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

[Philip Wazdatskey]

Media is the fourth R for arts.  Text may remain
important much as did latin for higher education.


--- Matthew Bernius <mbernius at gmail.com> wrote:

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