(This started as a comment and then got quite long, so I moved it to the main page)
I really am fascinated with, and have spent a lot of time ruminating upon, the arguments against written language contained in Plato's Phaedo. Part of this is because I studied a great deal of Plato in my undergrad, and was always fascinated by the idea that so much of what I was gleaning from that material was never intended for the record.
When Plato recorded (or created, depending on your view) the Socratic dialogs, he was primarily recording a method of teaching and learning that was not especially popular (the Apology is evidence enough of that). The Socratic method as we know it consists of group learning in a question-and-answer sort of environment. It is not front-led, in that each member of the group is encouraged to contribute both in the asking and the answering, but is certainly guided. The Platonic/Socratic argument against written knowledge is that it precludes this kind of inquiry. The written word, Plato's Socrates surmises, says the same thing to everyone. In that sense, then, it is dangerous, because one person may read a text in a way that encourages positive action and another may read it in an opposite way.
(Edited to add: After a comment, I noticed that this paragraph seemed somewhat contradictory. What I mean, and what comes from reading the Phaedo, is that Socrates' opinion is that while a text literally says the same thing to everyone, it cannot defend itself against misinterpretation. I hope that clears up my somewhat overtired musings.)
I wonder, as we move away from book-based learning and communication of ideas, what new sorts of teaching and learning will be created, and what old forms may be revived. In the world of blogging we already see much greater room for discourse within texts, with comments and message boards present on almost any blog and even many news sources. In things like Wikis, too, we see this ever-presented adaptability of text and information, and the arguments both for and against such flexibility. Even the medium in which our class is presented is one that is completely new, allowing for distance learning that also exists in a group setting.
With this constant flow of conversation, the originals are always adapting, both with the direct additions from the comments and the potential additions and modifications by the author as new ideas, questions, and information are presented by the readers.
What has been called the information age is, for our purposes, a new environment for learning, and I think it will be fascinating to see how the teaching professions and the lives of students evolve over the next ten or twenty years.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Add to Your Social Media Repertoire
Ever wanted to try Twitter? Already have a Twitter account? Follow me (CarolGSLIS) and learn some new skills, while also learning more about media literacy, reading, libraries, and more!
On the Imperiousness of Literacy
While Ong’s questioning of the effects that the centrality of writing has on our minds and our culture is at first provocative, I think he is raising an important point that should be considered. Why are reading and writing privileged in our society, and what effect does this have? As librarians, we see great value in reading in particular, and spend much of our energy promoting its merits. I’m not suggesting that this should or will change; but I do think it is important to take a step back and understand why this exists and what it may mean. In Ong’s assertion that “Literacy is imperious,” I don’t see imperiousness as a characteristic of the term or something that is inherent in the skill of reading, but rather a reflection of the cultural privileging of this way of learning, working, and living that has become so imbedded that it may obscure our vision to other ways of thinking.
In The Children’s Machine, Seymour Papert (developer of the LOGO programming language and contributor on LEGO Mindstorms) argues that computers may offer some very meaningful ways for pre-literate (illiterate?) children to learn, create, problem solve, and interact. He questions the idea privileged in the U.S. educational system that reading is the first and most important skill to be learned, and points out just how much time teaching to read takes up of the first few years in school. He is not suggesting that reading is not important, but that it might better serve students to learn in other ways in complement to reading. This is just one example of an alternate viewpoint that may not be considered because of the privileging of literacy.
Of course, reading and writing is so embedded in most of our lives that how can we ever really distance ourselves from it enough to analyze its role? Like Plato, who records Socrates’ arguments against the written word in writing (the only way we would even know about it today), we are fully immersed in the written way of doing things. While the beginning of Ong’s article raises the questions I mention in the first paragraph, it becomes clear that he sees it as central, concluding that “Writing is a consciousness-raising and humanizing technology.” While we may come to the same conclusions, I think the process of thinking it through raises some interesting ideas.
Digital Brains and Wisdom
I found the Ong and Wolf articles assigned for this week fascinating reading, although I have to admit I also found them pretty heavy slogging to get through. I had always thought of imperious as meaning arrogant, but I was surprised to learn that it also means “assuming power without justification”. What could it mean to say that literacy is imperious? The idea that literacy should not necessarily be regarded as normative and natural and essential to human intellectual life was one that had not occurred to me before.
Upon further reflection I realized that, of course, Ong is correct. There was plenty of human intellectual discourse prior to the development of writing, and writing is not an innate characteristic of being human in the way the speech is. What writing did, was to change the nature and content of intellectual discourse. As Ong puts it, writing is “utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior human potentials.” Writing brought about an “interior transformation of consciousness” that made possible a whole new type of intellectual process. Where oral thought had been essentially conservative, written thought allowed for more abstract and exploratory thinking. Writing allowed for ideas to be preserved across time and across space.
What does this have to do with digital literacy? I can’t help but wondering what changes in the nature of the intellectual thought of our species may be slowly being wrought by evolving digital technologies. I was struck by the description of how Plato condemned writing as alien, artificial and foreign to human life—quite similar to the criticisms often leveled in modern times at computers and digital modes of communication. Could it be that we are in the midst of a transformation that we are not fully aware of, just as Plato was not truly aware of how thoroughly writing had changed the nature of thought during his times? As Ong points out, Plato could not even have formed his argument against writing had the emergence of writing not already changed his thought processes. Perhaps the existence of digital media has already changed the structure of our thoughts in ways we have not yet fully realized.
This idea is supported by the Wolf articles, which describe how the human brain changed as reading and writing developed. Where Ong talks about a transformation of consciousness, Wolf describes a transformation of the physiology of the brain. If these changes occurred as the technologies of reading and writing emerged, it is equally possible that changes of similar magnitude are occurring as digital technologies emerge. A simple Google search with the term “internet changes brains” yields 37, 600 results, including many articles that I suspect many of us have read over the past few years. Some of these articles appear to be of the hand-wringing variety—“Is the Internet Melting Our Brains?", while others are more positive—“Using Internet Boosts Older Brains”.
In a sense, I don’t think it matters much whether we agree with the hand-wringers or the cheerleaders. Change, whether it’s for the better or the worse, is here, and, in my opinion, is unstoppable. Perhaps it is more important to be aware of it and to try to understand it than to form a judgment about its goodness or badness.
So why is the word “wisdom” in the title of my post, you may be wondering at this point? It’s there just to highlight a passing and somewhat unformed thought I had while reading the Ong article. Ong points out that great advances in intellectual thought were made possible by the development of writing. As he puts it, “Pressed by the need to manage an always fugitive noetic universe, the oral world is basically conservative. Exploratory thinking is not unknown, but it is relatively rare, a luxury orality can little afford, for energies must be husbanded to keep on constant call the evanescent knowledge that the ages have so laboriously accumulated. Everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors." Writing made exploratory thought possible, it created a separation between knowledge and the possesor of that knowledge. Knowledge and ideas could be transferred without personal contact. Although it is indisputable that a vast amount of great thought and intellectual progress was enabled by the emergence of writing, it may also be just possible that a bit of wisdom was lost in the process.
There may have been some value in the conservatism necessitated by a world without writing. I have long been enchanted by storytelling. I firmly believe that there can sometimes be more “truth” and more wisdom in a short, well-told tale than in volumes of written text. When a person, or a community, or a culture, can only keep as much information as can be committed to memory, by necessity only the most valuable ideas will be preserved. In a society where access to information is virtually unlimited, and the ability to preserve every little scrap of information—from financial records, to test results, to endless photos of the minutest events, to recordings of what we eat for breakfast—is also virtually unlimited, many people find it increasingly difficult to sift through all of that information to find what is of value; they find it difficult determine what their values are and to decide what constitutes moral “right behavior.” I don’t at all mean to suggest that we ought to try and go back to some idealized “good old days” when everything was better and everyone knew right from wrong; I simply wonder what was lost along with all that was gained when we humans learned to write.
Upon further reflection I realized that, of course, Ong is correct. There was plenty of human intellectual discourse prior to the development of writing, and writing is not an innate characteristic of being human in the way the speech is. What writing did, was to change the nature and content of intellectual discourse. As Ong puts it, writing is “utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior human potentials.” Writing brought about an “interior transformation of consciousness” that made possible a whole new type of intellectual process. Where oral thought had been essentially conservative, written thought allowed for more abstract and exploratory thinking. Writing allowed for ideas to be preserved across time and across space.
What does this have to do with digital literacy? I can’t help but wondering what changes in the nature of the intellectual thought of our species may be slowly being wrought by evolving digital technologies. I was struck by the description of how Plato condemned writing as alien, artificial and foreign to human life—quite similar to the criticisms often leveled in modern times at computers and digital modes of communication. Could it be that we are in the midst of a transformation that we are not fully aware of, just as Plato was not truly aware of how thoroughly writing had changed the nature of thought during his times? As Ong points out, Plato could not even have formed his argument against writing had the emergence of writing not already changed his thought processes. Perhaps the existence of digital media has already changed the structure of our thoughts in ways we have not yet fully realized.
This idea is supported by the Wolf articles, which describe how the human brain changed as reading and writing developed. Where Ong talks about a transformation of consciousness, Wolf describes a transformation of the physiology of the brain. If these changes occurred as the technologies of reading and writing emerged, it is equally possible that changes of similar magnitude are occurring as digital technologies emerge. A simple Google search with the term “internet changes brains” yields 37, 600 results, including many articles that I suspect many of us have read over the past few years. Some of these articles appear to be of the hand-wringing variety—“Is the Internet Melting Our Brains?", while others are more positive—“Using Internet Boosts Older Brains”.
In a sense, I don’t think it matters much whether we agree with the hand-wringers or the cheerleaders. Change, whether it’s for the better or the worse, is here, and, in my opinion, is unstoppable. Perhaps it is more important to be aware of it and to try to understand it than to form a judgment about its goodness or badness.
So why is the word “wisdom” in the title of my post, you may be wondering at this point? It’s there just to highlight a passing and somewhat unformed thought I had while reading the Ong article. Ong points out that great advances in intellectual thought were made possible by the development of writing. As he puts it, “Pressed by the need to manage an always fugitive noetic universe, the oral world is basically conservative. Exploratory thinking is not unknown, but it is relatively rare, a luxury orality can little afford, for energies must be husbanded to keep on constant call the evanescent knowledge that the ages have so laboriously accumulated. Everybody, or almost everybody, must repeat and repeat and repeat the truths that have come down from the ancestors." Writing made exploratory thought possible, it created a separation between knowledge and the possesor of that knowledge. Knowledge and ideas could be transferred without personal contact. Although it is indisputable that a vast amount of great thought and intellectual progress was enabled by the emergence of writing, it may also be just possible that a bit of wisdom was lost in the process.
There may have been some value in the conservatism necessitated by a world without writing. I have long been enchanted by storytelling. I firmly believe that there can sometimes be more “truth” and more wisdom in a short, well-told tale than in volumes of written text. When a person, or a community, or a culture, can only keep as much information as can be committed to memory, by necessity only the most valuable ideas will be preserved. In a society where access to information is virtually unlimited, and the ability to preserve every little scrap of information—from financial records, to test results, to endless photos of the minutest events, to recordings of what we eat for breakfast—is also virtually unlimited, many people find it increasingly difficult to sift through all of that information to find what is of value; they find it difficult determine what their values are and to decide what constitutes moral “right behavior.” I don’t at all mean to suggest that we ought to try and go back to some idealized “good old days” when everything was better and everyone knew right from wrong; I simply wonder what was lost along with all that was gained when we humans learned to write.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Digital Tidbits
An attempt at multitasking . . . can I create a blog entry while watching Frontline's Digital Nation tonight?
It has been a digital week and I feel like I'm learning so much and yet there is so much to learn. Tidbits from this week:
1. Harry Potter mania: Universal Studios is opening the Wizarding World of Harry Potter this spring (won't give a date, which is frustrating as I'm hoping it will be open when I'm in Orlando in late March, marketing ploy or do they just not know?). USA Today published an interactive marauder's map last Thursday: Peeking at Harry Potter's World as it Takes Shape. This is a brown and white map that you hold in front of your computer's digital camera and it becomes interactive. Music starts playing, voices of the characters are heard, and 3-D images take shape from the flat page of the map. It didn't work quite as easily for me as described in the article, but it was pretty amazing.
2. Article in School Library Journal about social networking: How 11 Intrepid Users Get the Most of Social Media. Really interesting uses of a variety of digital media, some with children and in school settings, some celebrating storytelling and books.
3. Release of the i-Pad and how it might relate to children's books: "Using the 2-page view, you can see both pages of a book. 9" screen,1.5 lbs. This is really going to make picture eBooks possible. Ithink this is going to be a core strength of this device -- once the
Note: Dulemba also has an i-phone application/book: Lula's Brew-- I don't have an i-phone yet so I haven't checked this out, but what a concept.
4. Even during my beloved respite for the week, watching Masterpiece Theatre's Emma on PBS, Emma Twitter parties (sponsored by PBS) are going on. I enjoy reading the tweets afterwards, but don't participate in real time. Jane Austen still gets my full attention!
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Laptops and Literacy
This week's readings about the nature of literacy have posed some questions for me to ponder relating to a new initiative at the school where I work. The school where I have been an English teacher for the past eleven years is going forward with a plan to purchase netbooks for all incoming freshmen in the 2010-2011 school year, with the plan to continue this for all incoming freshmen for the next four years until the entire student body is netbook-equipped. The concerns many teachers have expressed about this initiative -- cost, maintenance/theft concerns, cheating, increased distractability in classes (all of the classrooms will be internet-connected), potential negative impact on traditional literacies, etc. -- have been largely dismissed by the powers-that-be. We are all for closing the digital divide, but our district already has a program to get laptops into the hands of students whose families can’t afford computers, many students already have laptops (of a higher quality than the ones they will be given), and there is no plan to provide internet access along with the laptops, rendering them useless at home (since they will not come with any non-internet based software). Anyone who expresses concerns about the plan and calls for, not necessarily a stop to the program, but at least a more clearly defined and better-researched rationale and plan for implementation, seems to be labeled anti-technology, anti-progress, and out of touch. The administrator in charge of purchasing this technology, in response to one recent question about the impact on print literacy, declared that “all literacies are the same.” Going into this week’s readings, I was curious how they would address this issue in particular.
The Wolf reading suggests that certain aspects of traditional reading encourage unique brain development that could be compromised in a generation engaged more in digital media at the expense of traditional reading. At the same time, Wolf acknowledges that perhaps these new literacies could encourage the growth of previously undeveloped neural connections and enable individuals with some disabilities in print literacy with a better ability to maximize their intellectual potential than in a world dependent on print literacy. Similar issues came up in the Braille article -- what is lost and what is gained by the dependence on these new technologies? I am not opposed to the benefits the new technologies have to offer, but I am concerned about what would be lost.
I am willing to entertain the possibility that my feelings on this issue are at least partially because I am more comfortable with print than digital media. Reading the Wolf excerpt, I wondered if I am just nostalgic for the kind of reading moments Proust describes. I do sometimes worry that my students who are poor readers, who never developed that "lost in another world" engagement with reading books, will never experience the pleasure I found in those moments. But perhaps I miss things that they experience through their engagement with digital media. Who am I to judge one experience better than another? At the same time, must one be gained at the expense of the other?
Beyond concerns of what the lack of print literacy might mean for the pleasures of reading, however, are concerns about whether or not the increased use of digital media in schools positively impacts student learning. An article from the New York Times that has been circulating around school -- Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops by Winnie Hu from May 4, 2007 -- chronicles several school districts around the country that are now abandoning laptop programs like the one upon which my school district is embarking. The reasons given include misuse of the computers (to cheat, look at pornography, etc.), costs for repair and replacement, and a lack of research showing that having the laptops improved academic performance. Part of the issue is that the programs are so new that little thorough research on the efficacy of these programs exist, but the results of existing studies do not look overwhelmingly promising. The article says,
"In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against."
Later in the article, Mark Warschauer, a professor of education who supports laptop programs, acknowledges that there is no evidence that laptops increase state test scores, but he does say, “Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research. . . If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”
Given that George Lucas and Steve Jobs, however, did not go to schools with one-to-one computing, however, and still managed to become as innovative and creative as they are, I still wonder if there is a way to merge what’s good about both these approaches. Is there a way for the new digital literacies not to replace the print literacies of the past, but to add on to them? Is putting a laptop in front of every kid all day at school the best way to do that?
The Wolf reading suggests that certain aspects of traditional reading encourage unique brain development that could be compromised in a generation engaged more in digital media at the expense of traditional reading. At the same time, Wolf acknowledges that perhaps these new literacies could encourage the growth of previously undeveloped neural connections and enable individuals with some disabilities in print literacy with a better ability to maximize their intellectual potential than in a world dependent on print literacy. Similar issues came up in the Braille article -- what is lost and what is gained by the dependence on these new technologies? I am not opposed to the benefits the new technologies have to offer, but I am concerned about what would be lost.
I am willing to entertain the possibility that my feelings on this issue are at least partially because I am more comfortable with print than digital media. Reading the Wolf excerpt, I wondered if I am just nostalgic for the kind of reading moments Proust describes. I do sometimes worry that my students who are poor readers, who never developed that "lost in another world" engagement with reading books, will never experience the pleasure I found in those moments. But perhaps I miss things that they experience through their engagement with digital media. Who am I to judge one experience better than another? At the same time, must one be gained at the expense of the other?
Beyond concerns of what the lack of print literacy might mean for the pleasures of reading, however, are concerns about whether or not the increased use of digital media in schools positively impacts student learning. An article from the New York Times that has been circulating around school -- Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops by Winnie Hu from May 4, 2007 -- chronicles several school districts around the country that are now abandoning laptop programs like the one upon which my school district is embarking. The reasons given include misuse of the computers (to cheat, look at pornography, etc.), costs for repair and replacement, and a lack of research showing that having the laptops improved academic performance. Part of the issue is that the programs are so new that little thorough research on the efficacy of these programs exist, but the results of existing studies do not look overwhelmingly promising. The article says,
"In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against."
Later in the article, Mark Warschauer, a professor of education who supports laptop programs, acknowledges that there is no evidence that laptops increase state test scores, but he does say, “Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research. . . If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”
Given that George Lucas and Steve Jobs, however, did not go to schools with one-to-one computing, however, and still managed to become as innovative and creative as they are, I still wonder if there is a way to merge what’s good about both these approaches. Is there a way for the new digital literacies not to replace the print literacies of the past, but to add on to them? Is putting a laptop in front of every kid all day at school the best way to do that?
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