Literacy in the 21st Century

Hello all,

For this week’s blog, I came across something that seems right on with our talks about dyslexia.  If you click on the link below, you will go to a website that has a rotating woman.  Supposedly, the way the woman rotates (either clockwise or counter-clockwise) tells us which side of the brain we are most prevelantly using.  If you see her rotating clockwise, you are using more of the right side of the brain; counter-clockwise, more of the left.  You can see her shift directions, so I am told, if you switch the current between the two parts.  I have not been able to do this though…my brain is too stubborn perhaps.

I see is her rotating clockwise, which indicates more activity in the right side of the brain.  I am curious to hear what others see.

Now, I am not sure if this is just a “trick” that we see or if this has some correlation with dyslexia.  Either way, there is something going on here.  My assumption is that what we see does dictate what part of the brain we are most apt to use (kind of like Wolf’s assumption that someone with dyslexia has built up other parts of the brain that non-dyslexic people don’t use as much).  And since this is a visual process, I tend to think that it has to carry over into the reading process as well.  I am also curious if the outcome has any correlation between those of us who are right-handed or left-handed, and if there is a correlation between languages we know.  For instance, if someone was raised with an Eastern language (Farsi, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, etc.) if they see the rotation going one way as oppose to the other more often than not.  I know we have a few people in class who speak a few various romantic languages…but since the structure of these languages are so closely tied to English, I wonder if that makes a big difference.

Also, Kenya, I was wondering if your niece (was that your niece you were talking about in class, or cousin?  Sorry, can’t remember) could check this out.  I would like to hear what it is that she sees.  Perhaps the dyslexic mind can see the woman rotating both ways easier than the non-dyslexic.  I don’t know; but it’s a curious thing.  So, if you guys have a chance, check it out and let me know.  And try to see if you can switch her direction.  Like I said, my brain is too set in its ways!

Here’s the link:

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html?from=mostpop

Jeff Gomez’ Print Is Dead
(Yes, the whole thing)
Due: 10am Tuesday February 3rd

Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.
(Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre chapter 19)

For this Response, we shall say goodbye to Wolf’s Proust and the Squid while saying hello to Gomez’ Print Is Dead. Wolf ends her book by noting, oxymoronically, that: “A book about how our species learned to leap beyond the text shouldn’t have a last sentence. Gentle readers, it is all yours….”

Gomez’ book, on the other hand, is not interested in giving its reader the last word. Gomez is presenting an argument (or series of arguments), and the purpose of an argument is, often, to forestall all response from the audience except rapt, mute assent.

Poppycock!

For this Response, you are to write the last word on, against, for, or beyond Gomez’ book.

My advice: have fun with it.

Proust and the Squid pp. 163-236
Due: 10am, Tuesday January 27th

I can’t explain it, the things they’re saying to me,
It’s going ,em>yayayayayayaya, oh yeah,

‘cause I’m a 21st Century digital boy,
I don’t know how to read but I’ve got a lot of toys,
My daddy’s a lazy, middle-class intellectual,
My mommy’s on valium, so ineffectual,
Ain’t life a mystery?
I tried to tell you about no control,
But now I really don’t know…
– “21st Century Digital Boy” Bad Religion

The last section of Wolf’s book addresses the brains that cannot read “normally.” For this Reading Response, I’d like you to think about this passage (arguably, one of his most famous) from Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text:

Thus, what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to so with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading. (11-12)

Bringing together the first two sections with the third, I’d like you to think about what it means to read as an academic. How is this different from “regular,” or “normal” reading? Do you read in different ways, and if so, when, how, and why? Do you see any connections between the way(s) academics (especially Humanities academics) read and the ways people with dyslexia and other reading challenges do? Again, you may want to use a passage from a work to ground your discussion, but you certainly don’t need to do so.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1973, 1975.

So, you’ve all read (or re-read) Frank Stockton’s classic short story, “The Lady or the Tiger.” (And, as I mentioned, there is a sequel: “The Discourager of Hesitancy,” in which a delegation comes from another kingdom to ask the semi-barbaric king which door the lover opened. I highly recommend it.)

Time to settle the question once and for all, my legionnaires of literacy. Which door did the lover of the princess open? And why?

As we discussed, your answer might connect to Stockton’s fascinating (and quite fun) prose, or to your experience with the reading, or to your knowledge of the history of the story, or to… well, you tell me.

The lady? Or the tiger?

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?

I was fascinated by the section where Wolf talked about her son, Ben, who drew the Leaning Tower of Pisa upside down, and it reminded me of that book Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards.  In that book, many of the activities involve you drawing either upside down or with your non-dominant hand, or crazy things like that.  According to Edwards, that kind of work activates a different center in the brain that allows you to be more creative and “free” than you normally would be.  And after reading Wolf, especially the stuff about the right hemisphere re-wiring and growing “stronger” to compensate for the left brain’s weaknesses, I now understand what Edwards is getting at. (yes, I AM going to end with a preposition…just call me a rebel)

This brings me to think about the literacy involved in art, photography, graphics, and other visual media, especially in light of the current technology.  These days we’re surrounded by visual media almost as much as text.  In fact, in this class we’ve already talked about some “problems” that could arise when we’re asked to look at a “text” that involves both words and pictures.  I was thinking about how different that task is than interpreting the pictures that come with most children’s story books.  I mean, when you read Go Dog Go!, you get pictures — very cool pictures of dogs in cars and trees, I might add — but the pictures themselves couldn’t necessarily tell a story.  They’re nice to look at, and of course reading with pictures is usually more enjoyable (especially to little kids), but we don’t necessarily have to navigate those pictures to decipher meaning….or DO we?

If you think about a little kid following along as you read, you realize that usually you have to stop at each page and give the kid time to “process” the picture.  This often involves several sort of “I spy” moments when the child recognizes objects in the picture that have been mentioned in the story, and then sometimes random comments that expand on the story and/or objects in ways you probably wouldn’t have thought of unless you were four.  So the pictures, then, become their own kind of literacy.  And it’s certainly true, too, that kids can make a story out of a series of pictures, text or no text.

So my real question is:  in this age of an outpouring of visual media, will our brains begin to “re-wire” themselves to adjust to a new kind of literacy?  I think, according to Wolf’s conclusions, the answer is yes.  What do you guys think?

Okay, I HAD entered this same post nearly three days ago, but apparently it did not show.  So here it is, again.

During the first day of class, I made a joke about writing my final project in “leet.”  For those that are unfamiliar with this internet “language,” allow me to make a quick definition.  Leet is short for elite and refers to any and all internet lingo that uses non-standard characters in place of standard characters.  For example, spelling leet itself can be accomplished with numbers alone like this, 1337.  The number 1 looks like the letter l, the 3’s make backwards e’s, etc.
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Wolf’s Principle 2: A Failure to Achieve Atomaticity reminded me of a psychological trick you may have all seen at some point: The Stroop Task.  I am NOT academically familiar with this and have probably only seen it on posters in catalogues or email spam.  The Stroop Task demonstrates our ability to read faster than we can name colors.  (Wolf talked about “the naming of things” in part one.) This task in an exercise in “directed attention.”  Even if you have seen the graphic before, check it out.  There are actually three levels of directions for reading the “test.”  Level three is the hardest for most people.  Based on stories people shared during our last class, I would expect that Professor Parent and other people who said that they could mutli-task, or mangage “continual partial attention,” would perform better on this test than, say, myself who can only do ONE THING AT A TIME. 

If you follow the link below, you can read a brief explanation of what it is.  You can also try it out.  I thought it might be a fun blog post because we could each try it and then maybe compare it to Wolf’s description of the reading process in our blog comments.  This is not a ploy to get the most blog comments, at least not consciously ; )

When I tried it, I was not able to click on the “blue box” as directed, but I was able to click on “static non-shockwave demonstration.”  Of course, it would be way-fun if I could just upload the directions and image here, but Word Press and I are not in agreement how this should be done.  Just follow the link.

The Stroop Test

Hey guys,

For this weeks blog entry, I wanted to write about a question Professor Parent asked me after reading my first exploration.  First, to let you all know, I did option 2, and reread a random section from a book I read a while back.  Then I analyzed how I read this paragraph.  Here was his comment/question:

“…I strongly suspect that after reading Wolf and then setting out on this assignment, you’re in a different reading/thinking state than you would have been the first time you read the book.  What do you think about this?”

This was something that I thought of as I was writing out the assignment.  Interestingly, after reading “Proust and the Squid”, it did open my eyes in a sense, in that I was reading deeper than I had before.  By “deeper” I mean, on more than one level.  It is easy for us to read something and be swept away by the prose and fall completely into our own imaginative mind.  That is how I would explain my reading of this book the first time I read it (the one I was analyzing, not “Proust and the Squid”).  However, after reading Wolf’s book, I was reading in two different ways: one was being in this imaginative mind and the other was in an analytical approach to my way of reading; ie, how I approached understanding the sentence I was reading, what I was anticipating out of the paragraph, trying to find context in the content, etc.

I look at this as a kind of “partial continual attention”, like we had discussed in class.  However, I suppose that I did this subconciously before, without really recognizing it.  That is what Wolf would say, I’m sure.  Because as we are in our fantasy world of reading, our brain is digging up context, putting sentence structures together and deciphering information to predict probable outcomes.  The difference is this, I believe: Being consciously aware of this process made for a much more acurate, understanding and ultimately enjoyable read.  This one little paragraph in the midst of a 522 page book gave a huge insight into both the main character and his father.  I discovered these insights in my first read of the novel after hundreds of pages; but in three sentences, I could see major characteristics in both peoples personalities.  There is hindsight here to, I am aware.  I knew about theses characters fully, obviously, since I had already read the book.  But, it doesn’t change the fact that even if I didn’t read this book, I would have still come to the same conclusion about their personalities.

So, I would say yes, after reading Wolf, and going into this assigment, I was prodded into a deeper reading sense.  But it is interesting how and why this deeper reading came to be.  So my question is this; after reading a book such as “Proust and the Squid,” that discusses ways at which we read, do you think that one might be changed and, perhaps, evolve, or at least, take a step toward evolving their reading processes?  I might be making a big claim on that.  I’m not suggesting a huge, catastrophic change, it could be subtle, it could even be a step toward a change, but a change nevertheless.

And to clarify, by change, I mean, becoming a clearer, deeper reader than once before.  Anyone have any opinions?