Resources - Discussion Papers

New Literacies for the Twenty-First Century
From Page to Screen

Connected Learning: The Learning Technologies in Schools Conference
Melbourne Convention Centre
August 9-10

Dr Ilana Snyder
Faculty of Education
Monash University
Clayton 3168
Phone: 9905 2773
Email: ilana.snyder@education.monash.edu.au

Introduction

This paper is about literacy, technology and learning in the context of a rapidly changing world - a world in which the pace of change has never been greater and its impact never more far-reaching. Of all the changes that the world is currently experiencing, those associated with the growing presence of digital media and telecommunication technologies are, perhaps, the most profound. No one is able to escape the impact of these changes as they shape the material and cultural conditions in which we all live and work.

The new technologies have not only assumed a significant cultural presence, they have also become the focus for hotly contested social struggles in which educators, publishers, commercial hardware and software producers, parents, governments and the telecommunication players of the corporate world vie for position (Hawisher & Selfe 1997). Given the importance of the intellectual territory of literacy and technology studies, and the challenges educators will face in the coming century, these few years at the century's end are an appropriate time for the profession to pause and consider the implications of the new technologies for literacy education.

The new technologies first appeared in educational settings in the late 1970s. Since that time, there have been important changes to literacy practices associated with their use. Whether the technology is word processing, email, hypertext or the Internet, these technologies alter how language, both written and visual, is produced, processed and used. The application of these technologies influences the generation, manipulation, storage, retrieval and revision of texts as well as the products at the end. These products may be anything from a printed paper document to a hypertext web that exists only in electronic form. Further, these technologies offer us new spaces in which to create texts - spaces that are different from those that have preceded them. As a result, we cannot continue to conceive of text as something located exclusively on a page, in a printed book. The new writing spaces include the screen where text is displayed and the electronic memory in which it is stored.

It is important to establish at an early point in this discussion that the emergence of new literacy spaces and practices, signified here as the move from page to screen, does not necessarily signal the death of the printed book. The introduction of a new technology of writing does not automatically render older ones obsolete. For example, even though printing completely replaced handwriting in book production, it did not spell the end for handwriting. Rather, the boundaries between the two writing technologies blurred. Today pen and paper serve for notes and personal communications; word processing and typewriting are for texts not ready or appropriate for typesetting. The future of writing is not a linear progression in which new technologies usurp earlier ones. A more likely scenario is that a number of technologies will continue to co-exist, interact, even to complement each other.

As literacy educators, we already share a number of understandings about the influences of digital technologies. We know that the use of these technologies affects how we read and write, how we teach reading and writing and how we describe literacy practices. However, moving from a recognition that literacy practices are different when they are used to an understanding of how writing, writers and written forms change, is more difficult.

In this paper, I describe some of the complex connections between literacy practices and the use of the new technologies. I also examine the implications of their use for pedagogy and curriculum within literacy settings. Integral to my argument is the belief that as literacy educators, we cannot afford to ignore the fact that our culture has begun to go through what promises to be a metamorphosis. It is part of our responsibility as educators to consider some of the implications of these changes for education.

Closely connected to the speed and complexity of the cultural changes associated with the growing presence of digital technologies is the widening gulf between students and teachers. If we look at this phenomenon from an historical perspective, it is nothing new. Unlike their students, educators have traditionally greeted new technologies with little interest. The effect of this technology 'reticence' (Turkle 1984) is captured most powerfully by Papert (1993) in the opening chapter of his book The Children's Machine. Papert invites the reader to imagine a party of time travellers from an earlier century, among them a group of surgeons and another of school teachers, 'each group eager to see how much things have changed in their profession a hundred years into the future' (p. 1).

Papert contends that unlike the surgeons, who would be bewildered by the unfamiliar in the operating room of a modern hospital, the teachers would respond very differently to a modern classroom. They might be puzzled by a few strange objects, but they would see the point of most of what was being attempted and could easily take over the class. Papert's parable is illuminating: the exponential growth of science and technology in recent years has meant that some areas of human activity have changed dramatically. Telecommunications, entertainment and transportation as well as medicine are among them. But, argues Papert, '[s]chool is a notable example of an area that has not' (p. 2).

In Australia, at least, technology has never assumed a significant presence -neither in schools nor in post-school educational institutions. When television arrived fifty years ago, many believed that the new communication medium would transform education. It did not. When the first microcomputers appeared in teaching and learning settings in the late 70s, similar predictions were touted about how they would transform education. They have yet to do so. Amid the rhetoric of politicians in Australia, and indeed across the globe, who are promising that all schools will soon have Internet connections and greater numbers of students access to the new electronic technologies, history suggests that we should remain somewhat sceptical about the projected impact on pedagogical practices of the wiring of our schools.

But despite an unpromising history, as literacy educators we must consider ways in which the new technologies might be employed for useful purposes in literacy education at all levels. Just because we have remained largely impervious to technological change does not mean that this is how we should continue to respond. Even more importantly, if we are to begin to bridge the growing gulf between ourselves and our students, we cannot afford to remain ignorant of the characteristics of these new technologies and their complex cultural influences.

Of course, it may well be that a restrained approach to the electronic technologies' so-called revolutionary potential may prove to be an entirely appropriate response to their use in educational settings. It may be that the technologies will be used in the main for standard and relatively undemanding activities such as drill and practice. Indeed, perhaps it is wise to step back from the rush to acquire optic-fibre cabling, hardware and software to ask both value questions about how we should learn and teach, as well as hard-headed financial questions about cost-effectiveness (Moran 1993). But I believe that at the same time as we continue to act prudently, we should also be looking at the many and complex effects of the technologies and how we may use them to our advantage in literacy settings.

So that we are able to use these technologies intelligently, we need understandings of electronic literacies that are dynamic, critical and reflexive. These understandings also need to take into account the linguistic, the psychological and, most importantly, the sociocultural. They should be suggestive of ways in which teachers can participate critically yet productively in computer-mediated literacy practices.

Explaining literacy

Before moving to a discussion of digital literacies, it is important to explain what I mean by 'literacy' and 'literacy practices'. I draw here on the theoretical work of a recently completed, DEETYA-funded research project (Lankshear, Bigum, Durrant, Green, Honan, Morgan, Murray, Snyder & Wild 1997) on literacy and technology. Although teachers and the public often talk unproblematically about literacy, it can be a highly confusing concept in the context of educational settings. Traditionally, we have thought of literacy as reading and writing. To be literate meant to have competence with printed texts and to possess the mechanical skills of encoding and decoding. These provided the building blocks for the development of other skills. According to this viewpoint, once they become literate, people can get on with the business of learning. Street (1984) refers to this view of literacy as the 'autonomous' model of literacy. From this perspective, literacy is seen as neutral and can be used for all sorts of purposes - good or bad, personal or collective.

During the 1970s and 80s, a sociocultural approach to literacy emerged and became increasingly visible and valorised by the profession. From this viewpoint, literacy is understood as referring to 'the social practices and conceptions of reading and writing' (Street 1984, p.1). Literacy is really 'literacies' as print-based activities take many different forms. Further, these differences should be seen as residing in the literacies themselves rather than independently of them, as we never learn, teach or use literacy skills in context-free ways. Thus literacies can never be neutral, since, as practices, they are bound up with values, purposes, beliefs and aspirations. This explains why Street (1984, p. 1) calls this the 'ideological' model of literacy.

When literacy is explained from a sociocultural perspective, it is best seen as having three interconnected dimensions: the operational, the cultural and the critical (Green 1988 pp. 160-3; Lankshear et al 1997). The 'operational' dimension refers to competency with language - being able to read and write in a range of contexts in an appropriate and adequate manner. The 'cultural' dimension involves competency with regard to the meaning system. The cultural aspect of literacy is very much a matter of understanding texts in relation to contexts.

The 'critical' dimension of literacy has to do with the socially constructed nature of all human practices and meaning systems. To participate effectively and productively in any social practice, people must be socialised into it. But unless they are also given access to information as to how social practices and their meaning systems are selective and sectional they are unable to take an active part in the transformation of the meaning system. The critical dimension of literacy is the basis for ensuring that people can not only take part in a social practice and make meanings within it, but that they can in various ways transform and actively produce it. It is the critical dimension of literacy that is given the least attention in school settings. However, if one of our principal aims in education is to produce citizens who can actively participate in and contribute to democratic processes and practices, then it should have a key place in the literacy curriculum.

Digital literacies

When the new digital and telecommunication technologies are added to these understandings of literacy and literacy practices, we can begin to define what we mean by 'digital literacies'. Until now, technology has been seen as ancillary to literacy studies. But many recent accounts argue that literacy and technology are intimately inter-related (Green & Bigum 1996; Snyder 1996). If we think of digital literacies as socially constructed practices in which some kind of technology is integrally involved, then all literacies have to be seen as technological. Alphabetic and numeric scripts comprise technologies in the sense of being culturally constructed, systematic means for achieving goals and purposes. Similarly, the instruments used in encoding, decoding and making meaning, such as pens, printing presses and dictionaries, also comprise technologies (Lankshear & Knobel 1997). However, the technologies integral to conventional literacy practices have become almost invisible. By contrast, when new technologies emerge, they are conspicuous, distinct from conventional practice. Incorporating them into literacy practices then strikes us 'as introducing a technological dimension' (Lankshear & Knobel, p. 139).

'Digital literacies', as would be expected, refers mainly to practices in which computers and other digital technologies such as video applications, compact disks and satellite communications are integral. For the purposes of this paper, I use Lankshear and Knobel's definition of what they call 'technological literacies', but what I prefer to call 'digital literacies':

social practices in which texts (ie meaningful stretches of language) are constructed, transmitted, received, modified, shared (and otherwise engaged), within processes employing codes which are digitised electronically, primarily, though not exclusively, by means of (micro) computers. This definition can encompass practices involving hand-held games, video games, electronic translators, electronic organisers, compact disk players, and the like. (p. 141)

My focus here is on current practices of reading, writing, viewing, manipulating and communicating with digital texts and their potential integration into critical forms of literacy. Lankshear and Knobel (1997, p. 142) have produced a taxonomy which is sensitive to the multiplicity and complexities of literacies. It has three components: broad or generic forms of literate practice; particular aspects of those practices and more specific activities falling within them; procedures or techniques involved in those practices.

Lankshear and Knobel identify four genres of literate practice: word, sound and image processing; emailing; netting; and gaming. 'Word, sound and image processing' refers to the whole gamut of activities around generating, manipulating and communicating with digital texts. 'Emailing' is using the facility for sending messages to other computer users. We can contact local users via local network systems and contact people in many overseas countries using networked computers via the Internet. 'Netting' refers to activities involving electronic networks ranging from local area networks through to the Internet. 'Gaming' spans the wide spectrum from playing with hand-held machines through Nintendo and Sega-type games and arcade games to engaging games on the hard drive of computers. The computer game is just one example of the technology saturation that characterises the experiences of young people today as they tune into electronic media of many kinds.

Although any taxonomy has its limitations - the patterns and interrelationships are never as clearly defined or compartmentalised as they appear - Lankshear and Knobel have produced a useful tool to think about the different kinds of digital literacies. The details included in such a taxonomy identify a number of new literacy skills that our students will require to participate proficiently and critically in the Twenty-first Century. Identification of these new literacies has direct implications for the conceptualisation and design of curriculum.

The Executive Summary of the DEETYA literacy and technology study, 'Digital Rhetorics', (Lankshear et al 1997) suggests that literacy educators need to prepare students to work in non-linear environments; teach them how to skim, to evaluate critically, and to read the visual; provide opportunities for students to learn how to select valuable sources from the Web, to develop skills for evaluating as well as gathering information, and to assemble what they find into cogent viewpoints and arguments. But the report also recognises that many of these skills are still in the making. For instance, the effective use of the Internet as an information gathering tool will require yet-to-be-identified complementary skills.

Learning how to read the visual is of particular importance. In some ways we are sophisticated in our reading of visual texts, mainly because of our experience with film and television. But in other ways, we are somewhat naive in our ability to interpret the complex hybrid texts which are emerging, particularly in the new communication spaces presented by the Internet. These texts have both visual and verbal components, as well as the added dimension of hypertext, resulting in multi-media, multi-modal, textual formations that demand new ways of 'seeing' and making meaning. For hundreds of years, western culture has privileged the verbal (print and oral) as the pre-eminent mode of conveying meaning and producing knowledge. However, with the arrival of the new communication and information technologies, the reign of the verbal has been at least interrupted, if not overthrown.

This new emphasis on 'reading' multimodal texts, particularly in the context of the Internet, suggests that we need to teach our students how to read or as Burbules (1997a) says, 'hyperread', critically. We need to encourage students to reflect on the way that links within hypertext environments, such as the World Wide Web, connote relations, alter the meaning of the points they connect, and govern pathways of association that control and direct movement within a particular information space. Burbules stresses the point that links are not neutral: they have been put there by someone for particular purposes. Burbules argues that reflecting upon how links work can enhance the ability to hyperread the Web critically. In his analysis, Burbules asks whether or not reading or 'hyperreading' on the Internet is something new. He asks whether it is the same reading involving the usual skills and strategies simply being exercised in a new medium. He argues, however, that the question itself is unproductive. New media introduce new contexts, and changes in contexts mean that there are differences in practices. But at the same time, there is some continuity between these emergent practices and those practices which are more familiar.

Our aim as educators should be to foster a sceptical and discerning approach towards all the texts we encounter. The range of texts now includes electronic texts. Burbules (1997b) identifies some of the challenges when the new technologies are used. His suggestions apply particularly to the use of the Internet and I present them here in point form so that readers may easily apply them to their own education settings. Burbules reminds us that:

The seductiveness of the new technologies, their complexity of organisation, the volume of their content, the speed with which material comes at the reader, are all unprecedented.
The new technologies use all the features of other media, combine them together, then add the additional capability of hypertext.
If the new technologies are seen as important media for communication and accessing information, then we have to consider issues of content - gaining skills in finding what is worthwhile and avoiding what is not. There is much that is crass, dull and unedifying, but there is also much that is important, useful, interesting and entertaining. The problem is telling the difference.
The pedagogical challenge includes not only technical know-how, but is also a matter of providing users with critical skills to assist them in becoming discriminating.
The pedagogical challenge is also to provide workable heuristics - rules of thumb to use in these spaces without getting lost, frustrated or discouraged.

According to Burbules (1997b), critical users of the new technologies require:

• Multiple strategies for finding information
• Ways to be selective about what they find
• Multilayered ways of judging credibility

Critical users will also need to find ways of judging the credibility of sources. This may be achieved by posing a series of questions:

• Who is the provider of the information?
• What are the qualifications and position of that provider relative to the topic?
• What sorts of interests may be at work in presenting the material in one light rather than another?
• How is the material organised?
• What assumptions are revealed by the categories used?
• What categories are not included?
• What assumptions do the links reveal?
• What isn't here?
• Whose interests are being served by this information and by this presentation of information?

Burbules (1997b) then asks: How do we apply these faculties of critical hyperreading across media sources? He argues:

Critically reading images, music, video and so forth are not all the same as reading written text. The particular way in which hypertext/multimedia juxtaposes text, images, music etc becomes itself a dimension of reading. The elements of multimedia graphic design, completely apart from the 'content', are themselves a way of expressing ideas and relationships. We need to engage in discussions, based on these kinds of questions and approaches, to reflect upon the procedures and criteria by which we make judgements about the relative quality of information.

The operational, cultural and critical dimensions of digital literacies

If we accept the argument that literacy and technology are inextricably linked and interdependent, then it becomes a useful exercise to consider digital literacies in terms of the dimensions of literacy presented earlier: the operational, the cultural and the critical. When technology is also taken into account, the operational dimension involves being able to read and write in a range of contexts in an adequate and appropriate manner employing conventional print and electronic media. Teaching mechanical skills of reading, writing, spelling, keyboarding etc should be relatively direct, insistent and demanding but grounded as far as possible in everyday purposes and pursuits familiar to learners.

The cultural dimension involves understanding texts and information in relation to the context - real life practices - in which they are produced, received and used. Without the cultural dimension, language users are unable to understand what makes particular ways of reading and writing appropriate or inappropriate, adequate or inadequate in a given situation or setting.

The critical dimension involves being able to innovate, transform, improve and add value to social practices and the literacies associated with them. It makes the difference between merely being socialised in to sets of skills values, beliefs and procedures and being able to make judgements about them from a perspective which identifies them for what they are and are not and recognises alternative possibilities.

One of the most interesting findings of the Lankshear et al study was that in none of the school studies - eleven schools were included - was there evidence of the critical dimension.

Facing the new century

This conference, dedicated to an examination of 'Connected Learning', is timely. We simply cannot continue with our jobs largely as we always have, as if very little is really changing. We should think carefully before we dismiss the word processor as just a tool, a more efficient way of writing. We cannot continue to see networks, the Internet and the World Wide Web merely as new ways for people to connect. Nor can we argue convincingly that books on disk, encountered on a screen, are not that different to printed books as the words do not change.

Educational institutions are beginning to adapt to the integration of digital media. As teachers, we must consider ways in which to incorporate them effectively into our teaching if for no other reason than our students will force us to change. Students are using these technologies, using different writing processes, researching in new forums and connecting critical thoughts in visionary new ways.

A more pressing reason to incorporate digital media into our teaching relates to issues of power and how we and our students gain access to it. Just as we know that social, political and economic power is closely associated with access to and knowledge of certain discourse forms (that is, the discourses of power), social power now is also closely associated with access to and competence with the use of digital media (Gee 1996). We simply cannot deny our students opportunities to develop facility with and critical understanding of the possibilities, limitations and influences of digital media and telecommunication technologies.

But how do we integrate these technologies into out teaching practices effectively? Of course, there are no simple solutions, but without doubt, we must learn how to use them ourselves, and with some confidence and competence. We must also think about the changes to literacy practices associated with their use. Only then may we engage with our students in the critical use of digital media in the context of curriculum. Facility and ease with the technologies may be achieved through professional development programs and university courses or through less formal arrangements. Whichever pathway is chosen, ultimately, it is a matter of teachers recognising the importance of these cultural changes and their implications for education and taking the electronic plunge.

References

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Burbules, N.C. (1997b) Misinformation, malinformation, messed-up information, and mostly useless information: How to avoid getting tangled up in the 'Net. In C. Lankshear, C. Bigum, C. Durrant, B. Green, E. Honan, W. Morgan, J. Murray, I. Snyder, & M. Wild, Digital rhetorics: Literacies and technologies in education å current practices and future directions. Funded by the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) through the Children's Literacy National Projects Program. Canberra: DEETYA
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