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

[Dr. Steve Eskow]

Philiip Wasdaskey writes: 

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

This has become the new conventional wisdom, widely circulated and believed
by "digital natives" and those who believe that the natives are a new breed
with new nervous systems, visual learners, multitaskers, and so on. That is:
text is the new Latin, a concern of mandarins and antiquarians, the world
itself to be organized and run by the imagists and the visualists.

What is going on, or should go, to engage with this clouded and uncertain
vision before it takes control of schools and colleges and becomes offical
intellectual doctrine?

Steve Eskow




--- 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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