the times are a changin'

The changes to sound recordings over recent years is truly amazing. The Way the Music Died piece was helpful in understanding some of the changes from insiders’ views and even though this production for PBS’ Frontline program was made in 2004, many of the trends the artists discussed continue today. Since this program was made mp3 players and iPods have exploded into such a pervasive part of our society and I believe this was mentioned in our session last night for class. This program in particular made me think about my time working at the Bloomington Public Library (IL) and how music cds were such a huge collection seemingly when I began working there in 2001 and how they began to decline in numbers overall and in new titles as I was about to leave there in 2007. Since that time the collections only gotten sparser it seems. The number of audio books on cd has diminished likewise in a similar pattern which stinks for me as I had only just figured out how to use My Media Mall last summer when Bloomington and others in the library system got rid of it. Now I have to find new reads from this limited format there. I was ready to make the technology leap and the rug got pulled out from under me! I think many patrons like myself in public libraries will have to adapt likewise as it’s more feasible to have services like My Media Mall than cds and other physical formats. I wonder whether music collections at public libraries will dwindle to nothing with so many using services like iTunes, Rhapsody, and the like. In schools, especially in this cash strapped state, I imagine audio books on tape or cd will have longer lives but even in this library setting mp3 audio books like Playaways are making in-roads.

Media Literacy and Criminals

I know that this course is about youth and media literacy, but I've been quite amused recently about the articles that I have been coming across concerning criminals and their use of new media and games.

• Gangs use of Twitter, Facebook on the rise
• Criminal Colin Gunn Used Facebook To Threaten Enemies From Jail
• Dungeons and Dragons Prison Ban Upheld
• Fugitive Christopher Crego Posts Facebook Info That Helps Police Arrest Him
• Prisoners Lose Facebook Pages After Victim Taunts

Interestingly, police and prison officials have had to increasingly deal with criminals and their use of social media in ways that were perhaps quite unexpected. For example, gangs are now recruiting new members and bragging about their exploits on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or lone criminals are taunting others via posts on Facebook. Some of these poor choices on the behalf of criminals have led to their capture or the revoking of privileges in the cases of criminals that are already incarcerated. What seems apparent though is that criminals are now using new media in order to carry out some of their work. In some cases, the police are using this to their advantage, for they can now see and document when threats are made and sometimes even when the acts are carried out when the criminals post pictures of their crimes. In one of the articles that I have provided, one cop is even quoted talking about the need to not publicize all that police are doing with new media to catch criminals so as to keep criminals in the dark about police tactics. Nevertheless, there does seem to be a need to make uniform policies - or simply make a policy at all since there are few official policies in place - concerning new media and games.

Gaming, for instance, seems to be greatly misunderstood. The article about Dungeons and Dragons that I have posted above is a bit problematic for me. I suppose if one is in prison, then they are being punished for some reason and shouldn't be able to do everything. On the other hand, I don't know that I agree that Dungeons and Dragons "promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling." Statements like that lead me to believe that there is an air of ignorance towards gaming that needs to be addressed in our criminal justice system.

With all of this being said, I have found these articles quite interesting. Our focus on youth in this course is not wholly separate for these topics. Informing young people about new media and gaming is important, but it's also important to teach them about being responsible with new media and making them aware that the choices that they make about what to share and post online are choices that need to be taken seriously. A new site has been created called Please Rob Me that simply searches for public Twitter posts in which people freely mention that they have left home. This information can be combined with other location-based social networking tools to determine the location of homes that have been left unoccupied. I'm sure most of us don't think about that when we post status messages about our locations, but it's perhaps something that we should be thinking about and it's a great example of a seemingly simple action that has rather unintended consequences.

10 Technology Ideas Your Library Can Implement Next Week

From American Libraries, this article on easy technology tweaks offers up some good ideas for libraries of any size and flavor.

I Feel the Earth Move...

In the words of the great songwriter, Carole King, "I feel the earth move under my feet.." Although she was referring to someONE, those lyrics can apply to feeling the music, too...quite literally! As I read the excerpt from Jourdan's Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy I found myself nodding and saying, yes, yes, he got that right...I love to listen to music. I listen in the car while I commute, and I listen while I'm working around the house. I like to listen while I'm cooking, or reading (although I can't have words while I read - too much input!!) but I really like to just sit and listen. I'm a concert goer - and I can be mesmerized just listening to the notes float and entwine. The music appreciation class I took in my undergrad days has actually paid off through my life time - the instructor was very focused on training us to actually listen to what we were hearing. I was very interested in Jourdan's explanation of how the mind works, and the relationship between right brain and left brain tasks in listening. The opening of the section we read brought such clear images of early musicians to my mind - I appreciated the evolution of performing, and the dual goals of expressing oneself through music, as well as moving others to emotion through hearing that performance.

In my library each December I host an open house musical Christmas extravaganza - we clear out the desks, move in round cafe tables, bring out the decorations, set up the piano and keyboard and the drums and really let loose. The whole school is invited to drop in any time they can - musicians are "booked" throughout the day - teachers and students alike. Some performances are spontaneous, some evolve, sometimes it's like a jam session. I bake cookies (actually my husband baked 85 dozen for me this year!!) and serve hot chocolate all day. Each student gets a coupon good for a "couple of cookies and a cup of cocoa." We have had student/teacher bands, combos, duets... you name it. One year a faculty/student band performed a heavy metal rendition of White Christmas! The audience went wild! The place is packed from 8 am to 3 pm. Feedback from administrators, faculty and students is that it is such a common denominator - the atmosphere is naturally more relaxed, and they all get to see each other in a whole new way that they don't get to see in the classroom. I've thought about skipping a year, but they've already started making suggestions for things to include next year. I've also been frustrated at times because there is so much conversation during the performances, so I was very interested in the article's discussion of the evolution of concerts, and the listening habits of the audience. I will share some of that information with my teachers.

On a different note... from the New York Times article of Jan. 3, 2010, "A World of Megabeats and Megabytes," I was interested in the history of the portability of music with the advent of the digital file format. This sounded like a recounting of my own personal journey through music in the last 35 years! I can't seem to carry enough music with me - I always have a couple of flash drive full of music, my iPod, and even a portable 120 GB hard drive that I keep just for music - and keep it plugged in to my car's sound system. I related to the "need for instant gratification" in being able to pull up whatever song I'm in the mood for at the time.

In all of the readings I was struck by how we have come to take music for granted in our lives, to the point that it is often just in the background without us consciously listening. I thought about how people without hearing miss what we take for granted, and that led me to do some searching for more information about how the deaf "hear" music. I found a good article in Science Daily online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/11/011128035455.htm When we owned a Ford dealership, we had a customer who is deaf. Whatever vehicle he bought needed to have a great sound system in it - and he would set the bass so that he could feel the vibrations. The article, "Brains of Deaf People Rewire to "Hear Music," dovetailed with the readings on the way the brain functions in hearing people when listening to music. At home he would place mega-speakers on the floor so that it would reverberate through the floor - which drove his wife nuts because the sound was definitely different for her!

A History of Media Technology Scares, From the Printing Press to Facebook

Via LIS News and Slate:

"...Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label..."

Same Old Same Old? or A Whole New World?

While listening to Radio Disney this weekend, I was struck by how little things had changed since I was a tween and young teen, lo these many years ago. “I will love only you forever and ever.” “Love me for who I really am.” “I can’t live without your love.” “I’m really special inside where no-one can see.” “I’m for real, and I hate phonies” “You done me wrong.” “Baby, it feels so right when I’m with you.” And so it goes. Idealism, extreme emotions, high drama, focus on the self, and a deep desire to both fit in and be unique fill the songs that fill Radio Disney. These are the same themes that have been the hallmark of teen music for decades.

In addition to the music, much of the programming and promotion on Radio Disney had a very familiar feel to it. There were interviews with stars, contests—“Be the third caller and you could win…”—request lines, relentlessly upbeat disc jockeys, and young people on the phone trying very hard to sound very cool. Although I was trying to call the radio station from a Princess phone and today’s teens are calling from cell phones, the desire to be on the radio has not changed. Although my personal heartthrobs were Mark Lindsey and David Cassidy (much though I cringe to admit it) rather than the Jonas Brothers, the passionate adoration and desire to know every single possible detail about that person’s likes and dislikes are not very different today than they were when I was young.

And yet, some things are very different than they were. I used to have to listen to a song over and over and over again to try and figure out what the lyrics were. There were endless debates: did he say “Rolled up like a deuce” or “Rolled up like a douche”? (How sophisticated we thought we were to be able to say that work without giggling…) Nowadays, the lyrics are there for you with a click if you want them. I’m not entirely sure why that seems important to me, but it does. I’d welcome others’ thoughts on whether this instant availability of the lyrics matters.

When a radio station had a limited broadcast range it could only reach the people within its area of service. There was at least the possibility that popular songs or singers could vary from region to region. The capacity of Radio Disney to reach the whole nation instantly probably increases the homogeneity of popular music. The same songs and stars will be hits in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles all at the same time.

Although there was some crossover between TV and music stars, i.e., David Cassidy, for the most part, music, movie and TV stars were different people. A musician followed one route to success and needed one particular set of people to back him or her, while a TV actor followed another route and needed a different set of people. The people who owned radio stations and music labels were not the same people who owned TV stations. But now, Miley Cyrus is a music/movie/TV juggernaut. Her TV show feeds demand for her music and her music and TV show promote her movies. Several of the songs I listened to this weekend were from the soundtrack of a soon to be released movie. There isn’t as much separation between entertainment venues as I remember.

I have heard it argued that the Internet would have a democratizing influence on music; anyone could get their music out there and find a following. Radio Disney seems to be an example of the opposite effect. By playing to young people’s desire to be on top of whatever is cool at the moment and being able to blitz the whole country with the few songs and singers that its owners deem to be marketable, Radio Disney has an enormously powerful effect on what tweens and teens listen to.

The idea of big corporations dictating what kind of music is available was also brought forth in the “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” and “The Way the Music Died” websites. This possibility bothers me a little less in those cases though, because they deal with music aimed more at adults. The argument that recording companies won’t buy hip-hop music with honorable or inspirational lyrics, that hip-hop musicians perform violent or homophobic songs because that is what sells has, in my opinion, some validity to it. If hundreds of thousands of people pay good money to buy songs with lyrics that I happen to think are hateful, it seems a little pointless to wring my hands and complain about the record companies or recording artists. As a society, we get the music we pay for, and if don’t like what is being paid for, we should probably think about why our culture values such songs.

Marketing to children though, may be a little different, simply because kids are developmentally more inclined to follow the herd. The need to fit in is so great at this age that it makes me a little uncomfortable to think of such a small group of people whose only motive is profit having such great influence. Having said that, though, I wonder what the solution would be. I would be very interested in knowing what others think about kids and music and marketing. Is anyone else troubled? Or am I over-reacting? Perhaps just another older person worrying needlessly about “young people these days?” In any event, spending time with Radio Disney was a very interesting and thought provoking experience.

Free Information Visualization Tools

In class this past week, someone asked about building one's own visualizations. Here's a link to a post from FlowingData about a couple of free web-based tools to try out: http://bit.ly/9zOJLN

There are some tutorials on the FlowingData site (do a site search) that walk you through the process of creating some various visualizations, but most of them require knowledge of Python and basic scripting skills.

Cheers.

Google Wave

We talked in class about using the new Google Wave. This is a link to the site, which offers a video to explain the whole thing... http://wave.google.com/about.html#video

Waving is part chatting, part document editing - all in real time... All I have done so far is the chatting part, no document writing or editing. This month I have a couple of collaborative projects to work on and will try Waving to see how well it works.. I'll keep you posted!

Images in the Classroom

A few years ago I was reflecting on how best to teach the African Slave Trade to my 9th grade world history students. While there are many different pedagogical approaches to teaching such disturbing and inhumane events and ideas to students, many of these methods require educators to use grade level or above readings and writing assignments. Certainly, these readings can be quite provocative and stimulate great discussion; however, I found that many of my students were so challenged by slave narratives and other primary and secondary documents that the full effect of the atrocities could not be felt. While that year many of my students had more life experience than me in terms of issues they dealt with on a daily basis they lacked the reading skills to match their maturity. For many educators this is certainly a problem—struggling readers with the ability to process complex and mature concepts and topics. As I brainstormed how best to take on this pedagogical challenge it led to reflection on how to best engage students in topics that are sometimes controversial, emotional, and unimaginable. The answer was clear—images.
As this week’s readings suggest, images are able to stimulate ideas and express meaning and stories. Further, they can encourage analysis and synthesis. For this particular lesson my goal was for students to understand:

1) the effects of European enslavement on the indigenous peoples of the Americas,
2) the role of African tribes in selling/trading slaves to Europeans,
3) the European conquest of African villages,
4) the experience of the Middle Passage including slave revolts and conditions aboard the slave ships, and
5) the arrival of the slave, the slave auction, and life on the plantation

To accomplish these goals I collected images of each part of the slave experience. Before presenting these images to the students we discussed the process of analyzing images and the power that an image can convey. After modeling an image analysis, students were organized into groups of three and given an envelope of images. The first task required students to place the images in order. During this phase, students were able to see the chronology of the experience and see the “big picture” of what had occurred. While this could have been done through a reading as well, being able to hold on to the pictures and creating a visual timeline for students made the ideas and events more tangible. Once students believed that the pictures were arranged in the appropriate order they articulated to me why the order that they had was correct. The next step required students to do an analysis of each image. This demanded students to look at particular details just as they would read for in a printed text. Students were encouraged to look for expression, types of weapons, clothing, etc. for each image in a step-by-step process. The end result was that students were able to breakdown each event/phase of the atrocity and talk about each with a strong sense of understanding. During the image analysis process students were also asked to develop discussion questions and write a list of questions to further inquiry to stimulate further exploration. The last phase of the lesson required students to take what they learned from the images and discussion and write a letter to slave.

Since I developed this lesson I have done it every year and found it incredibly successful. Students engage with the images and are able to create more connections than had I simply used slave narratives or other primary and secondary sources. The images encourage students to think critically and “see” history in front of them versus that of “reading” history. Since this activity I’ve had an increased appreciation for incorporating images in the classroom, especially when the topics lend themselves to challenging themes.

Do School Libraries Need Books?

As some of you may know, I'm not a GSLIS student. My current home department is the Computer Science department. I found this debate over at the New York Times on libraries interesting, and I would like to hear some of your comments on the topic. The debate concerns whether or not we still need physical books in libraries with, among other things, the increasing use of e-readers and the ever decreasing amount of books actually being checked out or browsed. I personally hate reading anything longer than a blog post on a screen and kill lots of trees printing things (I promise I print double-sided and with multiple sheets on each side of the page!), but I'm curious. What do some of you think?

Social Media Revolution

Here's a fun and interesting video highlighting the impact that social media is having on the global economy and society.

Walter Benjamin article

I think it’s fairly accurate to say that Walter Benjamin and I have little in common. He truly understood art and I don’t. Even though I don’t consider myself to be an aficionado of the arts, I have felt a sense of appreciation for certain works. I can remember when I saw ‘The Thinker’ on a traveling exhibit or when I was viewing various paintings and the like at the British Museum in London during my one trip overseas. However, the reproduction of art in the modern world is of little concern to me and I think the claims here of negative fallout because of photography or moving pictures isn’t warranted. I understand that things do lose their ‘aura’ when you’re not seeing the original but in the grand scheme of things, this is inconsequential. If anything, seeing art through a picture online or in a print magazine only makes me want to see the original a little more if possible. That is probably why I did go with my mom when I was in junior high to see the Rhodan exhibit because I’d seen its representation elsewhere and here was a chance to see it in person. It’s like the difference between hearing your favorite musical artist’s music through some media and still wanting to see them in concert because you’d seen the representation of them already.
I could only agree with the author in the idea that seeing in person is better for appreciating the artwork’s intrinsic value, but not completly . I think of the difference of seeing a movie in the theater and seeing it at home on dvd-there’s just something about being there that even the best Blue-ray, 1080 pixeled flat screen, home theatre system home environment can’t beat. At least, I think so as I don’t own any of these home entertainment devices. Benjamin may be right that the live performance is better than the movie production since the live actors can feed off of or adjust to the audience present with them as opposed to those actors who can only hope they’ve truly conveyed the screenplay’s intent with the help of the producer and/or director. However, I prefer the movie theater and its product for the opposite reason that Benjamin seems to think makes the live stage preferable-the artificiality. To see the set in-person just emphasizes that this isn’t real, just like witnessing an actor’s live gaff. These things only make me realize just how fake this production is and that to me takes away some of that ‘aura’ that a film’s editing and special effects can do away with without the audience even knowing, thus maintaining that believability. I do however agree that more often than not, you can better reflect on a painting or physical work of art better than you can most films. At least in a movie theater you can’t go back and rewind though since the emergence of dvr players, I’ve wanted to a time or two. Many people though can think of movies which have moved them and which have stuck with them even though they’d only seen them once. In this day and age, if you didn’t get the full meaning of a film it’s not difficult to go and pick up a copy of it on dvd to rent or own.

Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Sexism & Racism

I had this sent to me, and thought it fit in pretty well with this week's readings.
(PDF)

Wired Kids, Negligent Parents?

In the wake of the Kaiser Family Foundation's newest report on media in the lives of young people, a four-part opinion series at the New York Times: http://bit.ly/dB7ijR

Revisiting Visual Culture

As I began to delve into the world of visual literacy this week, I was immediately confronted with ideas that had been introduced to me during my undergraduate years studying art education pedagogy. Issues about critically analyzing and producing images have always been central to art education, however, traditionally these images have always been those which were designated “fine art.” And while tradition has mostly prevailed in art education, there have been pushes for something new with the changing times.

In reviewing the articles and websites this week I was reminded of one of these grassroots art education movements called Visual Culture in Art Education (VCAE). I only remembered it vaguely, because it was not seen as “best practice” in my undergraduate institution. I mostly remembered the criticisms, that VCAE leveled works of fine art with things such as advertising, consumer products and comic strips. Also, it was said that the enormous breadth of VCAE made it too difficult to teach in the time allotted for the arts in schools. But as I sat there trying to recall more, I quickly was at a loss. I decided that in the spirit of this week’s topic that I would do some research into this topic.

I searched through old copies of Art Education (The Journal of the National Art Education Association) with the vague memory of an issue focusing on VCAE. Finally I found it, the November 2005 issue with the title, “Oh, No! It’s the Return of Visual Culture!” complete with image of a deformed swamp monster clutching a paintbrush. This was precisely as I remembered the art education movement, as a destructive and debilitating force against tradition. But of course, I had no foundation for this assertion, it was simply what I had been taught (and too naive to question). So I proceeded to read the publication from front to back. I learned that VCAE was truly an all-encompassing study of visual culture which includes the traditional visual arts along with popular culture images, folk art, industrial, interior, package and graphic design as well as photography, commercial illustration, entertainment media and the internet. It is truly a study of our visual world. The proponents of VCAE recognize the potency of these images and the effects on children growing up in the midst of these influences. With the fine arts as such a small portion of the visual world, they assert, why is arts education so focused on these antiquated traditions of high art?

I was surprised at how much seemed so relevant to my thinking today. I have always felt that students seemed ill-equipped to analyze the bombardment of visual stimuli around them. With advertising, television and the internet as a constant, unrelenting force in everyone’s life it is essential that we know how to filter this information and critique it. And yet in art education we tend to focus only on the high arts (mainly painting, drawing and sculpture). While I love these images and recognize their importance, I also wonder if it is enough to study these visual images and call it a quality arts education.

It is actually one of the many reasons why I am moving from the realm of art education to librarianship. It’s not that I now think the arts to be irrelevant, but the expectations put upon art teacher from staff, parents and administration was beginning to wane on me. It seemed to me that the arts in schools are a frill, an extra that could easily be replaced or eliminated at a moments notice. I knew that parents and administration expect conventionally beautiful (or even “cute”) artwork to grace the walls of the school and see that as a symbol of a quality arts program. And being a non-tenured teacher there is a lot of pressure to live up to that standard. However in reading these articles that dissected this Visual Culture art movement, I became once again inspired. These were the ideas that brought me to art education in the first place. The concept that children could learn to analyze a visual image and speak intelligently about its meaning, whether it be a painting by Da Vinci or an advertisement by McDonald’s. The idea that art isn’t limited to museums or the elite, that you can surround yourself with culture. I cannot wait to infuse my teaching with these new ideas and to bring visual literacy into my teaching. Perhaps I am not a complete convert to VCAE, but I am certainly glad that I revisited its teachings. And in addition, it also makes me happy to think that the role of the school librarian is no longer limited to the gatekeeper of books. The title of School Library Media Specialist allows me to introduce and explore the various forms of media to my young students, including visual media. And that is truly an exciting prospect.

On Plato

(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.

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.

Applying Ong’s argument to Aviv’s New York Times piece “Listening to Braille” for me brings out some of the assumptions that are underlying people’s perspectives on the “illiterate” blind. I found it interesting that in Doug and Diana Brent’s study of blind people’s prose, they asked them to “write” by composing on a keyboard, a skill unfamiliar to them. They invoke Ong, but I feel, miss the idea of writing as a “technology.” To me they prove that people that haven’t had much experience writing will have difficulty writing—and perhaps even that their minds work differently that literate people. I wonder, however, how the results may have been different if they had their subjects compose their stories orally and dictate them. If the subjects then created organized, complex thoughts, would this be less valuable just because of the medium by which it was accomplished? To me the study assumes a specific set of values, and disproportionately privileges the “tool” or means of production, therefore backgrounding content or meaning. The Brents’ conclusion explicitly identifies the set of assumptions they are working from (using the term “value”) –“It just doesn’t seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and complex thought we value in a literate society.” The examples of Laura Sloate, successful director of a Wall Street firm, and New York governor David A. Paterson may counter the idea that lack of literacy equals an inability for complex thought.

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.

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. I think this is going to be a core strength of this device -- once the price comes down a bit, that is." - from a children's lit listserv. And some excitement from children's author and blogger Elizabeth O. Dulemba.

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!