The Transparency Problem needs to be renamed something with the word “meta” in it, because what’s meant is the ability to get into the intentions and influences that reside in the media itself. In History, he notes a teacher using the video game Civilization to teach. Students played the game, but “lacked the vocabulary to critique how the game itself constructed history” (p 15). That is, in short, the problem with all media, including text.

Using media, allowing media, should take place within a learning context. This is not the context of learning the material, but rather the context of learning how the media is constructed. The only place I see this done is in the field of Communications, and sometimes not even there. We do not always, as educators, have the meta skills ourselves to teach the analysis of media as it is used to learn. It reminds me of everyone playing Oregon Trail back in the day, to “learn how people lived in the 19th century”. As a goal for elementary students that may have had value, but older students should have been analyzing the ways in which the game was portraying history.

Take it a step back, to traditional print media. The report notes that “students lack both the knowledge and interest in assessing how information was produced for and within digital environments” (p 45). Go ahead and remove all the words after produced — it’s safe to do so. This has nothing to do with digital anything, but with analytical skills in general. What Jenkins et al call the “transparency” problem is a basic lack of cognitive analysis.

When I teach history and provide excerpts (yes, I live in the 21st century too) from fictional works, the important thing is that students understand the historical context in which it was written. What were the social, political and economic influences that might have played into this work? Criticism of this nature is built into the field of history. And yet we assign Civilization so they can learn…what? the joy of doing history? Seems like the same kind of joy we have in watching the History Channel. Either way, it’s not doing history unless you get into it with some kind of meta approach.

I don’t think students will enjoy this. When I was an English major, back in the last century, I got very annoyed at criticism, especially of poetry. Why couldn’t I just enjoy the poem? or the story? why did we have to analyze it to death? It kept me from enjoying literature. What I see now as enriching, as understanding the code, I saw then as intrusive. I cannot, in other words, expect my students to enjoy analyzing a video game they might play for recreation. And I, the instructor, don’t enjoy playing the game — I am continually annoyed by the “alternative histories” in such games. They make no sense to me. It’s hard enough to ferret out the meaning of what might have really happened; adding a “what if” scenario seems to make it more difficult and less interesting. (Don’t worry, I’m good at bridge if not Farmville.)

What was most odd regarding the “transparency” issue in the report, however, was that the examples of how teachers could institute these skills still didn’t emphasize analysis. “Medieval Space” (p 31) is noted, where students “create online profiles for various historical figures” and imagine “how they might have interacted if they had online spaces in the fifteenth century”. Oh, do let me analyze this one.

Not only didn’t they have online spaces in the 15th century, but what people do and how they do it is influenced (duh) by their culture. That culture didn’t include online spaces, nor the type of communication that would imitate it, thus you get far, far away from analyzing the actions of historical personages when you turn it into this kind of game. And while it may indicate that the student understands that Richard III felt he was above moral rules (which is, in fact, a historian’s interpretation), imagining his current song as 2Pac’s “Only God Can Judge Me Now” (p 31) is vastly amusing but has little to do with learning history. (Yes, I know, I’m a fuddy-duddy. I have a friend who refuses to watch any movie with me that has a historical setting because I complain all the way through.)

So much was right in this report. It emphasizes that meta-analysis is significant, that ethics must be tied into digital learning, that analysis of text is still a key skill, that students must understand multiple perspectives. At first I assumed the examples were so poor because we don’t have very good examples (or perhaps people don’t recognize those of us already providing them). But now I’m thinking it’s because of the insistence on separating “digital” skills from everything else. The skills mentioned relate almost purely to the digital environment (appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, transmedia navigation), and yet the challenges are those of all learning environments: access, meta-analysis (“transparency”) and ethics. Although the report acknowledges these challenges, its error may be in not putting them first.

Perhaps the reason the examples are poor is because the (media skills) cart is being put before the (cognitive skills) horse. The foundational skills, the ones that are older than digital, are needed before the new media skills. Before one “appropriates” material (defined here as “the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content”), one should know how to cite sources. Before you do simulation (“the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes”), you need to know how the real world works. “Role play, in particular”, the report says, “should be seen as a fundamental skill used across multiple academic domains” (p 30). Back we go again to having Henry VIII use Twitter.

We never really taught the analytical skills correctly, or at least they weren’t learned as deeply as they should have been. I contend that these skills must be the foundation, just as the past is always the foundation for moving forward. The abstract expressionists learned to paint in the realistic academy style first. And although I am by no means recommending we go back to rote drills and factual memorization, the basic skills are individually cognitive and analytical, not embedded in new media. Rather than assuming those skills will some how emerge as we mash up, multitask and navigate transmedially, we should approach new media with those old analytical skills in hand.

Some things I completely agree with, including the idea that students shouldn’t be segregated by age when we want them to learn things, and that one purpose of industrialized education was to develop a standard curriculum and training for all.

But that wasn’t the only purpose.

If we take the points made in the article to their logical conclusion (and logic is all the authors have here – I saw no evidence that wasn’t anecdotal), then students should not have to learn (or rather, be taught) basic mathematical calculations or factual information. They should also be able to learn (not be taught) what they’re interested in, and teach it to others.

“Why should children — or adults, for that matter — be asked to do something computers and related equipment can do much better than they can?” ask the authors.

Is that supposed to be a rhetorical question? Did these handy computers and equipment fall from the sky? No, they were invented and developed by educated individuals. Alan Turing stayed in school, although his teachers said they wished he’d become educated rather than focusing on those science things he liked so much. (I can get anecdotal too.)

We should all know how to do basic math. Computers and calculators can do it for us, but we wouldn’t know what to put into the machines nor how to use the answers if we didn’t know basic math.  My paycheck is automatically deposited at my credit union, and handled by computer. How can I check the work of that machine if I don’t know basic math?

We should all have some factual knowledge, because you cannot know what to look up if you don’t. You’ll also have trouble knowing how to research something using keywords and verbal relationships if you don’t have a good vocabulary. Yes, you could get a good vocabulary only in the areas you’re interested in, but that wouldn’t help when you do research in any other area.

To follow only ones whims, even for Alan Turing, would be to miss the larger picture. Education, to me, isn’t about either teaching or learning so much as it’s about awareness of the larger world and ones place in it.

“One might wonder,” say the authors, “how on earth learning came to be seen primarily a result of teaching.” Perhaps because it often works that way? Tribal societies show their young how to hunt or make baskets. The children learn at the side of adults, and they learn through both observation and instruction. Even the article itself presents the medieval university model as a good thing, because students chose which teachers they wanted to listen to.

But here’s where we must get back to the reasons for industrialized schooling. Yes, schools were set up to manage children and help create an industrialized workforce. But they were also, in the 19th century particularly, places to put children instead of making them work in factories. Publicly funded education was especially important in this regard, as were mandatory education laws. The purpose was not to enslave kids and turn them into automatons, but to make it possible for them to learn things in a place dedicated to learning. Many parents objected, because they wanted the children working in the family business, or in the fields, or bringing home money from a factory job. Now many parents are utterly dependent on public schools as society-funded day care.

So when the authors promote the idea that students should be able to go where they want to learn what they want and not be force-fed “content” by “teachers”, I want to remind them that for centuries any sort of education was a luxury experienced only by elites. Those supposedly self-led medieval university students weren’t there because they wanted to learn — they were sent by their elite parents to advance the family’s goals. Most of them spent too much time drinking and making trouble in the towns.

I do not want a world where the student’s wishes determine the curriculum. There are sets of facts that are important, and it’s highly instructive to everyone to continually argue over what these are. But the model I’ve seen presented — no wait, there have been no real models, only complaints from both right and left about our education system. The model being implied would mean less opportunity for our poorer children to experience any level of education, because taxpayers simply won’t fund a system that doesn’t provide an equivalent chance to all. It’s a foundation of democratic and progressive thought for 100 years that all people deserve the same opportunity for education.

I do not like being an apologist for a system I don’t agree with in so many ways. I too am sorry that the format is not everything I would like. I don’t like segregated classrooms or standardized tests used as a measure of either teacher or student achievement. Test scores don’t show education; they show training. I would like to change these things. I would like to have a choice between a “day care” style public school and one that allows more home-schooling, practical opportunities for real-world learning, and book learning for the same credit. I would be happy to support both with my taxes. I’m also not interested in instant “accountability” — I don’t think you can say much about the success of a particular educational system until the children you’re messing with have grown up, and sometimes not even then.

But I’m not willing to give up the egalitarian nature of public education to allow for a system that serves only “voluntary listeners”. Industrialized education came about because there were too many people that society wanted to educate, and their parents couldn’t do it because they had to work (lower class) or didn’t know enough (upper class). This hasn’t changed. I would prefer that societies and governments invest far more funding in making smaller, better schools with mixed ages, mixed pedagogies, and mixed curricula. We aren’t doing this — funding is so low across the board that it can no longer be used as either a guarantor or preventer of success. So let’s take what we’ve got and fix it. That doesn’t require turning everything upside down.

I am reminded of the French Revolution (occupational hazard, I’m afraid). In 1789 the middle class rose up, supported by some of the elite clergy and nobles. They established a republic. The following year, the pundits responded. A famous discussion ensued, in print, between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, derided the French for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. A supporter of the American Revolution on the grounds that the colonies had created their own culture over a long period, Burke felt that abandoning tradition was not a good foundation for government. In The Rights of Man, Paine responded that natural rights were more significant than tradition, that oppression must be overthrown.

What neither man understood at the time, of course, was that the revolution was far from over. As people voted, the government became more and more radical. In the next few years the world would seen the arrest and beheading of not only a king and queen, but numerous “counter-revolutionaries” under the dictatorship of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety. The tyranny of the common people terrified middle class intellectuals and elites alike. By 1799, middle class control was reasserted, and the result was a dictator who ruled as a king, but by the rule of law.

History didn’t end there, of course, but it speaks to people who call the game too early, or who are loathe to change their mind. The initial stage of our internet “revolution” was the web developing under unusually open circumstances, growing to allow extraordinarily democratic participation for anyone who had access, and access increasing as the price of electronics and communications lowered.

A January New York Times’ article on Jaron Lanier points out that then, in 1999, many visionaries advocated free everything. Downloading copyrighted material and using it for oneself or for creative purposes was seen as acceptable, and many argued that opening music and writing in this way would lead people to buy once they had a taste. But they didn’t buy, and now these non-customers feel entitled to deprive creators of money by using “open culture” as an excuse for stealing. Are we in a time of mob rule?

I am reading Lanier’s book, You Are Not a Gadget. I have already read similar critiques of the internet, including Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (because I liked his other books and his Atlantic article), William Powers’ Hamlet’s Blackberry (because Dr Couros tweeted it), and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (because I always wanted to). But Lanier’s view connects most to what we’re doing this week, because he directly critiques “open culture” in its various manifestations. He is concerned about extreme groupthink online, the loss of individualism, and the creation of second-level mashups instead of original content.

Here’s five minutes of him on the impact of social media. It’s not as good as his book, but will serve as a snippet:

You can, oddly, find a lot of Lanier’s book on Google Books. And I got it at the library — I didn’t buy it. I feel a little guilty about that now.

I do not mean to counter Dr Couros’ enthusiasm about openness, and I do want, as I said in chat during our last class session to “teach the world”. Like Dr Couros, I am employed at an institution that is funded by the public. I have begun to feel like I’m stealing if I don’t share what I do freely and openly! And I have read many intelligent arguments against Lanier’s view, promoting the goodness of people in groups, the idea that no content is really original anyway, etc. I despair at articles about the web closing, because the big companies are taking it over. I want the web open and free, but perhaps I should consider that “free as in liberty” is more moral than “free as in beer”. My own beer, of course, I will happily give away.

Edmund Burke believed that the French Revolution could not work, indeed true democracy could not happen, because groupthink leads to tyranny, opening the door to dictators. Paine had more faith in the goodness and rationality of the crowd. I see these arguments, and many like them, playing out in these discussions of the internet revolution in general, and open culture in particular. I think that only in analyzing both sides can we get anywhere near the truth while we’re in the middle of such a transformation.

It’s going to bleed into other parts of my job. Six years ago I posted my sabbatical project on the web instead of submitting it as a report, in case anyone wanted to use any of the units. I am being evaluated this semester (every four years, with a two-year recertification). That’s usually a pretty confidential thing. I’m now considering whether it’s worth the upset it might cause for me to put that whole process online in the open. Seems like it would be good for the process to be more transparent. Everyone signed a confidentiality form, but the purpose was to protect my privacy. Why should I want my evaluation to be private?

All my heroes share. Alec is sharing about us, and talking about making everyone a “sharer” (see the first 8 minutes with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach):

Sometimes sharing doesn’t get you what you want. I read Openness: From Sharing to Adoption, a post by David Wiley bemoaning everyone sharing but no one adopting the Open Educational Resources that are freely available. I think this is because the type of people creating digital resources and happily sharing them are not necessarily the type of people who will adopt someone else’s work. Instead, I think they’ll look through the free resources and get ideas to create their own work. Then share it. (I wrote a comment, but it didn’t get through moderation – maybe I was oversharing).

So here are some challenges to sharing. Putting my evaluation out in the open won’t be uncomfortable for me, but it might be for those evaluating my work. That’s a problem. Putting copyrighted material, which I use in my online lectures, out in the open causes copyright concerns. Someday a movie studio could come after me, though I guess all they could ask me to do would be remove something.

I can’t say that my institution has a culture that is not supportive to sharing – rather, I’m not sure very many people at my institution have thought about it at all. We revised the intellectual property policies several years ago to make sure faculty could retain rights to their own work even if it was online, to make sure the college didn’t get our copyright. Faculty share in our professional development workshops. But the only real online sharing I’m aware of is my colleague Julie Harland, who puts all her math tutorials online and has gained some college fame, and the Pedagogy First! blog we set up as part of the Program for Online Teaching, where sharing is required. Maybe we need a workshop on the value of sharing.

Or just the moral imperative. It feels like my responsibility now.

I’m an OED girl, and it’s pretty clear that the word derived from competency with letters. In fact, the terms “illiterate” was used in the 16th century, long before anyone used the word “literate”, in the 19th. This suits my idea of historical flow for sure.

I am willing to accept the part of the definition that indicates it can be extended to mean “learned”, but it meant that in a time when learning meant formal learning, and formal learning meant letters.

In trying to determine what people mean by Digital Literacy, however, I looked at:

• National Council of Teachers of English: A Definition of 21st Century Literacies
• Douglas Rushkoff’s Why Johnny Can’t Program: A New Medium Requires a New Literacy
• Elizabeth Daley: Expanding the Concept of Literacy (EDUCAUSE Forum for Higher Education 2002)

What was interesting to me was not just the focus on proficiency with computer media (which I might see as the logical expansion of the word “literacy” as proficiency with letters), but also the critical thinking focus and moral direction being implied.

Rushkopf is downright apocalyptic in his insistence that we either learn programming or computers will be running us (cue sci-fi whistling spooky music). But programming is not a literacy by any definition – it’s a skill. The premise of his argument is sound: people (he says “kids” or “digital natives” but it’s really everybody) do not understand what the programs they are using actually do, or why they exist. His example is Facebook, which people don’t realize is mining them for advertising data. He also bemoans the lack of programmers being trained in our country as compared to Russia, China and Iran. I am not sure what he expects in a country that insists that everyone has a right to an academic university education, but that’s another post…

He’s saying that we can’t understand what the tools are doing to us without being able to program the tools themselves. I disagree. As I’ve said before, I don’t need to live in the 12th century to do know its impact. And I can know that Facebook is mining me (or that Google tracks my internet use, or that nothing I put on the web is private) without being a programmer. I can, as he says, “recognize the biases” of the technologies I use without creating them — I do it all the time.

On the utopian side is the NCTE. Nothing here about programming, except that they think we must be able to “create” multi-media “texts” (I know few people who can do this, and again, I don’t think they should have to if they understand how they’re created). I support up to a point their objective to “develop proficiency with the tools of technology” (to me that could also mean a book or paper and pencil). But further on we see the confusion between the term literacy (originally about the interpretation of symbols into cogent speech) and critical thinking, in the insistence that being able to critique is part of literacy. Perhaps it should be when dealing with print too, but to do that we must extend our idea of print literacy.

What the heck, we can do that. Let’s extend the term “literacy” to include critical assessment of what we read, and even what we experience. But then we get the moral, utopian dream in the NCTE’s definition: that building relationships, working globally, designing and sharing information are literacies. Worthy goals, yes, but not literacies. The implication is that society isn’t literate enough to work on such laudable goals with print media, although we have been doing just that for centuries. The NCTE’s definition constitutes a digital agenda. That’s fine, but let’s not call it a “definition” of “21st century literacies”.

Elizabeth Daley doesn’t like the way print continues to dominate our concept of literacy, and argues for expanding it into the visual medium. But certainly this isn’t new – her arguments could relate to Gothic paintings (“capable of constructing complex meanings independent of text”) or television (“methods of publication and teaching that are essentially different from those of text”). She claims there are a number of skills, most taught in her field of cinema studies, that are needed to be able to “read or write the language of media”, including editing, sound-image relationships, and typography. We are now getting awfully detailed and far away from the idea of a literacy that might be obtainable by ordinary folk.

Let’s say for a minute we buy the whole Literacy Package. We must all be programmers, create media in many formats (after studying technique and meaning, of course), develop proficiency in today’s technology, critically analyze all forms of media, and work collaboratively and globally. This will make it possible for people to understand the intellectual production of humanity through its visuals, and the electronic productions of the last century. It will also provide skills for such production in this century.

But go back before this century, or apart from historical images, and the fact is this: most information, disclosure, conceptual relationships, and techniques are textual. We have over 500 years of humanity’s knowledge represented in text, and a great need to understand it. People still believe what they read (even when it’s wrong), and write more poorly every year. It’s hardly the case that we have mastered print literacy, so we must be ready to move on to other media.

My conclusion is that understanding media (apologies to Marshall McLuhan), and even understanding its motives and effects, is a very desirable goal. But calling it “literacy” seems to open the door to fuzzy thinking. Words are still terribly important, even if you believe text is no longer king. And we should assess them critically as we move into the post-text world.

Guess I’ll go look up “contrarian” in the OED….

The book itself really has three parts, with the first and third covering they whys and hows of created some disconnection in an overly connected life. While I have been doing some of this myself (leaving the computer off all day on a weekend, not getting a smart phone), I wasn’t interested in that part. The middle, however, takes ten historical figures and discussed how each responded to the extraordinary changes in information technology, from Socrates to Marshall McLuhan, with various theories and techniques designed to balance the overactivity caused by the “next new thing”.

Usually, when non-historians write history, I’m not interested. They tend to do pop culture history. But frankly, the whole area of internet-influenced culture studies is pretty pop anyway, and if a journalist like William Powers feels comfortable pulling some stuff out of the past to make a point, I’m OK with that. It’s certainly not marketed as a history of anything. Rather, Powers is looking for places in the past where people have experienced similar phenomena to what we’re experiencing now. Scholarly historians assume that perspective instead of articulating it. It was fun to have it articulated in the context of technology and culture.

Besides, I learned about wax tablets, which I had not known about. Powers claimed in, ironically, his weakest chapter, that Hamlet carried something called a “table”, a wax tablet written on with a stylus and erased with the paddle-like back end of the stylus. I had never heard of this (my historical expertise is om medieval cloth-making technology), so I went to…the internet! I found wax tablets at York, and a a list of links about wax tablets during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Good stuff, with pictures.

It seemed as though each time new information technologies “changed the world” (printing, telegraph, railroads), there was a corresponding backlash, but these were not always of the nostalgic nature. And sometimes they served to highlight, or even preserve in better form, the previous technology.

I’ve since gone on to read Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and am now in the middle of the terrifying new book by Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget. I realize it might seem like I’m starting this class with a rather dystopian view of technology, but I don’t think it will turn out that way. I tend toward the idea of balance, “and” instead of “or”. And certainly such works give me a larger perspective than reading Wired magazine and pro-internet works by authors I already know and admire. So that’s how I’m starting…

Wax tablet image from http://objectlessons.org .