in rifts between those “in the know” and those left behind. Rather, they see the onset of digital literacy as an evolution, taking place—with both continuities and extensions of traditional print-literacy practices—more in line with Bolter’s idea of remediation, or McLuhan’s idea that the content of any new medium is an older medium. Digital literacy is not positioned as standing in opposition to print; it is part of a continuum in technologies for knowledge diffusion across which we can observe signs of the remaking of old relationships under new conditions of digital and global, networked cultures.

With a rough idea in place, I had to make sure my ideas were situated within literature that related to this course.  This part of the task was fantastic!  Because the task was so open-ended, I felt I had more freedom not only to explore literature that related to what we’ve learned within the course, but I was also able to look at ideas and literature that pushed the boundaries of what I’d learned thus far in ETEC 540.  What’s interesting to note though, is that in examining current technologies and how the meaning of a message can be conveyed and perceived differently based on media selection, it was only through digging into the past, that my project idea finally began to take shape.

Hinted at in our course notes above, McLuhan and his “the medium is the message”  supposition from Chapter 1 in Understanding Media: The extensions of Man contributed to the starting point for my project.  In addition though, throughout the course, we’ve looked at the evolution of text technologies and how humans have responded accordingly to these changes and advances in technologies.  I was particularly interested in how the message we are trying to convey might change depending on the type of technology we choose to use to communicate the message in the first place.  This idea lead me to the “Father of Information Theory”, Claude Shannon and his 1948 paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication.  Shannon was particularly interested in how the meaning of a message can be lost or misconstrued when “noise” interrupts a message’s signal as it is transmitted from its source to its receiver.  This is *exactly* what I was interested in, but on a much smaller scale.

Putting it Together

I decided I would examine the use of the following modes of communication to determine how the meaning of a message is affected by the use of a particular medium:  oral-based instructions, text, cursive writing, emoji, and sonification.  I used the image below (from the 2019 film, The Bit Player, documenting Claude Shannon’s life and the modern-day effects of his Information Theory) to guide me through my project. My idea was to take information (a message or instructions) and communicate it to my daughter, Carys.  However, I wanted to see how the noise (my daughter’s brain) interferes with the message depending on how I chose to communicate the message.

Image from The Bit Player film depicting Claude Shannon's information theory
Image taken from The Bit Player (available on Amazon Prime). Image courtesy of Levinson, 2019

Disability

My daughter, Carys, has a learning disability.  She has difficulty processing text-based tasks (whether that’s putting her ideas down on paper, or decoding words and processing text-based tasks).  Through examining different modes of communication with my daughter who has known difficulties with processing text tasks, I was hoping to determine whether meaning can become misconstrued if the communication mode wasn’t a good ‘fit’.

The Podcast

Here it is: the final product and my final project.  Thanks for listening!  References are below the podcast.

References

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
Collins, G. P. (2002). Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/claude-e-shannon-founder/
Horgan, J.  (2016 ). Claude Shannon: Tinkerer, Prankster, and Father of Information Theory – IEEE Spectrum. IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. Retrieved August 10, 2020, from https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/claude-shannon-tinkerer-prankster-and-father-of-information-theory
Levinson, M. (2019). The Bit Player. Prime Video. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/The-Bit-Player/0Q3B8F95AAOY3FEK1L8WINFASM
McLuhan, M. (2001 [1964]). Understanding Media: The extensions of man. Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved from:  http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=4643237
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. M The Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 55.  Retrieved from: http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf
Soni, J., & Goodman, R. (2017). Betty Shannon, Unsung Mathematical Genius—Scientific American Blog Network. Scientific America. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/betty-shannon-unsung-mathematical-genius/
The New London Group.  (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.)  Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.
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Linking Assignment: Task 1 – What’s In Your Bag?

For task #1 (What’s in Your Bag), I’ve chosen to link to Tyler Graham’s In my school bag task.  Tyler’s task 1 post was the first post I reviewed in ETEC 540 and I chose to link to it because his image closely resembled my own (especially what my own school bag would’ve looked like a decade ago when I was still teaching high school science and math in a synchronous, online environment).

An image of the contents of my bag (and the bag itself).
The contents of my bag contrasting the contents in Tyler’s bag (below).
Image of Tyler Graham's school bag contents
An image of the contents within Tyler’s school bag. (Copied from: https://blogs.ubc.ca/monsieurgraham/2020/05/15/in-my-school-bag/)

Literacies

Tyler and I are from a similar generation in that we both “grew up analog but came of age digital” (Graham, 2020); and so, Tyler’s bag reflects that blend (or conflict) between print and digital-based literacies.

Tyler continues to teach, whereas I have moved into higher ed.  Additionally, my life is (mostly) consumed by family (and so I chose to present my ‘purse’ or personal bag rather than my work bag).  What’s interesting to note though, is despite the differences in the contents of the bag (teaching-related versus personal), both Tyler and I still prefer to surround ourselves with print-based materials (though we carry digital materials out of necessity).  And so, if I were to come across both our bags, I would assume the owners of these bags felt a certain comfort with print perhaps suggesting that print holds more value or prominence than the digital.  Thus, it appears that the two of us demonstrate a stronger attachment to print literacies rather than digital literacies- though both are present on our sites.

Visual or image literacy plays an important role on each site as well: the images prepare the reader for the text to follow and the images provide the reader with an at-a-glance snapshot of our preference toward print (or conflict with the digital).

I think both Tyler’s post and my own post speak to the conflict noted in Bolter (2001, Chapter 4), Kress (2005) and Dobson & Willinsky (2009) where, through technology, literacy moves beyond ‘simple’ text toward more multimodal literacies and representations of ideas.  Print or linguistic literacies have been absorbed by the digital, which provides room for visual or image-based literacies to take more center-stage.  Further, we can now digitally adapt and manipulate text to form new representations of ideas through sound (sonification) and data visualization (graphic or spatial literacies).  The fact that both posts openly discuss the comfort we share in writing things down (the act of writing is reassuring) hints at our shared discomfort in moving toward the New London Group’s (1996) definition of multiliteracies.  (Later posts demonstrate growth as the course has progressed, however, this initial post highlights the importance of print-based literacy to Tyler and I).

WordPress Design

Tyler’s informal tone allows the reader to feel as though they are a part of a conversation rather than reading an academic blog post; this encourages the reader to comment, ask questions and interact with the content within Tyler’s post.  This may be off-putting to some if they are looking for more academic-sounding prose, but I find it more inviting and interesting.

Organization and Language

Part of the reason I didn’t return to Tyler’s page until recently, was that I couldn’t easily find his posts (they weren’t linked to his name in the link provided to us in Canvas); I ended up clicking on the link to Task 1 again, and was then able to find the rest of his links.  This might discourage others from seeking out Tyler’s subsequent posts (which seems to be the case)-especially if they find navigating website particularly challenging (or if they use a screen reader), however, once I figured out how to navigate his blog, it was fine.
Tyler teaches French so it only makes sense that he would switch the language of WordPress to French.  That’s a great idea! I do not speak French (though I can navigate well enough).  I think this would work well if he were to use his WordPress site as a teaching tool with his students or colleagues.  If our classmates can’t understand French, however, they might find it a bit more challenging to navigate; if they have a general idea of how WordPress sites work though, most users would be able to navigate Tyler’s site with relative ease.

Pedagogy

Again, the open-ended nature of this course allows students to take each task and make it their own.  Task 1 was pretty straightforward, however, if you take  quick look at how Tyler rearranged the way in which he presented his content for Task 7 versus my own ‘new’ interpretation, you’ll note the divergence in our ideas.  Being able to adapt a task and take it in the direction that makes to each student, is invaluable.  Further, by posting it to WordPress where classmates can see each other’s ideas, we become more open to these other ideas and interpretations of our assigned tasks.

References

Chapter 4. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
 
Dobson, T., & Willinsky, J. (2009). Digital Literacy.pdf. In The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy (pp. 286–312). Cambridge University Press. https://pkp.sfu.ca/files/Digital%20Literacy.pdf

Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learningLinks to an external site.. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.

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