New Literacies, New Learning

Generational Differences

--from Teens, technology and the future presentation to PLA by Lee Rainie on 23 March 2006.

A common observance is the distinction between those born before 1970, the time video games began, and those born after, though the labels used differ. Tom Storey uses Boomers vs. Gamers, while Marc Prensky calls them Digital Immigrants vs. Digital Natives (and on the WWWEDU listserv in February some people proposed a few additional categories, e.g., the Digitally Deficit, the Digitally Select, the Digitally Arrogant, and the Digitally Ignorant).

Lee Rainie, founding director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, uses the term Millenials -- as do many others. See Stephen Abram's blog posting on Lee's presentation The 8 Realities of the Millenials, or Homo Connectus at a recent conference.

New, preferred modes of thinking – such as multi-tasking and the appreciation of more cognitively demanding (‘smart culture’) mass media (see Steve Johnson) – recognized as more prevalent in youth, as well as research into the development of cognitive processing in the teenage brain, need to be taken into account.

These new modes of thinking are literally changing the brains of young people, creating faster, parallel-processing, random-access ‘hypertext minds’ – which is changing the information literacy practices of teens.

Connectivism

is the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories.

Principle 1: Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.

Principle 2: Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

Principle 3: Learning may reside in non-human appliances.

Principle 4: Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known

Principle 5: Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.

Principle 6: Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.

Principle 7: Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.

Principle 8: Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

-- from Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

Networked learning

is a subset of connectivism.

The connectivist view that learning is a network creation process significantly impacts how we design and develop learning.... Moving towards a networked model requires that we place less emphasis on our tasks of presenting information, and more emphasis on building the learner's ability to navigate the information (i.e., connectivism).

Blogs, wikis, and other open, collaborative platforms are reshaping learning as a two-way process.... The links and connections are formed by the learners themselves.

-- from Connectivism: Learning as Network-Creation

Both articles by George Siemens; see also his website Elearnspace and the online space of Connectivism which includes a blog and a wiki devoted to the subject

Have a look at some images of visual complexity

Right-Brain Skills

Daniel Pink argues that the winners in the future will be those who use both sides of their brains. He recommends attention to six senses:

• Not just function, but also DESIGN
• Not just argument, but also STORY
• Not just focus, but also SYMPHONY
• Not just logic, but also EMPATHY
• Not just seriousness, but also PLAY
• Not just accumulation, but also MEANING

In his paper The Knowledge Worker Redux, written for the 2005 National Library Board of Singapore conference, "Celebrating Knowledge", Doug Johnson, the director of libraries and technology for an average American public school system, takes a look at both Pink and Friedman and considers their arguments in light of what skills will be required in the future. He posits a hierarchy of "Knowledge Worker Skills":

1. The basics
2. Discipline/Profession Specific Skills
3. Technology Skills
4. Information Problem-Solving Skills & Higher Order Thinking Skills
5. Conceptual Skills -- which is where Pink's six senses come in

Johnson proposes a seventh sense to add to Pink's list:

• Not just knowledge, but also LEARNING

New Literacies and the Attention Economy

The development and cognitive implications of new literacies arising out of new technologies fit into the theory of the Attention Economy, where attention – defined as ‘engagement with information’ – is the scarce commodity being allocated in a world swamped with information. The trick in such an economy is how to get people’s attention and how to keep it – and this has caused a shift in information science from a system-oriented paradigm to a user-oriented one. The issue then becomes a matter of paying attention to what teens pay attention to (because no one doubts they can pay attention when motivated) and tap into it.

-- Lankshear, Colin, and Knobel, Michele.

• Do We Have Your Attention?: New Literacies, Digital Technologies, and the Education of Adolescents, Paper presented at the State of the Art Conference, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, January 26-27, 2001.
• Memes and Affinities: Cultural replication and literacy education, Paper presented to the annual NRC, Miami, November 30, 2005.
• New Literacies: Changing knowledge and classroom learning, Open University Press, UK, 2003.

-- Lanham, Richard A.

• The Economics of Attention, Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 1997.
• The Economics of Attention, ARL: Proceedings of the 124th Membership Meeting, Austin, Texas, May 18-20, 1994.
• Rhetorica, his home page
• The Economics of Attention : Style and Substance in the Age of Information, University of Chicago Press, to be published May 1, 2006

-- The Attention Economy: the Natural Economy of the Net -- First Monday article by Michael H. Goldhaber, 1997

Gaming

The positive value of sophisticated gaming, perceived as a popular culture incarnation of multi-tasking and multi-modal literacies, is gradually being recognized. James Paul Gee, an academic guru of critical literacy, published a book in 2004 called ‘What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy’, which explores literacy practices of youth outside the school context, from which, he argues, professionals can learn a great deal if they choose to.

See also Katie Day's discussion paper on \"Gaming as an Educational Tool\".

Can Games Be Used to Teach?\" is asked and answered -- point / counterpoint -- in the April 2006 issue of Leading & Learning with Technology. Does it just depend on the kind of game? David Warlick begs to differ -- "I would... say that it isn’t the difference between the kinds of games being played, but between the learning expectations. One type helps students to memorize facts. The other helps them to master concepts, develop problem solving skills, and do so in a more authentic fashion."

A good communal/librarian blog on gaming is Game On: Games in Libraries