Some thoughts on what we often mean when we talk about technological literacy
Today’s Inside Higher Ed‘s article “Technologically Illiterate Students” begins:
Say you are an employer evaluating college students for a job. Perusing one candidate’s Facebook profile, you notice the student belongs to a group called “I Pee My Pants When I’m Drunk.” What is your first thought?
It should not be that this student is unemployable for being an intemperate drinker, said Susan Zvacek, director of instructional development at the University of Kansas — though that it might mean that, too. Mainly, though, it should suggest something else — something that might be more relevant to the student’s qualifications.
“What it tells me,” Zvacek said, “is that the student is technologically illiterate.”
The piece then goes on to offer Zvacek’s definition of technological literacy:
“The digital divide used to be about the hardware haves and have-nots,” she said. “What we’re seeing now is that it’s less about who has hardware, but who has access to information; who has those problem-solving skills. And that’s going to be the digital divide that we’re going to see in the future … the ability to deal with information.”
The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”
On the one hand, I want to stand back and suggest that the issue raised in the anecdote isn’t about technological awareness but rhetorical awareness, about the construction of the self. And it is. At the same time, however, Zvacek is getting at something else. Zvacek is responding to the US Department of Education’s definition of technological literacy as knowing how to use a computer, and in doing so, she’s not alone.1
I want to push this issue farther though, push it beyond the concepts of computer literacy or technological literacy. In fact, I want to push us beyond the use of the word literacy itself for a whole host of reasons, first and foremost because literacy is, technically, about letters, about the written word, and that positions the issue squarely in a particular techno-cultural-noetic milieu.2
I was fumbling with this very subject when I wrote about technological literacy in The Making of a Technorhetorician: A Technological Literacy Collage, which I wrote earlier this year as an example for students working on their own technological literacy collages. I’m unhappy with what I wrote there, unhappy, in fact, as I was writing it. The problem, I’ve realized, is that I fell into the trap I try to push students away from. I let the imperiousness of literacy muddle my thinking3 The issue, I so fumblingly hinted at in my technological literacy collage is not literacy of any sort but awareness rooted in orality-literacy studies and media ecology. Its the kind of awareness that Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong spent their careers trying to teach us.
As long as we keep rooting this issue in particular techno-cultural-noetic contexts, we’re going to keep fumbling along, never to get it right. The awareness I’m talking about here, and the awareness I think Susan Zvacek is getting at without realizing it, is rooted in an awareness of McLuhan’s dictum/maxim “The medium is the massage,” that “[a]ll media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.”4 That is, McLuhan’s awareness of how media work as environments:
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a working knowledge of the way media work as environments. (26)
It can be hard, at first, to convince students that you’re actually talking about something relevant to their lives when you jump around from such topics as the difference between alphabets, syllabaries, and logograms; renaissance perspectivism and railroads; Homeric myth and encyclopedias; Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Absurdest theater, and the Fluxus Movement; John Cage and Charlotte Moorman, the TV-bra wearing cellist and performance artist. As McLuhan knew, you’ve got to pull the rug out from under their (our) feet before we can get beneath the surface and understand the deep structures. As I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere from time to time, focusing on surface, making the mistake of being too rooted in a particular techno-cultural-noetic perspective, leads us to focus on the wrong things. My go-to example here is the belief that oral poets must be illiterate. Early scholars of oral tradition too quickly jumped to this conclusion that oral poets must be illiterate because the oral poets they studied were illiterate, even while there was evidence to the contrary, and it mistaken notion was perpetuated for far too long.5 As Ong argued, writing is imperious. It clouds our perspective. We are so rooted in literacy and in print culture that we far too often fail to realize it’s not our natural noetic state or that it’s not inherently better than other noetic states. This is the reason why we use literacy as the metaphor for everything, and in doing so, we fail to recognize that when we think we’re talking about literacy we are sometimes actually talking about awareness of media as environments.
Ultimately, this is why I keep teaching The Medium is the Massage, why I keep returning to it semester after semester even as I resist becoming one of those teachers who always teaches the same thing semester after semester. A year ago, a student told me our university president walked by, saw the student reading The Medium is the Massage, and said, “People still teach that?” Fortunately, this particular student had gotten McLuhan’s message by that time and she was grooving on it big time. She had come to understand McLuhan’s message and its relevance to her 21st-century life. I keep teaching McLuhan because it is relevant to all our 21st-century lives and it will be relevant to the lives of our 30th-century ancestors.
Hmmm…Timothy Leary came up with the dictum “turn on, tune in, drop out” at McLuhan’s urging. (( In Fashbacks, Leary laments that people misinterpreted this as meaning “Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity” rather than asking them to alter their consciousness so to live better.) In that spirit, let me offer a new dictum, one to keep in mind when we think we’re talking about literacy: Peal back, delve deep, be aware.
- For those of you unfamiliar with the subject, let me suggest Cindy Selfe’s Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Paying Attention; Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives from the United States, and Stewart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age as three good starting points. [↩]
- See, for instance, Anne Wysocki and Johndan Johnson-Eilola’s “Blinded By the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy for a Metaphor for Everything Else?” in Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. [↩]
- If you’re really curious as to what I mean by this, see Walter J. Ong’s “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought” (The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50; Rpt. in Faith and Contexts. Vol. 4: Additional Studies and Essays 1947-1996. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 143-168.). [↩]
- The Medium is the Massage, 26. [↩]
- Scholars of oral tradition, including such people as Albert Lord who was one of scholars who first promoted the error, have also worked to correct this perception. For a good, introductory text on this subject, see John Miles Foley’s How to Read an Oral Poem. [↩]
TEI by Example Project
From the TEI by Example homepage:
TEI By Example offers a series of freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Besides a general introduction to text encoding, step-by-step tutorial modules provide example-based introductions to eight different aspects of electronic text markup for the humanities. Each tutorial module is accompanied with a dedicated examples section, illustrating actual TEI encoding practise with real-life examples. The theory of the tutorial modules can be tested in interactive tests and exercises. The tutorial materials are contextualised with a tools section, providing both an annotated overview of state-of-the-art XML encoding technology, and a TBE validator application, allowing you to test your TEI encoding as you type! [Read more.]
McLuhan Remix: A Video Essay
McLuhan Remix is three-part video essay with supporting web site created by Jamie O’Neil aka Kurt Weibers, a video/performance artist and assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo. Below I include the McLuhan Remix: Prologue and first paragraph of the web site intro.
The Medium is the Mix
Remixing is the most important aesthetic and epistemological outcome of the technologies of digital media and the Internet. This video-essay is intended for today’s students (digital natives) who are studying McLuhan’s words on paper. McLuhan knew how to mix concepts to create a powerful reaction. He utilized electronic communication channels (audio and video) in his time, and he spoke through them with incredible fluency. Today, YouTube mash-ups are an emerging form of literacy, rarely used for scholarly purposes. This is because the digital era of “cut&paste” has mostly been problematical for traditional academics (it is unacceptable to remix a term paper). But networked, digital authoring also greatly expands the range of expressivity… How then would McLuhan expect an essay to be composed today, nearly a half-century after his time? [Read more.]
Since I keep introducing The Medium is the Massage to students as an exemplar of electronic composition in the print medium as well as a theoretical text, it’s been my intent to rework the FYC Annotating McLuhan project into a video project remixing the book (both the print and audio versions), research, and video and audio recordings of McLuhan. For the time being, I’m going to use the video essay as a supplementary text in the current FYC course and plan on using it as a theoretical text and exemplar in next fall’s Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text course.
Via Lance Strate.
UCLA’s A Digital Humanities Manifesto
Via the Humanist Discussion Group, the UCLA’s Digital Humanities and Media Studies have published a A Digital Humanities Manifesto using the Institute for the Future of the Book‘s CommentPress, a modified version of WordPress that allows comments to be assigned to paragraphs rather than at the end of the blog post. It’s a 29 paragraph document. Here’s the first five:
Digital humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated.
Like all media revolutions, the first wave of the digital revolution looked backwards as it moved forward. It replicated a world where print was primary and visuality was secondary, while vastly accelerating search and retrieval. Now it must look forwards into an immediate future in which the medium specific features of the digital become its core.
The first wave was quantitative, mobilizing the vertiginous search and retrieval powers of the database. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, even emotive. It immerses the digital toolkit within what represents the very core strength of the Humanities: complex
Interdisciplinarity/transdisciplinarity/multidisciplinarity are empty words unless they imply changes in language, practice, method, and output.
The digital is the realm of the open: open source, open resources, open doors. Anything that attempts to close this space should be recognized for what it is: the enemy. [Read more.]
A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities
Via the Humanist Discussion Group:
On March 18th, 2009, digital humanists from around the world are planning to collectively document their day, and we are looking for interested participants!
A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (ADLDH) is a community project that will bring together digital humanists to document what they do on one day, March 18th. It is an autoethnography project by
digital humanists about the digital humanities. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, “Just what do computing humanists really do?” Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work online.To participate, please complete the application form by January 30th. Apply yourself or encourage your colleagues and students to join in. We will accept reasonable applications that provide different perspectives on what it is to do computing in the humanities. We are looking for a diversity of participants from different regions, backgrounds, roles, and disciplinary perspectives.
More information can be found at: http://tapor.ualberta.ca/taporwiki/index.php/Day_in_the_Life_of_the_Digital_Humanities
“English Downfall”: A Kairos 13.2 Disputatio Section Text
Cheryl Ball, Editor of Kairos, decided to “leak” this forthcoming Disputatio section text pre-MLA.
New Journal: Journal of Virtual Worlds Research
Via grockwell: Research Notes, I see there’s a new online, open-access digital culture journal: The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. From their focus and scope section:
The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is an online, open access academic journal that adheres to the highest standards of peer review and engages established and emerging scholars from anywhere in the world. The Journal of Virtual Worlds Research is a transdisciplinary journal that engages a wide spectrum of scholarship and welcomes contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect virtual worlds research. Read more
TEI Encoding of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues
Via grockwel, Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” overlaid with Text
Encoding Initiative (TEI) encoding. See A TEI Video Widget? to learn more about the origins of this video and the Text Encoding Initiative to learn more about TEI encoding.
Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies and Other Digital English Studies Texts
Next week, I’ll be giving a guest lecture on digital English studies to Gina Merys’ “Entering a Professional Dialogue” class, which is the second of two English major gateway courses here at Creighton. While I will spend some time discussing production, Bob Whipple is giving a guest lecture on computers and writing, so I’m going to focus on making connections with linguistics, literature, creative writing, theory, and education. To both narrow this beast of a topic down and provide some sort of coherent narrative, I’m going to give an orality-literacy studies/media ecology contextualization of the digital (English studies always has been technologized) and suggest that digital technologies both allow us to do traditional practices more easily and open up new possibilities for theory and practice. I’ll give some examples, focus on a couple of cool things they as new English majors can do, and provide a list of resources for further study.
Since the presentation’s a week from today, I’m moving from the general conception phase to actual presentation. And that’s why I’m so excited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens announcement today on the Humanist Discussion Group listserv that Blackwell has made freely available its A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Yes, it’s free. It’s cool. And it’s just in time as far as I’m concerned.
And since I’m mentioning the Companion to Digital Literary Studies, I guess I’ll also mention that Blackwell made its A Companion to Digital Humanities available for free some time ago. Another cool, free resource for those of you looking for such things.
And since I’m mentioning such things, I’ll also remind everyone that the complete, pre-print version of Electronic Textual Editing, a joint venture by the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Scholarly Editions and Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, is still freely available online. Pre-print means that the online version has not been through the MLA’s editorial and production process.
On being plagiarized
As we all know, one of the problems of posting our work publicly is it can be taken by others and presented as their own work. In a post about Hugin and Munin, Dark Raven has incorporated my own musings on Odin’s two ravens as a mythic representation of the interconnection of thought and memory as understood in medieval memory theory verbatim and without citation.
A Google Alert drew my attention to the use of machina memorialis in relation to Hugin and Munin, and at first I thought, “cool, someone’s citing me, I want to see what they’re saying.” Quite disappointed to find that they’re not saying anything new. Dark Raven’s added an introduction to who the ravens are, the relevant passage from “Grímnismál” as well as the passage from Snorri’s Edda that I included, added some cool images, and reversed the order of my two paragraphs. The plagiarized passages from Dark Raven’s blog read as such:
This legend is at least as old as the 13th Century when Snorri wrote the Prose Edda. We also find reference to the ravens in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the manuscript which contains the peom “Grímnismál,” “Grimnir’s Sayings.” We know, however, that the Codex Regius is a copy of another manuscript and it is believed many of the poems are much older than the thirteenth-century manuscript date. Likewise, exactly how far back Hugin and Munin date is unclear, but images of Odin and his two ravens are found in art dating to the Migration Period (ca. 400 – 600 CE).
In these two ravens I see a mythic representation of the connection between thought and memory. Our ability to think allows us to access and make use of our memories. And our memories, whether they are naturally or artificially stored, represent that which we know, what we call knowledge. Just as Hugin and Munin are separate but closely related entities, thought and memory are discrete but connected cognitive functions.Thought allows us to make use of our memories by means of reminiscentia, while at the same time our memories serve as a machina memorialis, as the engine of thought. Thought and memory being knowledge, must be shared, just as the ravens shared there knowledge with Odin.
The passages, from my web site, read thusly:
In these two ravens I see a mythic representation of the connection between thought and memory. Our ability to think allows us to access and make use of our memories. And our memories, whether they are naturally or artificially stored, represent that which we know, what we call knowledge. Just as Hugin and Munin are separate but closely related entities, thought and memory are discrete but connected cognitive functions.Thought allows us to make use of our memories by means of reminiscentia, while at the same time our memories serve as a machina memorialis, as the engine of thought.
This legend is at least as old as the 13th Century when Snorri wrote the Prose Edda. We also find reference to the ravens in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius, the manuscript which contains the peom “Grímnismál,” “Grimnir’s Sayings.” We know, however, that the Codex Regius is a copy of another manuscript and it is believed many of the poems are much older than the thirteenth-century manuscript date. Likewise, exactly how far back Hugin and Munin date is unclear, but images of Odin and his two ravens are found in art dating to the Migration Period (ca. 400 – 600 CE).
Dark Raven hasn’t even bothered to fix my typos.
For the record, I don’t mind finding my words on someone else’s blog. Hell, some of my blog posts are little more than someone else’s words. Blogs can and do function as commonplace books. It’s the link, the acknowledgement, that I’d like to see.
Twitter Feed- Four separate sets of plans canceled on me this weekend. With few friends in this state, that's an epic failure.
- One class down and one to go.
- The Call of Cthulhu in Under 2 Minutes http://nblo.gs/7sqXb
