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?
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