Artichoke

Deja vu at 10,000 meters, howling like a dingo, and what we report as noteworthy as an indicator of failure.

I chose Cuban’s book “Teachers and Machines: The Classroom use of Technology since 1920” from the corridor library as an Air New Zealand in-flight re- read for the return trip from Wellington to Auckland on Friday night.

It has been a while since I read Cuban so when I hit the following paragraphs I experienced an intense moment of déjà vu that crossed the decades and the continents  ... in truth it was hard to suppress the urge to join in the dingo like howling of the infant from Oz in the seat infront ..

Seventy six years ago Benjamin Darrow was claiming

“The central and dominant aim of education by radio is to bring the world to the classroom to make universally available the services of the finest teachers the inspiration of the greatest leaders ... the unfolding world events which through the radio may come as a vibrant and challenging textbook of the air.” Benjamin Darrow in “Radio: The Assistant Teacher” 1932 cited in Cuban Teachers and Machines The Classroom use of Technology since 1920 p19

Sixty seven years ago

A survey of almost 2,000 Ohio principals, conducted in 1941, produced the following list of reasons cited for lack of classroom radio use and the percentage of respondents who gave each reason;

No radio receiving equipment   50%

School schedule difficulties   23%

Unsatisfactory radio equipment  19%

Lack of information 14%

Poor radio reception 11%

Programs not related to curriculum     11%

Classwork more valuable 10%

Teachers not interested  7%    

 
I have nudged up against enough valorising claims about the potential impact of information and communication technologies on education, and “why don’t teachers use technologies in their teaching?” research findings and reports in the educational literature in New Zealand in the 21^st Century to recognise simulacra.   

I reckon conversations amongst the ict_pd community in New Zealand (and for that matter between any educator involved in attempts to reform a reliance on “teacher talk” in schools through the introduction of “a new technology” ) would be much more interesting if Cuban and perhaps Caroline Marvin were required prior reading.

And by “New Technology” I mean anything designed to ameliorate a reliance on teacher voice – eg chalk and slate, textbook and pictures, chalkboard, lantern slides, radio, film strips, film, overhead projectors, tape recorders, photocopiers, television, digital cameras, digital microscopes, computers, data shows, interactive white boards, graphic tablets, mobile phones, PDA’s and or the internet and the participatory medium of Web2.0 ... add your own ....

Cuban provides evidence from the introduction of radio, film and television  in the 1920’s and 1930’s for the “exhilaration/ scientific credibility/ disappointment/ and teacher bashing cycle that results when new technologies are introduced by non teachers determined to change teacher practice.

This thinking challenges those nonteaching educators/ academics/ specialists/ administrators/ facilitators/ edubloggers and reformers  who are no longer charged with delivering the New Zealand Curriculum fulltime or even part-time to students in classrooms, to acknowledge the expertise of those who are, when they are calling for the introduction and implemention of ICT charged change in schools.

“Reformers branded stability in teacher practice as inertia or knee-jerk conservatism. They viewed teacher reluctance as an obstacle to overcome. Seldom did investigators try to adopt a teacher’s perspective or appreciate the duality of continuity and change that marked both the schools and classrooms. Nor did any reformer even raise the disturbing issue that teacher expertise, drawn from a pool of craft wisdom about children and schooling that dances beyond the limited understanding of nonteaching reformers, should be bolstered rather than belittled.” 

And Cuban raises something else of interest to those of us working to introduce ICTs in the 21^st Century  classroom.

If we want to know how successful our efforts have been perhaps we should monitor more carefully what is considered noteworthy of praise in the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Educational Gazette, and other educational information technology media reporting.

For as Cuban notes what we see reported on as noteworthy ... is an indicator of difference from the norm ... is an indicator of what we have failed to implement and integrate with ICTs in education. After all we seldom reserve editorial space for how students and schools are utilising the felt tip pen.

When most of a school’s staff would embrace the new technology the effort would excite its boosters, like the story of the man who kissed his wife every morning for twenty four years and finally got kissed back. Teachers would be lauded; the principal singled out for praise; the school would be featured in newspapers and magazines. But such noteworthy praise and articles only have underscored how rarely teachers have used machines in their classrooms since the 1920’s. Cuban Teachers and Machines P51

Twenty five ovaries on the table at the dementia centre

Grandpa was in full grump today launching into a convoluted complaint that saw him railing against slippers, moving horizons  and zimmerframes.

After startling me by claiming to see twenty five ovaries on the table ... a conjured image so disconcerting that I still haven’t shaken out of my mind – [Trust me - thinking of belladonna lilies as “naked ladies”   just isn’t the same thing as imagining a vase of pink tinged stalked ovaries] –he  started his grump

It seems that slippers are noted for their ability to “betray and disappoint”  ....“all these slippers that give you bad service “- “one sole is an inch wider than the other sole .... you fool ... what can you expect from rubber soles ... etc etc  ... until he runs out of froth and gazes bleary eyed  at the foreign pair of slippers he has jammed on his feet ...he then adds without any sense of chagrin  ....”especially when they are not mine” ...

He wanted to know why when he drinks juice from the green plastic tumblers the horizon moves ... “just when you are certain that you know where you are the horizon moves and the juice that should have gone into your mouth runs out the side and rolls down your chin” ... I have had a similar horizon shift experience but not with juice in green plastic tumblers but he settled only when reassured that “horizon shift” was as he suspected a design flaw in the tumbler

And then we hit the zimmer frame argument – it seems that despite the best intentions in Grandpa’s observations zimmer frames in dementia centres end up being “one of those  things you can put in people’s way rather than put in people’s hands.” – he has rich anecdote to support this conclusion.

I loved this insight because putting things in people’s way rather than putting things in people’s hands seems to be something we struggle with a lot in education –

Identifying what are the conditions of value in teaching and learning and then identifying  what might enhance these conditions (“putting things in people’s hands”)  or betray these conditions (“putting things in peoples way”) is something I think about a lot with respect to ICTs and education.

I was still thinking about Grandpa’s zimmer frame classification and the twenty five ovaries when I checked my bloglines account ....

The Valve blog ... a must read has a site disclaimer that helps me clarify the things I love about bloggers

The blogs I keep coming back to have

“Authors' ideas, faiths, hypotheses, stubbornness’s against assaults of reason and evidence, points of literary honor, interests, temperaments, obsessions, political affiliations, high-bouncing utopian ideals, limpet-like reactionary attachments, elective affinities, stylistic crotchets, journalistic forays and hobbyhorses [that ] are their own, not their fellow authors [bloggers] ...ALSC's. The Valve Blog Association of Literary Scholars and Critics

The Teaching for lust  and Linguistics for administrators   posts features the 30 million plus views YouTube Hotforwords philogogist and teacher Marina explaining the various meanings of “dope”

I have been thinking about how to engage teachers in unpacking the new media literacies in the context of education, referring to Jenkin's white paper for insight

A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is
“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap.These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms” (p. 8).We would modify this definition in two ways. First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second, new media literacies should be considered a social skill. P19  Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

... but after being sensitised by Grandpa’s twenty five ovaries it strikes me that Marina may provide a better professional learning discussion example of the use of new media literacies in education – for the effectiveness of the content communicated cannot be valued by looking at the text alone.

The Valve post lets us know that evaluating the audio track tells us the content is competently captured

At Brainstorm, the ever-trenchant Richard Tabor Greene tested the videos on his students (I’m sure violating the guidelines of his institutional review board for human-subjects research in the process):
Now, evaluating this audio track—she chose to explicate word histories and does a simple competent job, if not an extraordinary job. Indeed, if you close your eyes and ignore her bulging breasts, the impression of stupidity from her goes completely away. I tested this on students the other day, giving them the audio and giving a control group the video versions, and asking ratings of 50 randomly combined dimensions. A cropped video version without her breasts upped her non-stupidity score, nearly doubling it.

I tested Marina on the adolescents who pass through the corridor – they were engaged, provoked, interested and could recall everything   - an observation that makes me think again about the possibilities in the new curriculum for teachers who obviously have much to learn about creating multiliteracy based communications for students in ways that are “open, rich, undermining, charged, connected, and practical”.

All of which leaves me with the same question but in a different context

How can we avoid education in the new literacies becoming an example of “corruptio optimi pessima” the corruption of the best is the worst of all?

Educational Metaphor: Learning as a Journey and Curriculum as a Mollusc

The New Zealand Curriculum 2007 continues our wobbly isles tradition of using a soft, wet and slimy mollusc as a metaphor for intellectual and spiritual growth

The curriculum nautilus - Since it first appeared on the cover of The New Zealand Curriculum Framework in 1993, the nautilus has become a familiar symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. Itreappears in this curriculum with a new look.It is as a metaphor for growth that the nautilus is used as a symbol for the New Zealand Curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum P2

The New Zealand Curriculum document itself encourages us to think of "learning as a journey ..."

As students journey from early childhood through secondary school and, in many cases, on to tertiary training or tertiary education in one of its various forms,they should find that each stage of the journey prepares them for and connects well with the next. P43

By learning te reo and becoming increasingly familiar with tikanga, Maori students strengthen their identities, while non-Maori journey towards shared cultural understandings. P16

In New Zealand our predilection for constructivist pedagogies and inquiry learning means we tend to interpret the learning as a journey metaphor as when

the teacher and students travel more or less together, along a somewhat defined route, making frequent stops along the way as students notice something of interest that they wish to explore. There are occasional interesting side trips to unexpected places. At times, groups pursue different paths and, after returning to the main road, report to the class about what they have found.  Judy Yero Teachers Mind Resources

I continue to acknowledge and thank cj for making me alert to metaphor ... for introducing me to Lakoff and how metaphors both obscure and reveal ...

“Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies.” P146  Metaphors we live by - Lakoff and Johnson

Cj is why I laughed darkly when I stumbled upon Alan Watt’s interrogation of the “Journey” metaphor today ...

Is a must watch for all those educators still anguishing over their inability to make any practical change in response to that educationally virulent call to action - Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on Do schools kill creativity?

I believe that creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it ... needs more than rhetoric and humour it needs lots of the sort of analysis I read today on General Praxis Blog on Arts teachers learning and pedagogy

When we talk about needing to build creativity in 21st Century Learners in New Zealand – we too often blur the individuals with the process, and the process with the product – we never get to interrogating identified “irreconcilable tensions”

"The positives in art education work are evident and well documented, and I value the work I do in schools highly. However there are aspects of working as an artist in secondary schools which do not sit right...

• The constant call for collaboration in an area which is often about a fairly solitary, highly personal exploration
• The emphasis of verbal communication in a subject which is often about an individual language that has nothing to do with words
• The focus on Artists as some sort of uniquely, innately skilled creative problem solvers who will be able to redress an inherent lack in the system
• The desire to promote equal partnerships in a system where artists and teachers can never be equal
• A blurring of expectation between the definitions: ‘artist’ and ‘art educator’
• An over-simplification of what an artist is, packaging them to fulfil a ‘required’ service
• Time, as a contributing factor to all above is not valued enough" Tapp participant

The General Praxis blog analysis is a great position piece for New Zealand educators - I have pinged it off to the artists and teachers I work with in the day job in the hope that it might catalyse a similar analysis here .. I want to explore the implications further

The complexity of analysis in the post clearly identifies why if we persist with describing learning as a journey we we will continue to be “Lost in the Sahel” when it comes to creativity. 

Note to anyone reading this post: The poetic writing and photography in this National Geographic Lost in the Sahel piece - is much better than the Artichoke post ... abandon the post and sink yourself in the article by Paul Salopek with photography by Pascal Maitre

Along Africa’s harsh frontier between desert and forest, crossing some lines can be fatal.
After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.

The Sahel itself is a line.

So is "Learning is a journey ..."

 

“There are too many heroes and not enough chocolate”

“Already, ads that once appeared in print are showing up on blogs. Bloggers stand to gain ever more of the advertising share for one simple reason: they can create custom content for advertisers. This is leading to a new style of blog that blurs the line between editorial and advertisement.” Web 3.0 Annalee Newitz New Scientist 15 March 2008 p63

When I think about edubloggers creating custom content for advertisers, it occurs to me that fretting about bloggers “blurring the line” with respect to Web 2.0 is “too little too late  thinking” ..... not only because creating custom content, for advertisers to place ads in, is entrenched day job practice for online marketers like Fairfax Media’s online Division Fairfax digital .... where advertising and content are essentially simulacra - but also because “blurring the line” happens all over in the landscapes of education ... an online edu_conference this week only affirmed my belief that marketing educashin and promoting those who will cynically or ignorantly promote educashin based initiative will always be with us .... educators are helplessly implicated in promotional marketing,  for much like Faifax digital, in the workforce of the 21^st Century learner the advertisement creates the activity/ creates the placement rather than the reverse.

Like those pimento and almond overstuffed olives sold across upmarket deli counters, the hierarchies of influence in education are over stuffed with the educashin gullible, and back filled with those made vulnerable by educashin flattery.  And yeah you are right some of them blog

The kindest thing you can think about it all is - They know not what they do to belong.

It has been a big week and I am trying not to think about it all and to concentrate instead on collecting my new learning.

I have been working two jobs this week – each day’s job extended by breakfast and/or late afternoon briefings/meetings ... and I have had some great new learning from my involvement helping teachers plan for  “concept curriculum” achievement objectives, learning intentions, learning experiences and assessment rubrics for   concepts of “Turangawaewae”, citizenship, culture, and sustainability using the new New Zealand Curriculum.

My only regret for the week is not reading  the “Be Green Drive” Freakonomics blog post before I took the gulley walk option on our split school site in Auckland on Wednesday -

I cannot wait to share this "drive don't walk" post with the teachers looking at reducing their carbon footprint in our Sustain ED Cluster 

At least some choices are beyond reproach environmentally. It is clearly better for the environment to walk to the corner store rather than to drive there. Right?

Now even this seemingly obvious conclusion is being called into question by Chris Goodall via John Tierney’s blog And Chris Goodall is no right-wing nut; he is an environmentalist and author of the book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.

Tierney writes:

If you walk 1.5 miles, Mr. Goodall calculates, and replace those calories by drinking about a cup of milk, the greenhouse emissions connected with that milk (like methane from the dairy farm and carbon dioxide from the delivery truck) are just about equal to the emissions from a typical car making the same trip. And if there were two of you making the trip, then the car would definitely be the more planet-friendly way to go.

But I am hitting Easter break so very tired ...

Grandpa to all formal measures – lost in his dementia – is especially insightful today

He described his experience in the dementia centre as living in a place where “there are too many heroes and not enough chocolate” [I brought the brie he requested yesterday instead of the chocolate he wanted today ... I am certain that tomorrow he will puzzle loudly over why I have brought chocolate and neglected to bring brie]

He describes himself as living in a place where when he came out of the tunnels and fed himself into the bean machine he emerged into a most beautifully made but ultimately bewildering foggy sky ... as living in a place where “the Americans” (aka anyone who can move around without a zimmer frame) who insist on shuffling around the saveloys and mashed potato on the lunch trolley had never considered that the weakness in the place lay with Lynda (the charge nurse) .... as living in a place where every question is  countered with a “wait until you see Lynda” answer ... a place where when you try to pin anything down it just keeps moving away from you ...a place where your zimmer frame keeps on going around and around and around.

I can identify with the “too many heroes’ – with feeling like I have been “being fed through a bean machine” and with the frustrations of an institutionally imposed reliance on the “wait until you see Lynda” for the answer – all of Grandpa’s musings ensure the relevance of that widgetbox   online countup counter I have set up for those - yet to arrive - “shortly and soon guidelines”  

Those shortly and soon guidelines ...

A  “shortly and soon” ICTPD cluster guideline alert pinged in yesterday

* This year there is a new expectation that all school principals will write a detailed report of their school progress for the Milestone reports. This is both designed for your own reflective purposes as well as the need to report to the Ministry in regards to outcomes of the programme. Guidelines for this are to be completed shortly and distributed to all clusters soon. Therefore schools leaders will need to be vigilant about data gathering practices that  support accurate reporting in this area from now on. National Facilitator ICT PD Programme

Now changing expectations is an unchanging expectation in the ICTPD clusters, but when aligned with “shortly and soon” thinking .... it gives me grief

Since we already expect our cluster principals to comment on the impact of the contract delivery within their individual schools at each milestone, the wriggle in this edict lies in the guidelines yet to be distributed.

For how can I ask our school leaders to be detailed and vigilant about gathering accurate data when we are six weeks into the term and the new guidelines for what they are now to report on have yet to arrive?

Even when we know the detail of what the guidelines include, capturing the progress of a cluster of schools is an interesting challenge for writers of the New Zealand ICTPD Cluster schools Milestone Reports.

I am struck by this newly articulated need for detailed progress reporting on each individual schools within the cluster, as well as (presumably) detailed progress reporting on the cluster as a whole.

I wonder if the guidelines will ask individual schools to evaluate and comment on what they contribute to the whole ...

That ....”If we removed a school from our cluster what would happen to the cluster as a whole?  So what does each school contribute to the progress of the whole cluster?” Thinking

– or will the guidelines remain trapped in an individualist focus on the schools themselves?

In an act of reckless (and probably furtive) textual scholarship, I’d like to gain access to the individual Milestone Reports from across all clusters since the programme began – to examine the records for how individual  ICTPD clusters represent progress in their Milestone reporting, to determine how the reporting of progress  changes within a cluster across the three years of the cluster funding, and to analyse whether the overall representation of progress by individual ICTPD clusters, has changed since its inception.

I guess I am interested in some kind of empirical measure of the diversity of milestone progress reporting – across all clusters at any one time, within a cluster over time, across all clusters since the inception of the cluster programme etc. 

And then once I have measures of the diversity of progress reporting. I am interested in the quality of the measures themselves –

Have cluster progress indicators become richer or blander? Has the increasing introduction of “Guidelines for reporting progress” resulted in a  “McDonaldisation” of measures of progress much like the overall biodiversity of bird species may remains high in an area yet the native species have been replaced by sparrow’s, blackbirds, mynah birds and thrush.

Fortunately for the people who have to work with me each day - I do not have access to the ICTPD cluster milestone archives,

.... but I do have a kind of Wikipedia like editorial record of our cluster/s involvement, archival copies of the thirty two ICTPD milestones we have written to date, the responses to each from CORE Education,  all the email exchanges, and the Administration and Support Handbooks (2003 to 2008) that advise clusters how to attempt this recording of progress.

When it comes to digital preservation I reckon my archives can button the button on all measures in Kenneth Thibodeau’s tripartite model for defining digital objects – physical, logical and conceptual.

“Thiibodeau .....offers a tripartite model for defining digital objects: first as physical objects (“signs inscribed on a medium” – for example the flux reversals on a magnetic tape); second, as logical objects (data as it is recognised and interpreted by particular processes and applications software; for example the binary composition of a Word .DOC file); and third, as conceptual objects (the object we deal with in the real world,” such as a digital photograph as it appears prima facie on the screen).  P3 Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination  Matthew G. Kirschenbaum .

So I guess I have enough material to reflect on all these challenges within the context of my own reporting next time we have three months of rain or while I await the “shortly and soon” guidelines.

Those new media literacies and social networking in The Old Elephant House

On Friday I was guest at a wedding in the grounds of Auckland Zoo .  I wanted to immerse myself in the ceremony and enduring ritual of a marriage celebration, but I also saw this as an opportunity to collect digital content on my new mobile phone – to experiment with mobile technology afforded digital stills, video and sound collected during the ceremony in the band rotunda and reception in the Old Elephant House.  I intended to use 21st Century technologies and literacies to communicate the “social networking” evident at an event framed on enduring ritual from the past ....  .

As those who know me might predict I didn’t get very far, I was too distracted by the event itself - the azure blue feathers on the plumptious breast of the peacock determinedly advancing on the drinks table, the elephant’s trunk seeking out the foliage pinned to the increasingly anxious groom , the zoo intercom crackling across the space around the band rotunda wishing good fortune to the new married keeper and her partner - I preferred to capture all of this with my memory rather than on my 1GB micro SD card.  And when I checked out the content I did capture the next day almost every image and sound features the official wedding photographer.

Hmmm ... seems I captured the capturer ... rather than any social networking between participants.

One of the refrains that plays on a loop in my mind is - how we can help 21st Century students use the new literacies to create and communicate new learning outcomes through collaboration and networking?  ....  I reckon a good place to start this thinking is Henry Jenkins ... he has unpacked some valuable start up thinking on this ...            

"This context places new emphasis on the need for schools and after school programs to devote attention to fostering what we are calling the new media literacies -- a set of cultural competencies and social skills which young people need as they confront the new media landscape. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking. These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills which should have been part of the school curriculum all along."
From Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Clarifying what the new media literacies involve nudges at the back of my mind every time I listen to a student podcast, interact with a student webpage, read a student blog or view a student created movies ... which means I have been trying to critique the critical literacies that the students have used/ failed to use  in their intended  communication for deep understanding for quite a while. 

And it is not an easy task ..

For whilst we have well established criteria and clearly outlined indicators – those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant targets and success criteria for strategies to meet the purpose of tasks within the primarily text based content of the old literacies in education, we do not seem to have not developed these to the same degree within the visual, audio, tactile etc participatory context of the new literacies.

Which is why I am so often made anxious when I listen to student created podcasts, view students’ digital movies and or read student blogs ....

When we have not identified indicators and specific, measurable, achievable, relevant targets and success criteria for strategies to meet the purpose of these new literacy tasks  –

When the most significant strategy available for student selection of the visual, audio, tactile media components, for manipulation and transformation of digital media,  is little more than a poorly identified cultural intuition.

Then I would argue that our ability to both, recognise and teach/ facilitate for deeper learning outcomes is compromised.

I am made even more uncomfortable when teachers eschew well established textual literacy standards in favour of a similarly ill defined cultural intuition as their students to assess the new content broadcast by students working in these new media landscapes – an approach that sees far too many of them confidently sharing cringe worthy student creations as examples of new literacy excellence.

Sitting in the audience, participating in the network on moments like these I remind myself of Henry Jenkin’s white paper caveat that youth must “not push aside old skills to make room for the new” ... something I fear is not given enough prominence when we explore new literacies and e Learning in some New Zealand classrooms.

A definition of twenty-first century literacy offered by the New Media Consortium (2005) is
“the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap.These include the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms” (p. 8).We would modify this definition in two ways. First, textual literacy remains a central skill in the twenty-first century. Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must be able to read and write. Youth must expand their required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new. Second, new media literacies should be considered a social skill. P19  Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

I try to ensure that textual literacy remains core when working with students and planning with teachers by an act of creative visualisation – by stripping any textual content from the aural, graphics, haptic and animations in the new media and imagining an educator’s reaction to it in isolation. Is pretty good as an Emperor’s new clothes strategy ... but this approach misses something important

Just as textual literacy is complicated by changes in the page interface - check out In the beginning was the word – A visualisation of the page as interface so synergies develop when aural, visual and digital transliteracies are added to textual content.

So we do need to persevere and elaborate on looking at learning outcomes through textual literacies - to work carefully to develop well established criteria and clearly outlined indicators – those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant targets and success criteria for strategies to meet the purpose of tasks within the visual, audio, tactile etc participatory context of the new literacies.

A significant challenge for educators. 

Warning: Greater Thinking Challenge Ahead

All this Artichokean thinking was not helped by the grudging realisation that our thinking about, and negotiation between, the multimedia of the new literacies is even further complicated - our thinking about the multiliteracies may well be betrayed by our immersion in the multimedia culture industry

Thinking about this in the context of student learning outcomes through the new literacies means that as well as risking betrayal of content when we work with the students in this way - we also risk betrayal of process

I can attempt to explain this with reference to one of my favourite 20th Century thinkers

As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

The “corrosive effect” of media on our creative and aesthetic minds is persuasively argued for by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944 ... and if they are right then our ability understand the new literacies and to help students communicate meaning through the new literacies may be undermined at a far deeper level than I have been fretting over in the post....

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

We live in the 21st Century participatory multimedia culture yet Adorno and Horkheimer’s 20th Century bolded claim has never been more true ...

To paraphrase Adorno and Horkheimer’s thinking ... 

Our ability to identify synergies and strategies that help students produce multimedia products to satisfy (meet, persuade)  consumer/ viewer/ audience needs and then encourage our students to adopt them for their own multiliteracy networking communication has been corrupted by the multiliteracies adopted by the producers of media for the masses – so what we do identify and teach as strategies for effective and persuasive communication of understanding risks limiting student  imaginings and reinforcing student needs for more of these “as soon as the film begins” like multiliteracy products.

All of which makes me ask:

How can we avoid betraying both content and process when we introduce blogging, videomaking, podcasting, wikis, webpages  and other Web2.0 applications (like social bookmarking, collaborative authorship [text, concept mapping, spreadsheets, timelines], image sharing, calendar sharing, video sharing, book sharing, voice sharing [pod casting], presentation sharing, social networking, communication text, communication voice, blogging, RSS feeds, digital storage, geographical mapping, customisable start pages etc)  as useful new literacies to the 21st Century learner?

How can we avoid education in the new literacies becoming an example of “corruptio optimi pessima” the corruption of the best is the worst of all?