[Air-l] Technology Transforming Education--EE-Learning

[Matthew Bernius]

Textual and verbal literacy will retain their privileged positions as the
key to positions of power and control in society, and as the heart of
knowledge work.

As the natives becomes increasingly digital they may also become
increasingly image-oriented, and decreasingly print literate.

Education--schools and colleges--are assigned the task of providing the
knowledge and skills the general culture fail to provide.

As visual imagery and audio become increasingly pervasive in the general
culture, it will fall to the schools and colleges to provide the core skills
of print literacy which the digital natives will not develop by immersion in
the media.

What do you think?

Steve E.

For what it's worth, I think this is where exactly where things are moving.
Though perhaps print literate isn't quite the right phrase. Typographically
literate might work better (texts have too many possible connotations). What
we are finding, ironically here at the School of Print Media, is a definite
move away from the "willing" consumption of typographic texts (be they
electronic or paper) by many of our students. We've found that also
corresponds with problems articulating arguments and concepts (be it orally
or written).

The problem that I have with discussions of alternate learning modalities is
that typographic text still remains the most prevalent method of
understanding abstract concepts, especially in industries where media rich
training is too costly to produce. As a technical school, we face the
challenge of preparing students for jobs that don't currently exist, using
software that we know will be antiquated by the time they leave the
university (assuming a four year stint). I cannot, at this moment, foresee
an immediate future where one can avoid developing the skills to parse
technology manuals and/or typographic web content.

It's for those reasons that I (and a number of my colleagues) are moving
towards the model that Steve laid out in his final paragraph. We believe
that the best way to make our students adaptable is to drill the core skills
of typographic literacy (as well as the core skills that publishing
production is based upon). I am working to come up with better ways to
orient those skills in a larger media ecosystem. However, retrograde as it
may sound, we believe that typographic literacy, and the skills that are
developed through the study of it, are the foundation on which success will
be based.

- Matt

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Matthew Bernius
New Media and Customer Intelligence Strategist for Hire
mBernius at gMail.com
http://www.waking-dream.com