Oct
12
Week three: Transliteracy, metaliteracy…..Carol’s head explodes!
October 12, 2011 | 7 Comments
Last week’s and this week’s ‘theme’ of visual literacies has provided me with more (literally) eye-opening ideas, links, and resources than is possible to deal with in two weeks. I have loved the pages that my fellow students and tutors have pointed me in the direction of and those that I’ve found, very often, serendipitously.
HPVS (Human Phantom Vibration Syndrome)
However, from the variety of ‘artefacts’ found, everything from digital novels and plays to digital art that deals with issues surrounding digital culture, I have also started to think about what we really mean by literacy and whether, even if we are enthusiastic about the possibilities of multiple literacies, there might be a negative impact on the ‘old’ literacies of reading and writing. As an English literature researcher, an ex-secondary English teacher and someone whose day to day job involves helping students with academic writing I am concerned about the ability to read and to write.
So concerned are many universities with students’ writing skills that they are developing online diagnostic tests of grammar and ability to structure a sentence through to an argument. Unfortunately these may too often take the form of ‘quick-fix’ solutions with no attention paid to the holistic relationship between learning, teaching and writing. As a secondary teacher, I used to ask my pupils what they liked to read and the answer was often that they didn’t and that they preferred DVDs. Should we be worried about what seems to be a drop in reading among school age kids, or about university students some of whom do not seem to know the basics of grammar? Can we blame an increasingly digital culture for this, where text-speak and an increasingly image-led engagement with the world may well be edging out the written word? There are no clear answers to these questions, although we may be right to be worried given that we view our culture as one where any ideas of value are communicated through the written word. However, as Thomas et al point out in ‘Transliteracy: Crossing divides’, the period during which the word has represented the logos is perhaps less significant when we view it in light of what came before where ideas were passed on through the spoken word and through the visual, such as cave paintings. And, arguably, we are entering a new phase, enabled by ever-increasingly sophisticated technologies that are changing the way we can communicate. Perhaps the emphasis on the written word, for our pupils and our students, not least for every one else, is ignoring the possibilities to, or even the need to, develop new literacies.
However, this does not mean that we should reject one for the other. Transliteracy, according to the Transliteracy Research Group is ‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks’ (http://nlabnetworks.typepad.com/transliteracy/#tp). The TRG then are suggesting an embracing of all literacies, from ancient traditions of orality through to modern technologies. One should not supersede another, but there is always the possibility that if only one literacy is encouraged, the other(s) will fall away. Carpenter’s point that ‘some have argued that students’ pre-existing literacies can be tapped and utilized to facilitate the development of academic literacy’ (2009, 139) suggests to me that this can work both ways if approached thoughtfully in learning and teaching. Digital literacy and/or visual literacy (and we are back at the ‘digital natives’ argument!) could be used as a way into considering writing. On a very small media scale, with my secondary pupils who didn’t like reading, we looked at screen versions of literary texts, the best example being with secondary 2 pupils who read ‘Goodbye Mr Tom’ then watched the film and produced a visual resource and a written piece on the difficulties of adapting a book for TV. Their final evaluations actually came out in favour of the written word as something that encouraged, rather than just ‘provided’, the imagination. However, I think it is important to recognise the complexity of both word and image. Kress’s contention that ‘words are (relatively) empty entities’ whereas ‘depictions are full of meaning; they are always specific’ shows a naivety about the complex relationship between signified and signifier (2005, 7&15) and a simplistic notion of the way that readers and/or spectators interpret what they are looking at. One of the fascinating projects that I looked at over the last week, and continue to do so as I’m hooked, is http://www.inanimatealice.com . This is an excellent digital novel, aimed at, I think, primary school age, that is:
Transmedia – designed from the outset as a story that unfolds over time and on multiple platforms, the episodes are available on all devices capable of running Adobe’s Flash Player. ‘Alice’ connects technologies, languages, cultures, generations and curricula within a sweeping narrative accessible by all. As Alice’s journey progresses, new storylines appear elsewhere providing more details and insights, enriching the tale through surprising developments. Students are encouraged to co-create developing episodes of their own, either filling in the gaps or developing new strands. (http://www.inanimatealice.com/about.html)
With its multiple platforms, and its nod to Web 2.0 issues of ‘flattening’ or synthesis of consumption and production of culture, inanimatealice also seems to me to be of some import in considering how we can use new literacies to encourage new skills but also an interest in old ones, such as storytelling. Taking some inspiration from this, I and a colleague are hoping to develop a project within our university, perhaps starting off from the relatively low-tech idea of a wiki-novel (one of the producers of inanimatealice, Kate Pullinger, was also responsible for the ‘A Million Penguins’ wiki-novel (no longer available but information is to be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_fiction ). One of the challenges, which I have also found through this week’s task to produce a visual artefact, is that there are multiple layers of challenge in looking at new literacies, from having technological knowledge and ability to a critically evaluative approach to content and collaboration. Thus, I come to the latest term I have alighted on, Metaliteracy:
Through this overarching approach to information literacy, we examine the term within a new media environment. Metaliteracy promotes critical thinking and collaboration in a digital age, providing a comprehensive framework to effectively participate in social media and online communities. It is a unified construct that supports the acquisition, production, and sharing of knowledge in collaborative online communities. Metaliteracy expands upon the traditional skills-based approach to understanding information as somehow disconnected from emerging technologies and related literacy types. Standard definitions of information literacy are insufficient for the revolutionary social technologies currently prevalent online (http://bradmatthies.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/from-information-literacy-to-metaliteracy/)
This then would seem to incorporate everything, all types of literacies as information literacy
But with the added meta-analysis of emerging technologies and their cultural impact.
Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise
7 Comments so far
Hi Carol,
I was interested in your comments about metaliteracies. I’ve just been reading this book chapter.
Dowdall, C. (2009) Masters and Critics: Children as Producers of Online Digital Texts in Victoria Carrington & Muriel Robinson (eds) Digital Literacies: Social Learning and Classroom Practices. Sage
Dowdall introduces the idea of critical digital literacy which looks as though it is related to the definition of metaliteracies that you cite. She is critical of the functionalist, skill based conceptions of literacy that underpin government policy in connection with literacy initiatives. She goes on to suggests that framing digital literacy in a similar way i.e. the ability to read and write with a variety of media misses key aspects of multimodal communication. Instead she proposes the term critical digital literacy which foregrounds communication and context and is manifest as a ‘mastery of the wider socio-cultural context in which text production in digital spaces occurs’. She illustrates her point by referring to communication via profile pages in social networks where the text becomes a site for negotiating social identities. An awareness of the ‘rules’ of communication is key to producing and consuming digital texts in this context.
I rather like Dowdall’s ’3D’ view of digital literacy!
Hi Geraldine
Thanks for this – will take a look. Both views seem to be taking a much more holistic approach that recognises there is more to digital literacy than ‘skills’. As with traditional literacy, which is included in metaliteracy and I would guess critical digital literacy, to be ‘literate’ means more than functional control. It means an understanding of forms, tropes, perceptions, theories etc.