Literacy in the 21st Century

Remember when we used Etherpad to collaboratively write a poem? Well here’s an interesting cross between collaborative writing (there’s only one person doing it) and screencasting (as Joanne demonstrated in her talk on podcasting). Check out 13 Sentences About Startups. It’s brilliant, but I need to spend some more time with it and see if I can slow it down. Think about this as a visualization of composing and editing, and the way that every change (and every mistake) can be meaningful. Cool stuff.

Then we have yet another take on the future of books — this time, though, the problems we’ve discussed (not simply replicating paper on screens, for instance) is being addressed! The NYT reports on Vook, a new company designed to make electronic books … well, more electronic. Check it out.

This next article was sent to me by a former student (hi, Jay!), and it speaks to many of the things we’ve discussed in class: psychology, tailoring messages to particular audiences, market research, and the way we’re programmed to respond to certain things, but not others. Disney is researching teen boys to develop shows designed to appeal especially to them. That’s not earth-shattering, of course. All companies research their target demographics, but this article gets into some of the details of how detailed they are in their research. It’s creepy. And a fantastic read. You should definitely check it out.

Next, for all of you Blade Runner fans out there, io9 is reporting that Boom! Studios is adapting Philip K. Dick’s classic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a graphic-ish novel. As Graeme McMillan writes:

The series, appropriately titled Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? will include the full text of Dick’s 1968 novel – famously adapted into the movie Blade Runner – alongside brand new sequential illustrations for something more than just illustrated prose.

I’m excited, but I really have no idea what it will look like in the end. Perhaps that’s why I’m excited. The first issue of PKDDADoES? goes on sale in June.

And finally, all is not well in Puppetland. Click the link to read all about the game (it’s a very concise game manual). Click here to download your own puppet character sheet. We’ll be filling them out in class on the 29th, but you’ll be much happier if you’ve thought about your character ahead of time. As we’ll all be taking turns gamemastering, I’ll explain the situation next week so you can also have enough time to come up with a good scenario. Trust me… Punch the Maker-Killer has come up with a truly insidious plan this time!

Pre-post reminder: this week’s Reading Response topic: “How would you make Cathy’s Book better? And now onto the post.

A few items of multimodal, multiliterate interest. First, my laptops are having problems. Ugh. The Mac PowerBook G4 has decided that Firefox is no longer interested in playing embedded YouTube videos. Other videos (mostly) work. But YouTube? Nope. There’s a URL-by-URL fix out there, but that doesn’t help with embedded videos. And yes, I’ve tried all of the suggested fixes. No good. So, on the Mac I surf with Firefox and keep Opera open to do nothing but watch videos. How tedious.

And then the sound capabilities of my PC laptop started to go. First the speakers got scratchy, then they crapped out altogether. Now the earphone jack does nothing, either. Double-ugh. Of course, the PC laptop does have its zombie sound moments — usually involving some irritating system sound or beep that comes out at ear-splitting decibels because I’ve forgotten to turn the previously uncooperative and utterly silent sound to off.

But to get to the good stuff, make the jump.

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Following yesterday’s post, Jill Walker Rettberg dropped by to let us know that the slide wasn’t original to her, but was from a Flickr set she found. Check out her comment for the link to the Flickr set. (And if you’re not already reading her blog, check that out, too. You know, she’s the person who came up with the definition for “blog” for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory.)

Also, I got an e-mail from the people who create the online work Inanimate Alice. I taught IA to my TAP seminar last semester, and the freshfolk weren’t terribly impressed, but according to the IA blog:

They are all high school special education students, many with learning disabilities, and many that really dislike reading and writing. When I first discovered the Inanimate Alice episodes, I thought they would be perfect for my students. I made up a Unit for them, including some ideas from the educational pack your site provides and adding some of my own ideas. The images, sound, and interactivity truly engaged them and still lent itself to “teaching” literary elements such as setting, mood, characterization. When we completed the 4 episodes, my students couldn’t stop asking, “When is Episode 5 coming out?” I finally said, “You guys are going to create your own!” I had 4 different classes, each working as a collaborative group. They used a program called PhotoStory 3, which I’m guessing is similar to iStories. My students wished they could have had their episodes “do more”, such as moving text, or clicking on objects, etc. Overall they were happy with their results. I actually had them use an evaluative rubric to score them to see which episode “won”. It was a great learning experience. Have a look at these links to see what the students have created.
http://aronowsenglish10.blogspot.com/
http://aronowsenglish11.blogspot.com/

And some of you may have wondered why I reacted so strongly to Jim’s video of the exploding chair. Here’s why.

Gizmodo is reporting that: “A 14-year-old boy in China was killed when his chair exploded, sending chunks of metal into his rectum. The bleeding this caused killed him. The alleged explosion came from the gas cylinder that was in the base of the chair, the part that allowed the user to adjust the seat up and down.”

Gizmodo wonders whether the story is legit, but the posting-trail seems to head back to a Japanese blog, which means that’s where my investigational skills stop.

Joanne mentioned links to online short stories in her presentation. Here’s a new one with very short stories — Brain Harvest. The stories selected so far aren’t exactly my favorites, but they’re certainly interesting. In a sometimes head-scratchingly sort of way.

And finally, for today, Bill Simmons at Candleblog posted this a while back, and I’m still not sure how to respond. Here’s a how-to guide for presenting while your audience is Tweeting their brains out. (And why that might not be a bad thing.) What do you think?

Welcome back from our loooooooong break! Here are three things to ponder.

Thing the First: I updated the renga post we did before break with the image files from our collaborative poem. Check it out. Now that some time has passed, you may be able to read it without being overwhelmed with memories of the experience of writing/reading it. We often find that in participatory literacy activities the experiences of the participants are much more interesting than the resulting work. What do you think?

Thing the Second: While flipping through the latest issue of Duke University’s alum-stroking magazine, I noticed that prominent digital textuality theorist N. Katherine Hayles is now at Duke (she was at UCLA last time I spoke with her). I also noticed that she has a column out discussing the future of textuality. Here’s a bit of her argument:

Why isn’t everyone gaga, then, for the new literary art forms emerging in digital media? One reason is the “bathtub” argument: Folks say they can’t read a digital artwork in the bathtub or curl up with it in bed. That is changing with digital readers like the Kindle. Of course, it is hard to beat the portability, low cost, and convenience of the paperback book. Unlike computers, even very old books almost always work when you open them. Still, if we have learned anything since programming was done by plugging cords into ENIAC, it is never say never when it comes to advances in networked and programmable media.A more serious objection is the charge that electronic literature lacks the subtlety, richness, and resonance of print literature. In part, I think this objection comes about because literary critics, nearly all of whom took in print with mother’s milk, do not fully understand how to read digital art.

You really should read the whole thing.

Thing the Third: While bopping around the interwebs, I happened across this post on Jill Walker Rettberg’s blog, and I was struck by this slide from one of her presentations:

What do you think?

Go here.

(Link removed.)

We went to http://etherpad.com You should, too.  I’ll post the results soon.

Okay, bowing to the will of the people, below the jump is the result of our collaborative poem-writing experience.  I’ve removed the names, but each writer is shown in a different (slightly) color.
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So much going on!

Think you’ve got this whole “new media literacy” thing down? Try this: a new “novel” by Aaron A. Reed, Blue Lacunae. It’s a hybrid novel/interactive fiction, and it’s quite interesting in the parts I’ve “read” so far. I won’t give anything away, but I did enjoy the avatar customization he includes. It’s rare to find that in a book. Even an eBook.

And perhaps most importantly, Amazon unveiled its Kindle 2 today. We’ll watch this video in class and discuss it, but there’s more info at Amazon if you’re interested.

After last week’s post about TV watching and book-being-read-to-you-ness, I finally got around to watching the Superbowl ads. And what did I find, but this:

And not only that, but another New York Times article for us! This one is why TV is still around when we have computers to satisfy all of our needs. In case you’re not sufficiently piqued to read it, here’s Randall Stross with a daily dose of infuriation:

Consumers are increasingly avoiding newspapers — and books, too — because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.

Go on, I dare you to read it. On a screen, of course!

… by Cory Doctorow.

• http://craphound.com/?p=2090

Holy crap last weekend was full of literacy-related stuff! Here’s a quick run-down.

In the comics we had Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman’s Zits talking about childrens’ books. Here’s the first two cells:

And Bunny Hoest and John Reiner’s Lockhorns discussing reading skill and its inverse relationship to TV watching:

And then in the New York Times Mazagine, Virginia Heffernan’s “The Medium” column asked “What are kids learning to read when they learn to read online?” That’s more than relevant. I think our classroom is bugged.

Heffernan opens:

“Did you like this book?” asks the computer. It’s a customer-satisfaction question, but it seems more profound than that.

We hesitate. Ben, my 3-year-old son, shoots me a puzzled look. The answer should be yes. Ben enjoys what’s on the screen right now: Starfall, an online medley of free learn-to-read activities. But he doesn’t like the question.

“It’s not a book,” he explains, emphatically, to the laptop. “It’s more like a movie or a video.”

Read the rest — it’s really interesting, especially from a childrens’ lit perspective. And super interesting, from a Proust and the Squid perspective, when Heffernan notes that:

I’d like for Ben to sit with One More Story and come away with the impression that he’d been read beautiful books all afternoon. But Ben tends to ask for One More Story when he wants privacy, the same state of mind in which he likes videos. Books, by contrast, are for when he feels snuggly.

As I said, read it all. It’s well worth your time. Even if you have to read it on a computer monitor.

This post was going to be all about the fact that increasingly people are turning to someplace other than Google to get the best search results.

But then I remembered that Google assimilated YouTube at the end of 2006, and then that tag line and catchy lede got all shot to heck and back.

So, anyway, GooTube is, as the New York Times reports, increasingly becoming the search engine of choice for all kinds of information. This is interesting just from an informatics standpoint (Google being ubiquitous, monolithic, and now completed verbified), but also from a literacy standpoint.

“I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again.

While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time.

“When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google,” said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif.

How much of what we know, and what we want to know is primarily visual, and how much more efficiently would we learn certain topics if we instinctively searched for extra-textual information on them? How would we identify such topics? And is this a case of multiple intelligences, or of a foundational feature of information itself?