Multi-Modal Literacies (and Mention of the Ong Collection Website)
Browsing NCTE’s “Multi-Modal Literacies” resource page, I found the following under “Multi-Modal Literacy Key Terms“:
Late age of print / secondary orality
According to Ben McCorkle, “we are living in what media theorist Jay Bolter has famously termed the late age of print, what literacy scholar Walter Ong calls the era of secondary orality. . . . Words are no longer static things, quiet black marks pressed onto a white page; instead, they float alongside sounds and images; they make meaning in their movements. They are visual, aural, and sometimes haptic. As such, their function as objects of literacy in changing in fundamental ways.”
Regular readers of this blog and people who have heard me talk about Ong’s digital turn will know that Ong didn’t stop with secondary orality, but also introduced the terms secondary visualism and secondary literacy. One of the unpublished items I’m arguing to include with the launch of the Ong Collection Web site, which I hope will be before the end of the year,(( I want to have a better sense of what will be on the site before I talk specifics, but we are currently digitizing some audio recordings of lectures and photos, and will will have some unpublished lectures and essays when the site first launches)) is Ong’s unpublished lecture “Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism.” It’s not earth-shattering or anything, and it was tailored to a seminary class (on preaching, if I’m remembering correctly), but it does extend Ong’s techno-cultural-noetic stages of media beyond secondary orality. Maybe someday the fact that Ong didn’t stop with secondary orality might be common knowledge among media and literacy theorists.
Any way, while the NCTE site is geared for K-12 education, it is worth a look. Since the CCCC position statement link is broken, I’ll link to CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments here. See also NCTE’s 2003 Resolution on Composing with Nonprint Media. The CCCC Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication rewrote that 2003 position statement as a resolution for CCCC, which was passed in 2005 (see resolution 5).
Link to NCTE’s Multi-Modal Literacies via academichack.
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Twitter Feed- Visited Arbor Day Farm in Nebraska City yesterday, which is where Arbor Day was started. I should remember to take pictures.
- A good start to what I hope to be a good day.
- Trying to get this week on the right track.
