Networked Publics Participation Gap

This week in New Medias New Literacies, we began reading some very thought provoking works by Kazys Varnelis, Networked Publics, and by Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. These readings are covering a wide application of concepts, theory, and issues that relate to digital literacy. One in particular that stood out to me was the “participation gap” described by Jenkins in chapter four, Why We Should Teach Media Literacy: Three Core Problems. The entire chapter is devoted to Jenkins belief, as I absolutely agree, that digital literacy is not something we should let children and young adults develop on their own, and that it takes deliberate structured intervention and infrastructure to ensure it happens properly. In regards to the participation gap, Jenkins points out numerous examples of the disadvantage, both in short term and long term, to those without affordable or accessible high speed Internet or without access to high capacity computers. My attention really perked when he specifically pointed to the advantage of having unrestricted high speed Internet access at home, instead of relying on a library’s connection or within a school system.

“What a person can accomplish with an outdated machine in a public library with mandatory filtering software and no opportunity for storage or transmission pales in comparison to what person can accomplish with a home computer with unfettered Internet access, high bandwidth, and continuous connectivity.” (Jenkins, 2006, p.13)

I have personal experience related to this subject that thankfully is now a part of my history and no longer the present. After taking my teaching position in 1998, I moved to Schoharie County and was fortunate to rent two different houses over the course of eight years, both with high speed Internet access (DSL and Cable). After I married my wife, we purchased a home that was somewhat located in a rural area, although only several miles from a densely populated area with high speed Internet access. The area also resembled more of a residential neighborhood than a sparse farm area. Unfortunately the only Internet access available was dial up, extremely slow, or satellite, extremely expensive. The house was nice though, and quite affordable, so we went ahead and purchased it with the thought that as broadband access was spreading, we would certainly be one of the first to be connected. Well, it happened, but it took three years before we saw it. After high speed internet had become a norm in my life, having to rely on my college’s access was extremely debilitating for those three years. I lost social connections to friends and family, I spent more time at my office than with my family, and my desire to pursue knowledge diminished significantly.

Today I no longer have that problem as I am now connected through DSL, I have re-established social relationships with distant friends and relatives, I am spending more time at home introducing my daughter to the wonderful resources on the world wide web, and albeit slow, am redeveloping an eagerness to search and sift the vast amounts of information available. That must be the case with everyone, right? Not exactly. In Networked Publics, we are shown that the United States significantly trails many other countries in terms of high speed internet access, and points to a few different reasons, including the fact that the US is not a densely populated (Varnelis, 2008, ch.4, speed bumps on the road toward ubiquitous broadband, para. 5). Furthermore, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimated in 2010 that there were still approximately 14 million residents of the United States who were not being served by broadband Internet (FCC, 2010, p.17).

My assumption is that anybody, or at least the majority of people, reading this blog has access to high speed Internet at their home. However, as educators, both in and out of formal educational institutions, we have an obligation to champion this cause, and to encourage our politicians from our local communities to the White House to continue the work to make broadband access, either through hard wire or wireless, accessible to and affordable for all American households.

REFERENCES

Federal Communications Commission. (2010). The broadband availability gap. Retrieved from http://download.broadband.gov/plan/the-broadband-availability-gap-obi-technical-paper-no-1.pdf

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The MIT Press. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/jenkins_white_paper.pdf

 Varnelis, K. (2008). Networked publics. London, England: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Literacy Debate

In a 2008 New York Times online article, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading, Motoko Rich presents us with an interesting look at how adolescents today are transforming our traditional definition of literacy, and how students practice and develop literacy (Rich, 2008). She uses specific teenagers as case examples, includes thoughts from the parents, and presents multiple sides of the issue from various organizations and intellectuals involved in education and educational psychology. What counts as literacy? Literacy by definition is one’s ability to read and write. However, I do not believe that the ability of one to do so should only be taught, cultivated, applied, and assessed in a strictly traditional printed form. Doing so is ignoring the fact that the world is changing, and the needs of the 21^st century in terms of business, democracy,  and society includes a new digital literacy that requires people to search, sort, read, write, and evaluate incredible amounts of information that are being produced daily and modified by the hour. To infer that the Internet, digital forms of text, and new media are changing literacy in a negative way is a closed minded type of analysis of the issue. Yes, there is some research out there that suggests Internet usage may be correlated to a decline in test scores. However, that result in itself warrants close examination and scrutiny.

The fact that these assessment models are not written or updated to address digital literacy or text derived through new technologies and new media, is essentially a prescription for declining scores and an increase in failure rates. Research does suggest that the more a student reads for fun, the better they do on these test scores. The Internet is what students do for fun, like it or not, it’s fact, and unless we ban in the Internet, that is what students will spend their time on. Students can use the internet to read for fun, which should increase their test scores. However, test scores do not improve because new media literacy is a different animal, and unless the tests are rewritten to address new media literacy, we will still continue to see students struggle on those exams. There is a key concept in education when it comes to curriculum design. Curriculum should not be written or structured to prepare students for an assessment, more commonly referred to as “teaching to a test.” Curriculum starts by identifying what the student will need to know and what they will need to be able to perform when the curriculum is over, and the curriculum is then designed, developed, and implemented with that goal as the basis for everything. The assessment is not that goal. The assessment is a measurement tool used to determine how well students are working towards those goals. Therefore, literacy assessments that do not include 21^st century forms of reading and writing are a statement by the assessment creators that the world is not changing around them and that new media literacy is not important or relevant for career skills or for any forms of lifelong skills that contribute to a better society, which is delusional.

I offer the following example to help illustrate my point. The New York State Education Department requires students to use a graphing calculator on their standardized algebra assessments. What do you think would happen if NYSED forced students, during the NYS Regents exams for algebra, to use grid paper and pencil to make all of the graphs they need to answer the assessment questions? My guess is that the test scores would be drastically lower than they already are. Curriculum writers in mathematics along with math teachers started using graphing calculators back at least when I was in school (mid 1980s) if not before, because they knew that it was just as important for students to be able to analyze graphs as it was for them to make the graph, utilizing technology to make more graphs faster allowed them to do more analysis.  Now, a graphing calculator is a requirement by NYSED to take the NYS Regents exams for algebra. 

Careers, communities, governments, schools, organizations, the world as a whole, will need people to be digitally literate as we move forward. Curriculum should be adjusted to include both traditional forms of literacy along with new media literacy so that we are meeting those needs, and the standardized tests used to measure reading comprehension and writing abilities should be redesigned to include digital literacy. Let's stop "teaching to the test", start teaching to our needs, and create some tests that assess how well we are teaching to our needs.

REFERENCES  

Rich, M. (2008, July 27). Literacy debate: Online, r u really reading? The New York Times.  
 Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/27reading.html?      
 pagewanted=all&_r=1&

How I use Texts

 "The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives" (Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9).

What do I do with texts, how do I make sense of them, and how do I use them to further my own learning? That depends primarily on the environment in which I am using them, work or personal. In my work, the majority of texts I use for my own learning, as well as the majority of texts I reference for my students in their learning, do not lend themselves well to social interaction per se. These books, some of which are hard print and others in electronic format, basically explain how machines are built, how they work, and how they come apart and go back together. Furthermore they are usually written by the person, or a close affiliation to the person, who designed the machine. They are, for the most part, very factual and based on scientific concepts and proven technological principles. However, they are often times misinterpreted or misunderstood. This ultimately structures my approach to teaching and the materials I build and present to my students in the classroom and in the lab (shop). 

When I put lecture material together, I try to consider the potential for confusion, misinterpretation, or misunderstanding of the text. This consideration comes from past experience and history with former students as well as my own struggles in comprehending the text. I try to create new text, present and explain diagrams, show videos, do demonstrations, and structure hands on lab activities in ways that reinforce the text and allow students to comprehend it from alternative means. In addition, I often times require students to write out and describe what they have learned. This comes in the form of lab reports where students reflect on what they did and write technical descriptions of what they worked on, along with system reports where they have to research and study specific systems on specific machines without my assistance and write a report along with the creation of an oral / visual presentation. In a way, this is another form of text for the class, and one that does allow social interaction between myself and the student as their text allows me evaluate and assess their learning and provide feedback, clarification, and support.

In my personal world, I typically access text electronically via websites, and rarely ever turn to printed text with the exception of my community’s local weekly newspaper. I like to read about news and events from these sources for many reasons, including their tendency to be updated when in reference to current events that are dynamic and changing by the hour. In addition, many web based news media outlets have built in an instrument that allows readers to integrate their social networking tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc) in response to the articles. I find this adds a wonderful dimension to the text as it allows people to respond to, question, challenge, and learn from both the original text as well as other humans. This is a great way for people to apply the concept of critical literacy and sociological imagination which Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel argue is essential to the practice of active citizenship (Lankshear & Knobel, 1992/94/97, p.89). On a side note, anyone who has had experience in reading or posting to these articles with their Facebook page know that the positives of this ability to interact with other humans are often offset by the insensitive, rude, and vulgar comments by some who need a serious lesson in civility. It is fine to disagree and even attempt to sway someone to your side of the argument, but when people start labeling each other with degrading names and profanity, the urge to participate goes away.

What about blogs, or weblogs? In my personal world, I do not find myself attracted to these forms of text much. That isn’t to say that I never read blogs, but as Lankshear and Knobel point out, bloggers are predominantly “individuals writing for relatively small audiences on themes, topics or issues of personal interest to themselves” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2001-2003, p. 197). Typically, the topics and issues that interest me are either not what bloggers are writing about, or the search engines and means of searching that I use do not land on blogger sites often. However, getting back to the work side of my life, I am intrigued about the use of blogs in my classes. While I currently do not use them, I may consider experimenting with them, or a similar form such as wikis, in the future.

Typically, I have my students work together is small groups (2-3 students per group) on lab activities and sometimes on system research reports. If I had them present their reports in the form of blogs or wikis, not only would it allow me to analyze and assess their learning as I always have, but it would allow the incorporation of a number of other benefits illustrated by David Huffaker in his 2005 article The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom. “Blogs present a perfect medium for literacy” (Huffaker, 2005). What kind of literacy? Simple practice of reading and writing, maybe a form of functional literacy, at an advanced level in terms of using technologically accurate terminology and descriptions, critical literacy from the standpoint of other students being able to question, challenge, and provide feedback directly, and most certainly New Literacy.

I’ve heard many people say that teaching is an art, and art is all about creativity. To me, a good teacher is one who can find creative ways to help facilitate learning in students, and I think I might have just found a new way to do that.

REFERENCES: 

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (1992/94/97). Critical literacy and active citizenship. In C. Lankshear & M.             Knobel, Literacies: Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives (p. 89). New York, NY: Peter Lang    

        Publishing.

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2001-2003). The "new literacy studies" and the study of "new" literacies. In  

        C. Lankshear & M. Knobel (Eds.), Literacies: Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives (p. 197).             New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing

Huffaker, D. (2005). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom. AACE      

Journal, 13(2), 91-98.

About Me

I wanted to take a brief moment to tell you a little about myself which will help bring some clarity to my future blog posts regarding New Media and New Literacies as they apply to me in my work and in my personal life. My full time occupation is at the college level where I teach courses related to agricultural equipment and engineering technology. Basically, I work with students pursuing careers where they will operate, maintain, troubleshoot, and repair farm equipment (tractors, combines, hay tools, tillage and seeding equipment, etc), construction equipment (backhoes, bulldozers, wheel loaders, excavators, etc), as well as lawn and garden equipment. I have been doing this for approximately 15 years. In addition, when the normal college semesters are over and students are home on break, I do some additional teaching in the form of industry training for the Bobcat Equipment Company. Beyond that I am a pretty "average" person. I have two kids (5 and 1) with a wonderful wife, a pretty average house that I paid an above average price for, two vehicles with too many miles, etc. In my spare time, which is very little, I enjoy golfing, snowmobiling, and a little gaming on my computer.