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?

Comments

[nix]

It's an interesting phenomenon that we attend events, visit places and then attempt to record it on a tiny screen in order to share it with friends who in many cases were there. I can comment on this because I do it all the time.

Is it that the shared product of the mobile phone or the camera becomes some sort of societal glue? If I tag you in my Facebook picture then somehow you are beholden to me? Is this a modern day version of if I take your photo I have somehow taken your soul?

Secondly (I can't come up with an interesting segue to do it smoothly ...)

I love seeing kid's work. I love seeing kids work too. One of my concerns is that kids no longer have to work to produce and so a trivial end product become the object instead of the journey of learning to get there.

[Artichoke]

Ha - Will send you an "elephant_and_the_bridesmaids_08" jpg as societal glue Nix -

I am unpacking pages 19 and 20 in the Jenkins white paper - they provide good analysis that we can use to explain why simply using Web2.0 technologies and affordances can disappoint in terms of learning outcome - your and mine experience of trivial end product experience

Is revealling to ask how much of what Jenkins et al identify below goes on alongside the videomaking/ webchallenge/ student blogging/ animation/ podcasting/ secondlife appearances etc in school?

Beyond core literacy, students need research skills.Among other things, they need to know how to access books and articles through a library; to take notes on and integrate secondary sources; to assess the reliability of data; to read maps and charts; to make sense of scientific visualizations; to grasp what kinds of information are being conveyed by various systems of representation;to distinguish between fact and fiction, fact and opinion; to construct arguments and marshal evidence. If anything, these traditional skills assume even greater importance as students venture beyond collections that have been screened by librarians and into the more open space of the web. Some of these skills have traditionally been taught by librarians who, in the modern era, are reconceptualizing their role less as curators of bounded collection and more as information facilitators who can help users find what they need, online or off, and can cultivate good strategies for searching material.

Students also need to develop technical skills.They need to know how to log on, to search, to use various programs, to focus a camera, to edit footage, to do some basic programming and so forth.Yet, to reduce the new media literacies to technical skills would be a mistake on the order of confusing penmanship with composition. Because the technologies are undergoing such rapid change, it is probably impossible to codify which technologies or techniques students must know.

As media literacy advocates have claimed during the past several decades, students also must acquire a basic understanding of the ways media representations structure our perceptions of the world; the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and circulated; the motives and goals that shape the media they consume; and alternative practices that operate outside the commercial mainstream. Such groups have long called for schools to foster a critical understanding of media as one of the most powerful social, economic, political, and cultural institutions of our era.What we are calling here the new media literacies should be taken as an expansion of, rather than a substitution for, the mass media literacies.

And that's before we start looking at the new social skills and cultural competencies are needed - as Jenkins et al point out the skills listed above are only necessary - they are not sufficient if we want students who can take effective participatory roles in the new media culture

[lucychili]

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education

[Tony Forster]

a "trivial end product become the object instead of the journey of learning to get there"
There is a bewildering array of multimedia that kids can produce. Maybe we should concentrate on how it was produced rather than the product. What problems were encountered and solved? What judgements were made? What new understandings were synthesised?
The product can be very good but that might just represent good tools & templates.

[Artichoke]

I think you have identified a practical and appropriate solution for educators Tony – to focus on the explanation of process – the understanding evident in the judgements made rather than the glittering “select from a menu – paint by numbers” digitised product ...

There is a medical professor in Arizona Maryls Witte who looks at the questions asked by her research students rather than the content discovered – which would also be worth thinking about

By happenstance I am reading Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum . I think you would love it .....I am still sinking myself deeply in the thinking in Chapter 1 but it already offers some compelling new ways of looking at process and product with respect to digital technologies.

"At last in Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms we have our tactical plan for thinking inside the black box of digital media, for moving past 'screen studies' to a new take on electronic media informed by deep understanding of technological practices of inscription and storage. Kirschenbaum introduces a fresh and enlightening dichotomy, that of the interplay of formal and forensic inscription. This dichotomy becomes the raw material for cutting the key to a new critical apparatus for unlocking studies of digital media."
--Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, Germanic Collections, and Film & Media Collections, Stanford University Libraries

In his blog post :Lost and Found in Cyberspace Kirschenbaum makes an interesting observation about a simple sociological solution to capturing or (archiving) process

She just needs to start saving her versions. In fact, as storage costs continue to plummet and personal hard drives begin to edge up to the terabyte threshold, saving every state of every file is likely to become routine, the default. It will cost more to take the time to search a file system, locate a file, and then overwrite it than it will to simply keep it somewhere on a hard disk whose aerial density is at something 10,000 tracks and sectors per square inch.

Perhaps the saving of multiple versions of student product during the content creation process will become a more widespread expectation as we further explore new media literacies

[lucychili]

thats why i thought collaborative book on social aspects of education written by students in a wiki was interesting =) they have explicit collaboration and history for the process and the content is largely about social aspects of education? wikis are a nice medium for being able to see how people get there. even if that is excruciating when youre the person getting there =)

[Artichoke]

Thanks for the link Janet is a real example of Kirschenbaum's scholarship - and your identification of the power of the wiki here is prescient ...

Interestingly K includes "A Note on Wikipedia as a Scholarly Source of Record" in the Preface.

Check this bit out

In several places this book references Wikipedia as a scholarly source of record, usually for some specific point of technical documentation. Information technology is among the most reliable content domains on Wikipedia, given the high interest of such topics among Wikipedia readership and the consequent scrutiny they tend to attract. Moreover, the ability to examine page histories on Wikipedia allows a user to recover the editorial record of a particular entry, with every revision to the text date- time-stamped and versioned. Attention to these editorial histories can help users exercise sound judgement as to whether or not the information before them at any given moment is controversial, and I have availed myself of that functionality when deciding whether or not to rely on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia itself, whose developers leverage their software's content modeling to expose document histories with a precision, transparency, and granularity unprecedented in printed publications outside of the realm of genetic editions and textual scholarship, is a working example of the mechanisms I discuss herein

[botts]

at the end of the day we are still expecting our students to provide appropriate levels of information that attempt to demonstrate an understanding of some concept we have tried to convey to them.

the new media literacies simply provide a "different" way of presenting said information to what has been traditionally accepted.

my seven year old taught himself how to use powerpoint, animations and all, which i thought was jolly clever of him. however, he was using his powerpoint skills to present what would once upon a time have been a story on paper about the things he likes.

slide 1 - i like computers (doh!!!!)

slide 2 - i like to watch tv

slide 3 - i like reading books about pokemon

slide 4 - i can do flips on the trampoline

add clip art and photos and a soundtrack that daddy helped edit and it looks and sounds amazing - but its still just a story about what he likes to do.

surely as a teacher i need to be asking whether or not the presentation answers the question/provides the information/proves understanding of the concept.... if not, then i haven't done my job properly.

this week one of my colleagues who teaches graphic design brought me some 'reports' her diploma students had done. they were pretty and presented in nice folders and on good paper stock... but... i found whole paragraphs lifted directly from wikipedia (and other places), very little sign of anyone using even the most rudimentary of spell checkers, not a reference to be found either in text or as a list at the end of the report, headings missing, no indexes etc etc etc.

these students can build websites, edit video, send and receive text messages and draw beautiful pictures, but they have an incredibly limited knowledge/understanding of textual literacies. we'll send these reports back and i'll be going in to teach them how to "write a report" properly... because it doesn't matter how it looks - it just doesn't cut it as an effective or appropriate presentation of the information they need to be conveying.