Eh-synchronous

Social-Digital Literacies

I listened to Howard Rheingold‘s “On 21st Century Literacies” again tonight. This time I took notes. Taking notes helps me remember the points.

After taking the notes I did some searches to understand more about what Rheingold has said about these literacies. I found references directly and indirectly addressing each of the 5 literacies. Some of these discoveries are linked. I hope that this helps others understand how Rheingold’s ideas fit together. The published pieces made my notes somewhat redundant, though still helpful for remembering.

Rheingold is incredibly prolific writer and lecturer. His experience with the world of media, journalism, book publishing and university education and his recognition in the world of social and digital media is well established. While adding my .02 to his ideas seems a little presumptuous, I will do my best to add some value here with my unique perspective. That’s what he prescribes after all

Looking at his ideas from the perspective of K12 education, there are some core ideas that I feel are especially worth noting. First of all, Rheingold frames the literacies into a social contex. He argues that we should raise our awareness above skills (an individual attribute) and toward literacies (interactive and communcative attributes). Second, he suggests that we consider all of the literacies as interactive and interdependent. None of them stand on their own.

Skills + Literacy

While it is difficult to draw a line between a skill and these literacies, Rheingold points out that skills can be valuable on their own – shooting a gun, building a fence, for example. But social media are social and expressive; requiring skills + literacy. As I write and manage my blog I have to consider my audience. I try to structure it to attract interest. Readers have to have reading skills and an interest and background in the subjects I choose. This is a social interchange that is constructed over and above my technical skills. While this may seem like a trivial point, it is essential when we consider the relative skill and training our students have with technology. While many teenagers have a grasp of the skills of communication; texting, facebooking, surfing and the like, I question whether they have a grasp of the social-learning and knowledge-building value of the tools. As much as we talk about collaboration, communication and participation for 21st Century learning, we underestimate the personal skills required for sifting through and synthesizing information and (on the output side), writing for and interacting with an audience. Looking at the 5 literacies it is worth highlighting:

• Attention to whom,
• Participation with whom,
• Cooperation with whom,
• Detection of crap by whom,
• Network with whom.

Interdependent Skills

After reading more about the literacies, it is evident that these 5 literacy + skills don’t stand on their own. In trying to summarize them, I find it impossible to reference one without considering others. While I have a fair amount of experience in the world of technology and education, I don’t pretend to understand them thoroughly. But my experience with technology and with psychology gives me a sense of their relevance and interdependence within K12 education. It seems obvious for instance that participation requires cooperation and network awareness. If I don’t have a sense of the network, it will be difficult for me to participate in a community. Without this awareness I won’t understand the rules of the community and will fall short of helping the group (cooperating). I have spent many hours on playgrounds, observing how children engage, conflict and resolve conflict and reassociate. The social skills required are not much different than these.

Here is the list of the literacies, along with my interpretations, some quotes (paraphrased) from the video and some links to Rheingold’s descriptions:

• Attention – Mindful Infomation, attention literacy. “Students are found looking at their computers rather than looking at their teacher.”, “Create a curriculum about attention.” I believe we need to improve our awareness of our thoughts, of task switching, when and where to use tools.
• Participation – Narratives of participation, The participation pedagogy, Smart Mobs. “Just participating isn’t enough. You must have something of value to others.”, “Need to feed (people) what’s valuable to them. To participate you have to learn how not to be boring and how to be useful.”

From Virtual Community -1993, Rheingold says (my italics), “instead of falling under the spell of a sales pitch, or rejecting new technologies as instruments of illusion, we need to look closely at new technologies and ask how they could help build stronger, more humane communities — and how they might be obstacles to that goal.”

• Crap detection – critical consumption requires finding authoritative sources through cross-referencing. Take nothing for granted. “Become a detective.”

From The Virtual Community again, Rheingold defines virtual communities as “social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace” (p. 5).

• Cooperation – The Smart Mobs link is relevant here also. Rheingold is well known for documenting examples of collaborative causes. “How to get things done without the use of official channels.”
  
• Network Awareness – Take time to familiarize yourself with the resources and social networks that represent your interest. People wonder how to keep up. Rheingold has provided some resources for creating a network dashboard on his vlog as a way to keep up/filter information. This is a great example of this concept.

I intend to return to these lit-skills in future posts on this blog. I am especially interested in the “attention” literacy. My experience as a behavior consultant for children and my 20+ years of meditation leads me to be especially interested in how we use our attention. My hope is that I will have some opportunities to network/converse with Howard Rheingold at some point. He appears to be a engaging and colorful character.

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Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.