“From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.
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—Elizabeth Daley
I added a new “Literacy” department today as it seems like this concept is getting more an more of my attention. Part of it is due to Lawrence Lessig and his book Free Culture, which is literally keeping me awake at night thinking about its implications for education. I want to explore some of those ideas further here in a kind of brain dumpy, random way as there is much to get my brain wrapped around and I do, after all, have all of this digital paper to use up.
Early on in the book, Lessig includes a definition of media literacy from Dave Yanofsky of Just Think!:
Media literacy is the ability…to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it’s constructed, the way it’s delivered, and the way people access it.
Lessig emphasizes the importance of getting kids to learn how to “write” media, to understand its “grammar.” This, obviously, is a messy process, one that I would suspect few teachers could accomplish well. “Few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is,” he says, then adds later:
One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what has been created.
And he quotes Elizabeth Daley, dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television, who says:
From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.
As Lessig says, the crucial point right now is that the 21st Century could be both read and write, making the aim of this literacy to “empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express.”
From my English teacher background, one of the most interesting parts of this is the expansion of the definition of literacy to go beyond the primarily passive relationship we currently have with the various texts in our lives. That’s not to say that understanding text isn’t important, but “reading” the text is no longer the only way that students can construct meaning. On some level, we’ve known that. We ask students to interpret with music or art or poetry or any other number of ways. But the major shift, as Lessig sees it, the NEW thing about all of this is what we’ve been talking about in this community since the beginning: publishing.
But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition—not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.
He then goes into a long discussion of the potentials of Weblogs not just as a vehicle for publishing these constructions but as a way for people to engage in meaningful discourse that he believes could in some ways resuscitate our democracy.
Lessig’s premise for Free Culture is that for creativity to flourish, we must be able to create derivatives of work that has come before us, to take old ideas and products and better them with our own innovation, and that current restrictions of copyright are drastically reducing the freedoms we have to do that work. In an educational sense, he quotes John Seely Brown of Xerox, who says:
Kids are “shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and this tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you’re doing in your garage. You are tinkering with a community platform…You are tinkering with other people’s stuff. The more you tinker the more you improve.” The more you improve, the more you learn. This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it, “the Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of intelligence.”
Lessig says “tinkering with culture teaches as well as creates.”
Now I know this constructivist sentiment is nothing really new here. In fact, to me, one of the most powerful potentials of this is the idea that kids can now contribute to the larger body of knowledge, that the meanings they construct can be shared beyond the classroom. It moves away from the old “what does the teacher want?” game to “what is the truth here, what is the importance of this content, and how can I construct my own meaning that contributes to a wider understanding of it?” Or something like that. And that’s powerful stuff. For instance, look at Ken’s response to my post yesterday.
Couldn’t a good science teacher and a group of willing students make a dynamite wiki site teaching themselves and providing resources for others to learn these powerful incidents in the history of science? Wouldn’t you learn pretty much everything you need to know to pass the test in the process of making the site? And couldn’t you very nicely use a group weblog to support the question-asking and the stages of inquiry that lead up to the wiki presentation? Couldn’t a decent educational researcher run up some test scores on pilot and control groups and see if the software, approached rightly, deserved a place on the list of best practices?
Why can’t blogs and wikis raise test scores? They can certainly facilitate the teaching of the core content standards, and they can potentially make learning more meaningful. And yes, we need some research.
Enough for now. I haven’t even gotten to my initial point which was something about how in concert with this new media literacy of active, constructive learning, there is an Internet literacy which deals with blogs and wikis and rss and the like. If we want to achieve the vision, we need to understand the tools. Maybe tomorrow…
Blogs and wikis most likely won’t raise test scores because the tests aren’t measuring the kind of deep learning facilitated by the technology and process of online collaboration. Blogs and wikis won’t help students memorize disconnected facts and formulas, which are what the tests tend to be assessing. But…if we started assessing real learning and ignored the meaningless memorization, then these new approaches would probably blow all the old methods out of the water.
I really like this post as it brings out some of the stronger points from Lessig’s ideas … and Will of course, you allude to the idea of constructivism and how teachers can use such technologies to prepare students for media and technological literacy. However, I think something at the end here falls apart when we start to think about the paradigm of test scores, and control groups (and even to some extent best practices). We lose, in the pursuit of specific ‘scores’ and specific ‘outcomes’ the constructivist ‘essence’ (to use a positivist term in the attempt to debunk positivist thought) of learning; that learning in fact may not go the way the the teacher intends it to happen. While teaching and learning practices have changed to some extent, test scores are still remnants of this old paradigm.
Good analysis, Will. It’s stuff I’ve thought about for more than a decade. In fact, you might want to take a look at an essay on “hyperliteracy” (coined term) that I wrote WAY back in 1994.
I re-discovered my own essay last year and posted it to my weblog:
http://www.tenreasonswhy.com/weblog/archives/2003/08/28/hyperliteracy.html