So, as I understand the intent here, this course considers "literacies" to refer to different modalities to process or learn information, and "new literacies" to refer to modalities that are enabled by relatively recent technologies, especially digital ones.
Taking the idea of "new literacy" as given for the moment (though I doubt its utility and reality and will write about that later), what are the pitfalls of, say, "Google literacy", the ability to find out almost anything in seconds with universal web search? Well ... Socrates got that right. People will have the appearance of wisdom but with no knowledge actually "in their heads", can they think usefully about a subject? Obviously there are huge benefits to learning facts as needed from your smartphone or other screen, but very few good things come unmixed with benefits.
I consider email a "new literacy", although obviously it's a development of paper mail and the telegraph before it. Email taught us to value immediacy (which led to texting and thus Twitter), and led to the development of a new skill: rapidly sorting "junk" text from valuable. Someone routinely receives 500 emails per day, of which 5 are personally important, 45 may be of some actual signifance, and 400 should be deleted unread. We all know someone who hasn't learned the skill of deleting unread, and wastes much time and cognition on worthless email. I'm not speaking of spam here, just email that has zero relevance to the reader.
So one thing a new literacy does is select people (in the evolutionary sense) based on new criteria. Slow readers will find most office jobs very hard to do in the 21'st Century. Slow "filterers" who can't quickly recognize useless items will likewise be less efficient, not just in a business setting but trying to use new media such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Snapchat. The criteria for social as well as financial success have changed.
I contend, therefore, that "filtering selections rapidly" is a new evolutionary driver, which was far less important before the invention of email and its children.
"People will have the appearance of wisdom but with no knowledge actually 'in their heads', can they think usefully about a subject? "
ReplyDeleteI believe this is what Durrant and Green were referring to in "Digital literacy and the new technologies in school education: Meeting the l(IT)eracy challenge?" when they talk about the Critical Dimension. In order to meet the literacy challenge, students AND teachers need to be able to operate the technology, that learning is more than just operating the technology, and be able to assess and evaluate software and other technology resources.
In your example of "Google Literacy," students need to be able to think critically about the facts in order to gain any knowledge.
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ReplyDeleteGreetings, Carl and Ismini:
ReplyDeleteThis was a great article and both of you have great responses towards the information. However, I do have some disagreements with the statements of "wisdom but with no knowledge actually in their heads". In the 21st century now that we do have Google and Smartphone technologies how does one categorize a person as 'not having knowledge in their head' when they have access at their fingertips? For instance, In NYC the MTA has now introduced the Kiosks. A person may have been a patron for many decades and travels on the F line as a part of their daily commute from Queens to Brooklyn. Now is it a requirement for a person to know every stop on the F line and connecting trains possibly to the E, A, or the D? Absolutely not. The computers on the trains will tell you exactly where you are and if you're inside the stations with a Kiosk it will direct you with information towards your destination.
With stating that not all information is to be retained indefinitely as function of work or necessity of life. People use technology in the capacity to where they do not have to think as much but also to improve efficiency. If a person misspells a word the autocorrect will fix it for them which will allow them to type faster.
People also use technology because of the flow of information. Stock traders rely of instant information. In fact they've programmed computers to sort or filter through many government and institutional databases of interest to single out code-words. If house words such as 'white house' and 'bomb' are in the same sentence from a source like 'associated press' (as this was the case in 2012) the computer would automatically dump stocks without any human interaction thus driving the markets down. I'm not a stupid person, I'm about to have two master's degrees and a PhD, but I don't know my mother's phone number because it's saved in my cellphone and other electronic resources. I'll always have access to it so there is no need to remember the information.
As long as a person has access to information they do not need to remember it as long as the circumstances does not require it professionally or personally. Lastly, a person does not have to be academically knowledgeable in order to be wise.
Interesting debate as to whether intelligence is predicated on the memorization of information or how to process and think critically about profound complex ideas etc. I wonder. We have 'information' and is that knowledge? What does that mean in terms of new literacy...... Good work
ReplyDeleteI agree with Pierre, because knowledge is from the ‘use’ and repeated use of the technology and blogs. Users tap into their information every day and get the practice over and over. The gain knowledge as they go. Marilyn
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