Blogs and/as Digital Literacy?
7 05 2007Does literacy in the twenty-first century now extend into the realm of digital literacy, including the ability to read and write on the World Wide Web?
The idea of literacy - being able to read, write, communicate, and comprehend - is at the very heart of learning and education. While there is a reasonable assumption that university students arrive literate in the classical sense, there is as well an expectation that the skills of literacy will improve and deepen with higher education. The digital era has added further complexity to the issue of literacy since the core skills needs to read, write and communicate are no longer (if they ever were) purely textual skills; rather being literate today often extends to the idea of digital literacy - being able to read, write and communicate across the world wide web and other digital arenas where communication isn’t just about crafting words, but also images, sounds, video and other multimedia forms. Moreover, literacies are increasingly about communicating with a larger (potential) audience, so not just thinking about one-to-one modes, but one-to-many communication more often than not.
Jill Walker, a prolific academic blogger from the University of Bergen, has written in a slightly different way about literacies in the web era, arguing that universities need to teach what she calls ‘network literacy’:
Most important, though, is the need to teach our students […] network literacy. We need to work out how we can teach writing in a distributed, collaborative environment, because this is the environment our students are going to live in. Network literacy means linking to what other people have written and inviting comments from others, it means understanding a kind of writing that is a social, collaborative process rather than an act of an individual in solitary. It means learning how to write with an awareness that anyone may read it: your mother, a future employer or the person whose work you’re writing about. [Jill Walker, ‘Weblogs: Learning in Public’, On the Horizon, 13, 2 (2005): 112-118]
From Jill’s writing, we’re left with a number of similar points to those already raised by Mark Pegrum: digital literacy is about getting comfortable writing for an audience (even a microcosm constituted by a tutorial group or class group), not just writing in a vacuum or a student-to-teacher (one-to-one) mode; and digital literacies are also about being able to incorporate more and more peer feedback and input, or writing collaboratively, not in isolation.
Blogs are a powerful arena for learning and teaching in part, at least, because they are a stable and recognisable form which encourages these sort of network literacies. I would argue, too, that blogs aren’t just about network literacies - although these aspects are extremely important. Rather, blogs are also key because their architecture increasingly is about mixing media forms other than text - be that image, sound, video (such as YouTube clips) or audio (such as mp3 files and podcasts). Henry Jenkins, the director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, has also written extensively on the idea of digital literacies and in a recent article (‘From YouTube to YouNiversity’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 53, Issue 24, Page B9) added these thoughts:
Blogs represent a powerful tool for engaging in these larger public conversations. At my university, we noticed that a growing number of students were developing blogs focused on their thesis research. Many of them were making valuable professional contacts; some had developed real visibility while working on their master’s degrees; and a few received high-level job offers based on the professional connections they made on their blogs. Blogging has also deepened their research, providing feedback on their arguments, connecting them to previously unknown authorities, and pushing them forward in ways that no thesis committee could match. Now all of our research teams are blogging not only about their own work but also about key developments in their fields. We have redesigned the program’s home page, allowing feeds from these blogs to regularly update our content and capture more of the continuing conversations in and around our program. We have also started offering regular podcasts of our departmental colloquia and are experimenting with various forms of remote access to our conferences and other events.
Blogging, following Henry Jenkins, can also be about building and deepening those networks of ideas and research which are what universities are (hopefully) best at. Ultimately, though, to make the point, I can’t just use words; instead I’d like to turn to this clip by Michael Wesch, as Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology from Kansas State University:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/6gmP4nk0EOE" width="425" height="350"/]
Following the spirit of the argument, then: what do you think? Are blogs a key platform for developing digital literacy?
Blogs and/as Digital Literacy?…
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I love the music to that clip Tama - it’s so victorious and pleased with itself. It raises my critical hairs. It makes me want to complicate the blog party by asking who’s invited, who can’t afford to come, who’s got other stuff to do, who’s not interested and why? You know I think digital literacy is really important, but I wonder if we can talk about social and political contexts too.
Alison, you are, of course, correct - any talk of digital literacy has to take into account that the digital is only available in certain places and only meaningfully usable in certain social and political contexts! That said, I’m more of the opinion that we should at thinking about how to provoke thinking about digital literacies in non-Western and poor countries and contexts, too. For example, in some African farming communities, they have no access to desktop computers, and no access to the internet, but there is ready access to mobile phones and txt message facilities (even if the weekly budget can only support one or two messages being sent). I suspect this context the short-hand of txt messaging is incredibly important to understand since every character saved has a far more substantial economic value to the phone user. I would concede, of course, that it would take some serious developments before blogs would be part of that environment!
I can see how the clip can be read as self-congratulatory (although I suspect that the choice of music by Wesch was at least, in part, limited by what music was available without copyright restrictions). It nevertheless provokes some useful thinking, too, about unanchoring from ‘text’ in a modern sense and linearity and so forth, but not necessarily in postmodern forms (which is not to say it can’t be read through postmodernism, but often the developments of digital textuality and so forth are done without conscious positioning in that [meta] framework.) Also, being a geek, I found it rather catchy and not unlike [eek! - double negative] the music to 1980s videogames!
[…] far more than just another web-based learning module. In supporting different types of content, as Tama Leaver pointed out, blogs give students the ability to work to their own strengths or interests without […]
[…] Blogs and/as Digital Literacy? […]
Yes, digital literacy good. Mmmmmm.
But to be honest I think I will have to evolve a bit before I can really get any great intellectual benefit from, for example, academic blogs or even online articles.
All well and good in theory, of course. Open access, communication, networks - it’s all fantastic. However, I can’t read on screen very well. It’s physically uncomfortable. I can scan, flick and surf, but I can’t really process anything unless it’s on paper. The articles I can print out, but it would defeat the purpose of blogs to do that.
Now, clearly, I try. I have a blog. I read blogs. But it’s a lot easier for me to read film reviews or heirhead gossip online than it is to follow an actual argument. Not a single one of my own blog posts actually deals with my research. And, case in point, I haven’t read the above post in full. I’ve read bits of it, some of them in order, and I think I have a vague idea of what it was saying, but for some reason my internet-based attention span isn’t very good, and I just can’t take in much information this way.
I’m convinced eventually everyone will be virtually connected in some way (academia perhaps being a convenient first stop), and there will be good and bad things about that. I, however, will be the decidedly un-cool (or whatever word the young’uns will be using then) suburban mother embarrassing her children with daggy stories about “I remember when vlogs were the new thing - do they still call them vlogs? Now, pass me the real newspaper…”
Sanna, You make some important points, not least of all that reading and thinking is contextual; I have to admit, despite being something of a blog fanatic, I still print off long posts to read on paper (I, too, feel my eyes burning away as I read too much on-screen).
The other thing you mentioned which I think is vitially important is the bite-(or byte)-size nature of a lot of blogging. While that means the form less suited to long complex arguments (and I think the most I’ve ever gotten students to blog is 1000 words, and that was too long), it is good for sparking thoughts, introducing ideas and so forth. Indeed, one of the skills many people lack is how to write forcefully in LESS WORDS, not more! Understanding attention spans and prefereed reading styles and modes may, indeed, be one of the core things we have to explore when looking at what makes literacy is certain digital contexts! (That is, communicating well, using the medium for what it does best, not just unproblematically replicating existing modes in a new form!)
We commonly hear that reading on the screen is about 25% slower than reading on paper, but I’m not aware of recent empirical work in this area (though that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any!). An old article on this subject (but with a brief 2005 update) is Jakob Nielsen’s 1997 “Why web users scan instead of read” at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/whyscanning.html There are some other useful ideas in this very short piece.